Today, reducing the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) of the IT Infrastructure and the faster Time to market for software development projects is a key mandate in every Enterprise. Usage of Open Source Software (OSS) is one of the key enablers in achieving the goals of reduction in cost and delivery time. Enterprises are also showing interest in leveraging OSS due to many proven success stories. Though usage of OSS has many benefits, its usage and adoption can add to the risks, complexity and challenges faced by an enterprise. In this article, I would like to point out key considerations and risk factors associated with OSS adoption and how we can address these challenges by defining an OSS Governance Framework.

The world of OSS provides a huge repository of knowledge that can be leveraged in multiple ways. One of the ways is to use OSS for enterprise-wide standardization and reuse, leading to increased productivity. By using OSS in software development projects, efforts can be reduced, helping reduce cost. Additionally, software can be developed at a faster rate and is also better in quality. These are some of the factors leading to widespread and rapid adoption in today‘s software delivery life-cycle. OSS Adoption has witnessed Accelerated Growth around the Globe with CAGR exceeding 40%. Increasingly, enterprises are recognizing Open Source to be a vital part of the IT landscape and embracing it due to the value it brings to their business and their customers. Gartner estimates that by 2013, Open Source will be included in 85% of all commercial software packages, and by 2016 will be included in mission-critical software packages within 99 percent of global enterprises.

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Social Networks have emerged as a powerful force that enables any individual or organization to raise their thought/ feedbacks about almost anything. This has led to the emergence of products like CrowdBooster, Klout, TwentyFeet etc. which allows to measure one''s influence within the social network. With these tools one can know who is influencing who, what and why.

It is needless to say that there is quite a lot of action in the fields for mining structured data for gaining business intelligence (BI) from them. And with the undeniable arrival of Big Data, the industry is trying to augment the traditional BI with the knowledge obtained from analyzing unstructured data (e.g. data from Social Networks, Documents uploaded, emails etc.). The basic philosophy at work is, if you have a product and/or service, gather as much data as you can (both transactional as well as non-transactional) so that your probability to predict its acceptability grows by mining on them.

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Having up-to-date information, reducing delays, and using improved speed for competitive advantage, have always been key requirements of any enterprise. With rapidly changing scenarios of the global economy, the requirement of shrinking decision cycles and having shorter time-to-market cycles has been heightened. Be it a bank, a retail chain or a manufacturing company, decision makers would like to be better equipped to make informed decisions, by having access to data that is current and relevant, rather than data that is older and hence less relevant.

Conventional business intelligence solutions primarily deal with data from the past. By using these solutions, enterprises cannot process data ''instantaneously'' or ''on arrival'', due to technical limitations. As per an Aberdeen Group survey, enterprises with real-time visibility have seen noticeably higher performance across several tactical operating metrics such as Growth in Operating Cash Flow, Increase in Inventory Turns and Reduction in Operating Cost.

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E-commerce continues to grow faster on a percentage basis than traditional retail. Even though E-commerce currently contributes only 6-12% of a traditional retailer’s revenue, it is expected to more than double in the next five years. More growth in sales is expected in the near future from online channels than traditional brick-and-mortar channels. New online store brands are creating growth from differentiated business models with higher customer satisfaction thereby generating business from repeat customers.

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