Why Open source is the future for SMEs

Do you find that paying for software licences is akin to being levied a tax on your success? Then, when you add more persons on your licence, as a result of your business growing, it increases your costs substantially. You’re not the only ones fed up with this approach.

There is a better way to engage SaaS these days, and that’s by finding a good open source solution. Open source software, as it sounds, is open and free to use, without any licensing costs – all one needs, is to adapt for your own particular circumstances and you are good to go!

You may be familiar with Open Source through well known applications like WordPress or Magento. For the software producer it’s a great way of getting the product out to the wider world quickly and allowing the market to improve, develop and add value to the product. That’s not to say that open source products are half finished – quite the opposite as most developers of open source are very fastidious about their quality control before exposing their baby to the scrutiny of their peers.

So, it’s no wonder that a lot of companies and business leaders are getting used to the advantages of Open Source and all that it offers.

Getting ‘match ready’ for the future

There’s another really important reason why Open Source software makes more sense for growing companies, and that’s to do with its transportability. Acquiring something via this route enables you to have a degree of flexibility that you wouldn’t nominally have with a licenced piece of software – because you have full ownership over your digital services and are not at the mercy of your software vendor. 

Often, customers of licensed software, having invested so much money in developing and adapting the system to their needs over the years are really loathed to walk away, even when the advantages the system gave them initially, have dissipated.

Organisations will often justify continuing to pay money out hand over fist, even when the software is not providing an ideal solution. We call this scenario ‘The Golden Shackles’ and is akin to holding on to a large helium balloon which is taking your further and further away from the earth. At what point do you decide to let go and fall back down to earth with a bump? When do you decide that the spiraling costs and limitations aren’t worth the candle, and you are much better off going to an open source supplier?

That’s a difficult one and one that only you could possibly answer, but let us outline some of the benefits you will find from open source software which might benefit a growing and ambitious business:

• The quality of software produced by the Open Source community sometimes exceeds that produced by purely commercial organisations
• It is suggested by some authors that open source is more robust, more reliable, less complicated and more error free than their equivalent commercial counterparts, as they are subject to much more collaboration throughout their lifespans and are developed by developers with strong technical skills and extensive peer connections
• With the more popular softwares, there exists an extensive community of developers creating plugins and extensions which adds automatically to the range and scope of the software

So, we’d recommend you took a closer look at Open Source for your business growth plans. We have!

Ergo Digital’s own open source software Omny Link, has already been used by a wide range of businesses to improve their marketing and performance. And, unlike a commercially funded product, it doesn’t hobble your ambitions nor tax you on your success: the price you see is what you pay from the start to the end of your licence.

We can setup a free trial for you so you can give it a go for yourselves – just call the team on 01962 605 000 to discuss in more detail.