Who Wants Preintegrated Suites?

Theoretically, the preintegrated approach should appeal to enterprises of all types and sizes. But in reality, preintegrated suites make the most sense if your open-source software is very stable, used in an "install and forget" approach, with just occasional upgrades as you refresh your technology platforms. In other words, with preintegration you choose ease over flexibility.

Also, the preintegrated approach appeals more to smaller enterprises than large ones, simply because smaller enterprises have fewer IT resources. "When it fits their IT needs, the suite approach makes sense for small and medium businesses," says Terry Retter, a director at the PricewaterhouseCoopers Technology Centre, an advisory group.

California construction firm Rudolph and Sletten is a case in point. "I'm in a mid-market company, so I don't have the resources to deal with a do-it-yourself stack," says CIO Sam Lamonica. That's why he relies on his operating system and application vendors to provide and maintain integrated suites. For example, Lamonica uses the IT GroundWorks management suite, which includes Nagios, Linux and JBoss. In this case, a commercial vendor includes open-source components as part of its product. That's fine with Lamonica, since the vendor worries about integration. Plus he suspects it keeps the price down.

CIOs like Lamonica at smaller enterprises tend to like the idea of preintegration when it's applied to specific vertical application areas, such as CRM or Web management, but dislike the idea of preintegrated middleware suites into which they must then integrate other applications.

At larger enterprises with more resources, CIOs might be more apt to pick multiple open-source integration and maintenance approaches - balancing the needs for vendor and application flexibility against the costs of maintaining that flexibility. At insurer AIG, for example, "all of our decisions are value-driven", says Jon Stumpf, senior vice president of engineering at the insurer's IT subsidiary, AIG Technologies. Sometimes, the preintegrated approach will have the best value, but sometimes it will not, he notes.

Large companies with heterogeneous platforms prefer the flexibility of a horizontal infrastructure on which they run various applications and data systems, and are willing to pay for the in-house or outside resources needed to integrate and maintain them, says Stumpf. CIOs at such large enterprises may see value in preintegrated horizontal suites, if they provide more value than other options and don't hinder needed flexibility, he says.

The University of Pennsylvania follows a similar "what fits best" approach, says Robin Beck, the university's vice president for information systems and computing. "I'd want a [preintegrated] stack where it makes sense," she says. Beck is perfectly happy that companies like IBM and Oracle include the open-source Apache Web server in many of their products, taking on the responsibility for ensuring that Apache remains integrated with their software.

One other possible appeal of the precertified suite approach: You might want to choose a suite that's been customized by the vendor when you don't have the resources or inclination to customize it yourself. That's why analysts think this concept makes sense for smaller companies. In the future, they envision vendors providing customized suites for a swatch of users - the same customization could work for all independent insurance agencies, for example, or nonchain booksellers. (Right now, such users have to use standard open-source components without specific tweaks for their business processes, pay consultants to do customization work, or buy a commercial product designed for that specific industry.)