Lock-In and Support Concerns

Despite the promised benefits of preintegrated stacks, some CIOs have strong reservations about adopting them: Besides the lack of application flexibility, fears include vendor lock-in and inadequate support.

After all, one reason people choose open source is to take advantage of a dynamic community that quickly adopts innovation. A preintegrated suite that changes on the vendor's schedule can eliminate that dynamism.

As AIG's Stumpf notes, "If the suite is 'take it or leave it', unless it exactly matches my assessment of what I need, I'll pass on it. If the stack is rigid, it's no different than going all-IBM or all-Microsoft," he says.

Plus, many open-source components tend to be run with other components in de facto suites, which the open-source community tests and maintains, Beck says. That lessens the need for vendor-managed suites, at least for common combinations of open-source software, she says.

"It will be hard for an integrator to provide a value above and beyond what the open-source community will do," says David Rasch, CTO of IntelliContact, which provides e-mail marketing, RSS feed and blog management software to small businesses.

Even where de facto suites don't exist, Rasch doubts that third parties can put together a broad enough range of preintegrated suites to meet different customers' needs. "The amount of what people want integrated varies widely," he says.

But concerns run deeper than application choices. "For me, an offering like Unisys's Oasis is backsliding," says Rasch, because customers aren't supposed to update or modify it, in order to retain their service-level agreement.

(Customers who do such modifications would likely need additional Unisys professional services, says Ali Shadman, Unisys vice president and general manager for open-source solutions, systems and technology unit.)

To address the need for flexibility, a CIO could treat the suite as a starting point, an initially integrated collection of applications that you may choose to maintain internally or hire external resources to maintain. But this approach does have some level of vendor dependence, says Raven Zachary, senior analyst and head of the open-source practice at research firm The 451 Group.

The likely need for services spending is not lost on Hewlett-Packard, OpenLogic, SourceLabs, SpikeSource and Unisys, as well as others, Zachary says. "They see that the stack is not the business, but IT consulting is," he says.

This slippery slope into dependence on consulting services particularly scares smaller firms with limited IT budgets.

"We hear horror stories about being locked into a vendor and having their technologies forced on you," says Jason Miller, bioinformatics department software manager at the Institute for Genomic Research. "A 300-person company can manage its IT itself," he says, noting that he brings in consultants only when he has a time crunch.

But these fears of vendor lock-in and consulting run amok are not limited to small companies: "I don't want the open-source environment to become a mirror image of the proprietary environment," says the University of Pennsylvania's Beck.

A final worry: Will having a single support entity actually simplify IT efforts? IntelliContact's Rasch understands the one vendor support argument but doubts most providers' ability to live up to the accountability he needs.

And Rudolph and Sletten's Lamonica is sceptical that enough providers would support companies of his size in the first place. "There aren't many third-party providers who are willing to or capable of providing open-source solutions to us," he says, noting most services firms aimed at the mid-market are certified by Microsoft or Cisco Systems "and don't want to rock that boat".