What India requires: Opensource vertical projects on a large scale ..
There are variety of verticals in which there are good opensource projects. Some examples of vertical solutions are to supply complete usable software stacks for sectors such as education, hospital management, libraries, doctors, retail, for placement people and so on.
Several of these sectors do have very decent opensource packages which can address small to mid-size business segments. These segments are currently being wooed by likes of Microsoft and IBM, but scope is wide open. It is a great business opportunity for some SI-type firms to convert these projects into end-to-end solutions and offer them to market.
They need to address some key business requirements:
- Tested, end-to-end solution stacks, which consist of several related open source projects. For education, for e.g., you need course-management applications on one side, and admission and other types of management on other side. All should work together.
- 24x7 support. (Or at least, in Indian context, day-time support, if the applications are not critical.) Such support should become available even at smaller cities - if the strategy should become effective.
- Integration with local ecosystem. For e.g. support popular printers which are available in market.
- Integration of backup/restore capabilities
- Pre-integrated support for remote management techniques.
- Appliance approach would be ideal. End-users would only see (web-based) admin screens and not the operating systems. Pre-configured stacks can be distributed as VM-enabled distribution packs. Multiple such VMs can run on bare hardware, lowering costs of operation. (For example, a opensource software called XenFire which can manage multiple application images on single host.
What would be the cost of such operations, given that we really want to make it cheap? Can we, for example, make it possible to spend only about $2000 to $4000 (Rs. 1 to 2 lakhs) for this kind of solution? That should be our objective. If telecom firms could bring down the cost of communication drastically, the rest of the decade should see emergence of firms who can make software infrastructure cheap for Indian firms. It can only happen when a single SI can interface with Opensource community on one side, and businesses/firms on other side, and use scale to achieve these kind of numbers. So in our example, be able to target 10000 schools to make a profit of about $10 million (about 50% profits per school - approx. $1000, due to use of free software). That means, the firm should be able to manage these requirements with about 100-200 people only (if we have to match IT salaries today).
Not really impossible dream. I know some groups are thinking on these lines. I only hope that they will understand dynamics of opensource world, be able to engage community in positive manner, give back to community what they deserve - enablements of various kinds (sponsor addition of features, request consultancy, provide free hardware etc. and so on) - anything to make Indian freelancers and students to take to opensource in big way. Sincere hopes that this will become reality soon!
