Open Source: An Enabler of Digital Transformation in India

Digital Transformation is gaining momentum in India. Cloud, mobility, big data, IoT and security are among the few technologies that are helping India to take this major leap. But along with it, open source is playing an important role in this big transformation. Vendors from the industry speak out of how open source is facilitating this digital transformation -  

Open Source is the new paradigm change that is sweeping the industry away from the traditional proprietary software model. The major feature of Open Source platform is flexibility and above all the freedom of innovation. The platform offers liberty to create or build, modify and use as per the requirement. So the more is your freedom the more it becomes accessible to the masses, the more is the area of data, because data transformation is always about transcending the barriers or allowing people to balance work life and personal life and give the maximum output.

The open source platform has underwent a lot of innovation in the past which has empowered organizations to experience new and advanced technologies at a reasonable price. “Open Source has witnessed rapid innovation over the past few years. It has enabled organisations to explore newer technologies at competitive prices without having to invest in proprietary software thus allowing them to focus on other facets of the Digital Transformation process. Apart from scalability and cost, Open Source is addressing the needs terms of choices of innovation, cost, security and flexibility. It allows organizations to gain benefits not only from their own employees but also from the entire open source community,” opines Neeraj Bhatia, Director - Partner, Alliances & Commercial Sales, Red Hat.

“Organizations are seeing Open Source as a flexible and innovation-enabling alternative to various non-Open Source Options. Since innovations budgets are also limited within organizations, Open Source is playing an important role and as such has become very popular over the last five years. Open Source is expected to provide flexible & customizable platforms that can be readily be deployed. For e.g. Several Global 2000 companies already use Drupal as a platform for their websites, offering benefits such as rapid development, extensive API support and being SEO & mobile friendly. So, in the digital age where customers are looking for an omni–channel customer experience, Open Source helps in adopting strategies that fulfil the requirements of customers by delivering innovative products & services,” said Kalyan Kumar, Executive Vice President & Chief Technology Officer – IT Services, HCL Technologies. 
“The industry is increasingly embracing open source telephony, since it offers a service delivery platform that is interoperable with the existing infrastructure, offers a wide variety of intelligent applications that can be customized to suit the organizations requirement and simplifies communications management along with extensive flexibility and scalability to launch and sustain all mission critical requirements. I would like to make a strong statement here that - ‘By 2018, 99% of the Companies will embrace Open Source in one form or other’,” observed Dr. Devasia Kurian, Founder & CEO, *astTECS.
Open Source platform has strengthened its position because it is such kind of a platform that can be modified by anyone and everyone in the vendor community. This leads to a faster innovation process. 

“The modern enterprise embraces open source capabilities to accelerate its digital transformation efforts. Open source components increasingly underpin today's major technology markets. It has reduced the cost of creating and developing new digital platforms that drive transformation. Open source has solidified its position as the platform best able to deliver these types of solutions as a result of the fact that an entire community can innovate faster than any one vendor. There is a significant shift in networking as well around open source with software-based networking solutions. Increased traction is seen in OpenDaylight, a Linux Foundation Project which is a multi-company open source software project building a platform to further adoption and innovation in Software-Defined Networking (SDN). This platform unites industry leaders in developing an open SDN platform in a vendor-neutral environment and is significant example on open source in the networking domain,” stated George Chacko, Principal Systems Engineer & Lead Technical Consultant, Brocade.

Investments in Open Source
Regular investments are needed to improve and develop a technology and a good traction for Open Source technology is being observed. Both small and big enterprises are moving towards Open Source. It is now widely accepted in areas like Operating Systems, Databases Software etc. and with the growing popularity it will also be embraced in other areas.

“We are seeing a significant increase in Open Source adoption by both small and big enterprises. Over last five years, amount of investments in open source has increased many folds. The rate of adoption of Open source is highest among areas/technologies like Operating Systems, Databases Software/Dev Tools etc. Going forward we expect this focus to grow and cover other areas like Service/Support etc,” said Kalyan Kumar. 

Enterprises are witnessing great value in adoption of Open Source technology. It is offering innovation, architectural control and thus attracting investments.The open source technology is also creating an impression on Software Defined Network (SDN). In SDN, Openstack is gaining momentum and is adopted widely by small and large enterprises. 

“Software defined is also getting impacted big time due to Open Source technologies. The major impact is led by OpenStack. OpenStack is seeing good adoption by various small and big enterprises. The enterprises are making investments into implementation, design and support for OpenStack and its related versions. Key businesses that are adopting OpenStack include CSPs, telecommunications companies etc. Businesses are able to see value in using Open Source as being enabler of innovation and architectural control with unlimited opportunities to experiment,” added Kalyan Kumar. 

Reiterating similar views, Girish Gupta, Technical Services Director - Citrix Systems said, “From an open source perspective, we have regular investments in these areas. It started when we acquired XenSource based on open source hypervisor of Xen platform. One of the recent investment is in Software Defined Networks (SDN) technology in a project called OpenDaylight. Apart from us there are investments from Cisco, IBM etc. It is an industry movement for building programmable networks that are flexible and responsive to organizations' and users' needs. OpenDaylight, the largest open source SDN controller, is helping lead this transition.”
He further added that Citrix is enabling lot of organizations that want to use open source as a medium to deliver applications or desktops. “A lot of times the secure and performance aspects of it are not met and then at that point our technology comes into play. A lot of government agencies use our technology to deliver a Linux desktop or a Linux hosted application to remote branch offices.” 

Talking from an architecture perspective, Traditional Rights Management vendors had kept a closed and limited usage architecture. However now the market is changing and players like Seclore is on the forefront of the new paradigm. Robust and easy-to-use APIs are the key concepts used by Seclore for its ‘Open Rights Management Architecture’, this helps to seamlessly integrate with any Enterprise’s IT infrastructure. According to Abhijit Tannu, Founder & CTO, Seclore, “APIs are available for File Protect and Unprotect functions that are typically used when automatically protecting files are being downloaded from or uploaded to enterprise systems.  What’s more Seclore APIs and SDKs are optimized for high-volume usage and are designed for scalability which is a key ask of many industry leading CIOs and CISOs.”
The biggest example is however Microsoft that is bringing a big revolution into the Open Source field. The tech giant now has its own BSD Unix operating system, supports Ubuntu as a subsystem on Windows 10, and recently open-sourced the Xamarin software development kit. Earlier this year, Microsoft and Canonical partnered up to bring Ubuntu to Windows 10 to make it easier for developers to write programs for Ubuntu on the Azure cloud.  Its liking towards open source just deepens. 

Digital India & Open Source
Like said, the market is evolving from proprietary solution to Open Source solutions, designed to support next-generation communications. In fact, talking of India, a significant amount of work in the field of Open Source has happened in the government of India earlier as well, but nothing much concrete had come out so far. However of late, the momentum is seen to have risen with the government's new Open Source policy coming in place, and this is making things hopeful for different agencies of the Government of India to be implementing open source very soon.
There is a myth around Open Source that security is the biggest concern. But it is a fact that this technology is more secured because the techniques deployed has to be more robust so that no one can breach the security. Moreover, the major differentiator with the proprietary systems is that it is reviewed by many people which helps in faster innovation. 

When it comes to the security aspect of Open Source, the entire community has a vigil that the right code gets it as the source code is available to all. Now government is also opening itself for Open Source technology and it is also very clear about the secured usage of this technology. 

“Enterprises and Government initiatives & programmes are giving a strong push to the development, support and promotion of Open Source Software and make telecom solutions accessible and affordable to all industry verticals and businesses. The biggest fallacy in Open Source movement is the perception that Open Source has a security problem. Open Source is in fact more secured because the security techniques  deployed has to be so strong that even a person who knows the technique cannot break it,” opined Dr. Devasia.

 “As the source code is available you know what is there and what is not. So no longer we need to worry about back doors because there is the whole community that acts as a gatekeeper to ensure that the right piece of code gets in. Then you also have the freedom to customize and restrict as you fit. Apart from that citizens and organizations have a lot of play. Our government has also been open to open source technology for a long time and essentially they are pro open source for the longest period of time. They have started to see a bit of investment in OEMs like Microsoft and Cisco. They have got a rule book where it is mentioned how and where the technology can be used and how to secure it. It defines how the government can use the technology,” explained Girish Gupta. 

Open Source is now used in various government projects under Digital India programme. The government has also announced the policies regarding this technology and there are a lot of plans that are ongoing for a national repository of this technology.   

“There is a lot of Open Source adoption in the GoI-for the Digital India programme. India’s first Open Source policy has been announced by the current government. A lot of IT implementations are being done by NIC across the nation, powered by Open Source technologies. Plans are underway to develop a national repository of Open Source software (like Github) for all government applications-so that these can be reused by other government agencies across the centre and states,” commented Rahul Chopra, Open Source India. 

Bridging the Digital Divide
India has the largest mobile population in the world and the penetration of mobile devices has made it easy to touch every life digitally which has in turn helped to bridge the digital divide to some extent.

Open Source is based on collaboration and sharing which has acted as a vital component to bring down the digital gap. The availability of innovations strengthened and helped people to grow. These factors has helped open source to grow and also goes to the last mile to connect people.
“Open Source has been a major contributor in bridging the Digital Divide across the globe. The underlying principle of collaboration and sharing on which Open Source is established is the perfect catalyst to help reduce this divide at a greater pace. Readily and freely available innovation via software such as Linux, DevOps, Containers etc. help empower communities & people to learn and grow without any restrictions. Digital empowerment should not be the privilege of a select few and Open Source ensures that Digital Innovation reaches the lowest of strata of society. In areas where setting up the infrastructure is a hassle and affordability is an issue, Open Source becomes the perfect medium to connect people,” said Neeraj.

“Today, if you look at the Indian Mobile population, it is currently the largest in the world. So the only way we can make them touch the digital living world is through mobile. Also, if you look at the mobility state today, not only the mobile phones should be affordable, I feel the mobility services which we get, should also be readily available. The cost of ownership of the service providers like Airtel, Reliance, BSNL etc. if they invest, the actual cost of delivery to the masses will decrease which will effectively spread digitalization process inside the market,” explained Rajarshi Bhattacharyya, Country Head, SUSE. 
He puts forth a small example that today the government of India has got a lot of initiatives to MHRD through programs like RSM (Rajeev Gandhi Shiksha Mission) the difference MHRD covers to land up with every student should have a tablet or a laptop. So if we look at that space also, to make those technologies or devices available to the common masses i.e. the people below the BPL line, we need to have an industry which is very cost effective and efficient. We cannot expect them to put the high technology operating system which can be anytime infected by a virus and the mission goes crashing and then no use for that mission. “And so we need to have strategies around open source which will allow you to give the software delivery and the hardware to all this masses to the different school education initiative so that the generation which is coming up will slowly take a pace and actually match with the digitalization. We can make it available and very much cost effective,” said Rajarshi.

Dr. Devasia on his part feels that open source is changing the way enterprise telecommunication works and has begun to grow in popularity, as it offers greater functionality and control. “Open Source tools are bringing costs down to the bare minimum, making it highly affordable. The affordability of Open Source solutions by companies in different strata helps in bridging the digital divide. SAP solutions can be deployed only by companies with large revenues, whereas open ERP can be deployed by small and medium sized enterprises also,” he stated.

Another point of view is that this technology can be customized as per user needs without paying any royalties to foreign companies. This empowers techies to work on major projects and offer solutions to customers globally. To top it up, it also offers lower cost of adoption of IT. 
“Open Source is a great ally to bridge the Digital Divide in India. Why? Because it allows us to customize software as per our needs, without us having to pay any royalties to any foreign firms. Thus, our entire investment remains in India, with Indians. Such projects give our entrepreneurs and techies an opportunity to work on major projects, build expertise, and then offer similar solutions to customers across the globe. Last but not the least, Open Source allows us to lower the cost of adoption of IT-as what we have to pay for-is the customization and support-and not any royalties,” opined Rahul Chopra, Open Source India. 

And so…
Though there are myths about the platform, but it cannot be denied that open source is accepted by everyone due to its flexibility and customizable feature. Innovation happens at a faster pace than the proprietary platform. All these factors play a major role in stating open source to be a big enabler in the digital transformation of India. 

Having said that, Open Source can be a big game changer in the Digital Transformation strategy. Its importance can be felt from the simple fact that both large and small organizations considering Open Source as a potential area of investment.

Aparna Mullick
aparna@varindia.com