Open Source Has Won: Now What's Your Strategy?

...[O]pen source is here to stay. If your organization isn’t using open source software in mission-critical applications, you’re in the minority. Even then, I suspect you are using open source software and just don’t know it. Even Microsoft has embraced open source by including open source versions of big data repository Hadoop on Azure, and they count Hortonworks and Cloudera among their valued partners.  And if you’re really one of those rare open-source-free enterprises, you might want to reevaluate your situation: you’re in an increasingly small minority.

If you’re going to use open source projects in-house, you’re going to need to identify a strategy for selection, implementation, operations and support just as you would any commercial product you use in-house. The trick is how you will access the required expertise.

For almost every open source project that works at enterprise scale, there are commercial vendors and consultants who will help you with selection through to support and updates. The challenge is when you need to combine two or more different open source projects — for example Hadoop and Solr. You find yourself with a multi-vendor problem from the start...