As a global management consulting, technology services and outsourcing firm, Accenture’s client list includes corporations and government agencies in 120 countries. By blending deep industry knowledge with technology expertise, it has developed and implemented solutions for a wide variety of business challenges. We spoke with Paul Daugherty, Accenture’s Managing Director of Advanced Systems and Technology/ Technology Growth Platform, about the trends Accenture is seeing among its clients in the adoption of open source technologies and about Accenture’s best practices for deploying open source.
Based on Accenture’s research and the survey it conducted of its customer base this spring, what interest does Accenture see in open source technology?
Among our target client base, 78 percent are using open source technologies currently and 69 percent are planning to increase their budget around open source. In addition, 38 percent of companies surveyed said they expect to migrate mission critical software to open source in the next 12 months. These figures are based on a survey we conducted of 300 executives of large companies, primarily in North America, the United Kingdom and Ireland. So, we are seeing a strong commitment to open source and that commitment is increasing.
Initially, the main driver for adopting open source technology was cost savings. Is that still the case?
Interestingly, when we asked clients in the survey why they are using open source technology, the top answers this year were higher quality, improved reliability, and better security/bug fixing of the software. In the past, cost has been the main driver. We see clients starting to view open source as a technology that provides better business solutions and advantages in more ways than just cost. We are also seeing clients starting to apply open source to new areas. Open source is being used in business applications in areas like CRM, customer service, and finance and accounting.
Based on Accenture’s research findings, is open source technology continuing to deliver the cost savings that initially attracted customers?
Half of the respondents of our survey cited open source as contributing to an overall lower total cost of ownership (TCO). So, while cost savings are not the primary driver for open source adoption this year, they are still an important factor. More than ever, clients are looking for lower TCO in their IT projects. Most of the organizations surveyed, (71 percent) said that cost savings come from reduced maintenance costs. A third also cited savings from shorter initial software development time and lower initial development costs.
How does Accenture help clients select what areas of its infrastructure are good candidates for migration to open source?
We always look at things in terms of what is going to provide the best TCO and generate the most value for our clients. We have diagnostics – frameworks and tools to guide us and help us make decisions in different aspects of the work we do for clients. So, for example, we have a framework we use when helping clients with data center operating system and infrastructure decisions. It helps us understand client priorities and marketplace trends, and helps clients decide where to get started and what choices to make.
Another example is our Accenture SOA Reference Architecture, which lays out all different capabilities that clients need to consider as they are implementing service-oriented architectures. We have reference architectures on a wide variety of the leading SOA platforms, including a JBoss reference architecture.
For cloud-based solutions, which is on the minds of all of our clients these days, we have a similar set of cloud computing assessment tools to help clients make the right choices as they make their initial moves into the cloud – whether it’s a cloud-based infrastructure- as-a-service model or a software-as-a-service based infrastructure.
Is Accenture seeing any patterns in terms of the types of projects for which open source technology is being used? For example, is it being used more for new projects or the migration of existing ones?
As I mentioned earlier, we are seeing open source move beyond a platform technology and be used in more specific business applications like CRM, customer service and finance and accounting. We are also seeing an increase in the amount of mission critical functions being moved to open source.
In terms of patterns of new projects versus migrations, I think we are seeing open source broadly across both. With new applications, clients are looking at how to get the best overall business value. Many clients are also looking to reduce their budgets and achieve better TCO with their current infrastructure.
The other trend driving open source is the trend around cloud computing. A lot of the underlying technologies in the cloud are open source, whether at the operating system level or the database.
The final trend is in the area of mobility. Open mobile platforms – Android is an example – are driving innovation and gaining market share quickly over other mobile operating systems. That trend will continue to drive the comfort level and adoption rates of open source in other categories as well.
Are there any ways that managing open source technology presents different challenges from technology developed on more traditional proprietary products?
Open source’s user-driven model, with a community that is expected to be participatory, leads to a more rapid evolution than with proprietary systems. This is one of the advantages of open source, but it is also one of the challenges. For example, ensuring that products integrate properly can sometimes be challenging when versions change rapidly.
How does Accenture help clients manage those different challenges?
We help clients create a disciplined management approach for using and governing open source to ensure they are properly tracking what technologies are being used and how. We also help clients ensure that they are implementing standardized stacks for each of their different types of applications. We also encourage clients to obtain support from an established open source vendor, like Red Hat, rather than take a self-support approach.
Cloud computing is an area that has generated a lot of excitement in the technology world recently. How do you see open source technology fitting in to cloud computing efforts?
Open source and the cloud go hand-in-hand. If you look at innovation around the cloud and what the clouds are running, you see a lot of open source technology. Open source has helped get cloud computing to where it is today.
The platform is where open source becomes very important. A lot of our clients today don’t want to be locked in to a particular vendor for the cloud because they don’t know where it’s going. Having an open source-based approach at this layer gives clients the confidence to make that investment.
The process/industry layer of the cloud is also important, particularly for Accenture, as we are in the business process outsourcing (BPO) business. Going forward, BPO is transitioning into a cloud-based business. We will see a lot of services migrating up through the cloud infrastructure if companies can buy business solutions in a cloud-like manner.
We see private clouds growing at 37 percent a year and we expect private clouds will be a $47 billion marketplace in five years. Open source is also important in public clouds, with projects like Deltacloud, which will protect companies from API incompatibilities. We expect that will be very interesting.
Accenture and Red Hat have been strong partners in open source implementations. From Accenture’s point of view, what are the benefits of partnering with Red Hat for open source?
We encourage clients to work with established, proven companies in open source. A good demonstration of the significance of open source is the success of Red Hat itself. Red Hat is the largest public company created around driving open source. It is a successful company with a stack of open source products including Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization, JBoss Enterprise Middleware and Cloud Foundations, Red Hat’s open-source based cloud computing expertise.
The open source market is very fragmented – that’s the flip side of innovation. There are a lot of communities out there, and that poses challenges for companies considering open source. Efforts of companies like Red Hat to put real scale and enterprise-grade support around open source, and to consolidate technologies like Red Hat Enterprise Linux and JBoss under one banner are important.
A question going forward for the industry is how to blend demand for more tried-and-true open source from enterprise customers with the grassroots communities. Red Hat has done it quite well and it will take continued effort to continue to industrialize open source while preserving the community-based aspects of it.
Can you provide any examples of open source solutions that Accenture has created for clients that might showcase how open source has solved a business challenge?
For the French government’s revenue agency, we developed a high-level online tax filing system at Impots.gov. Key issues were performance and security. It’s a highly secure system built top-to-bottom on open source infrastructure. It supports 10 million tax returns filed annually and has 24 million page views on peak volumes during the tax filing season. It’s a mission-critical system and it was delivered entirely on an open source architecture.
Another example is KLM. The airline KLM needed a global document management and knowledge management platform to support airline operations around the world. We did a comparison of proprietary and open source systems and selected Red Hat and Alfresco. It is a successful implementation deployed very effectively. It is used by thousands of users globally and the knowledge base has large amounts of data. The solution allowed employees to access and manage documents more quickly and more efficiently. It was built using Red Hat Enterprise Linux, JBoss Enterprise Middleware and Alfresco document management system.
A project for a large U.S. government agency involved creating an open source platform that achieved a 70 percent reduction in the time it takes to assemble and analyze mission-critical data. Time spent in meetings was almost cut in half due to access to real-time data updates. The system included a Web server that used JBoss as an application server.
Accenture focuses on bringing deep industry knowledge to technology projects and combining business insight with technology strategy. Can you describe how that fusion of industry insight and technology is executed?
We capture industry knowledge and business knowledge into industry process models that we use in our solutions. Clients want simpler ways to deploy solutions and we offer prepackaged solution stacks for specific industries to accelerate the time to deliver.
One example is AMOS, Accenture Mobility Operated Services. (See story page TKTK.) AMOS is a standards-based open delivery platform that blends Accenture’s mobility expertise with deep industry knowledge. The platform allows businesses to quickly deploy high value mobility services. The client could be a wireless carrier that wants us to run part of its operations or it could be a bank that wants to offer some mobile banking services very quickly.
Another example is the Accenture Foundation Platform for Java. With AFP-J, we have taken the most common things that clients need to solve as they are deploying business applications, and we enable clients to start developing the business solutions they need with a ready-to-go open source infrastructure.
Navitaire is yet another example. Navitaire is an Accenture company that provides travel back-office services, call center management, e-commerce strategy and IT strategy to airlines. The dedicated IT solutions it offers are hosted in the cloud. More than 70 airlines use Navitaire’s services. In 2009, 240 million of 320 million total client reservations (75 percent) were taken via the Web from a cloud-based solution across the entire Navitaire client base.
In conclusion, where do you see open source technology in its evolution?
I think open source is at a turning point. It has an established foothold and is now being recognized as more than a cost-cutting solution. It’s a technology that can streamline a company’s infrastructure costs while providing a reliable and flexible way to take advantage of emerging technology paradigms.
Open source, with its community-based approach, has also already driven a lot of innovation in the way software is developed. The development tools and the approaches used in community-based development are now often recognized as being the best way to deliver software. This has impacted the industry overall and even proprietary software companies are now reshaping the way they create and deliver software. This is significant.
A lot of innovation today is being created around open source software. Innovation in cloud, mobile, and social networking, are more often than not driven by open source software communities in those areas. So, open source is at the forefront of where we are seeing innovation, which bodes well for its further adoption in the enterprise space.
