Reduced procurement time is the number two reason to move to open source. Why? You don't have to wait for the vendor to pilot and you don't need to go through long evaluations. If you take a look at Health and Human Services (HHS), their Nationwide Health Information Network (NHIN) referenced implementation is being created as an enterprise service to allow a single patient view across 26 agencies that manage your health information in the government.
HHS went to each of the agencies and looked at what they were using for their middleware. Almost all of them were using proprietary middleware. So HHS picked one vendor and went out and received an estimate to deploy it across all 26 agencies. There are 307.2 million people in the country and that vendor came back with a price of approximately $800 million to obtain a license. But we all know in government land, anything over a $100 million has to go through a multi-year, full, open procurement process. So in the meantime, veterans are not getting their prosthetic limbs, seniors are not getting their medications and everything comes to a screeching halt.
There is a HUGE problem with the information system, when we can't share information. So when HHS realized the current procurement process was going to result in a three-year delay, they looked to Sun's open source, enterprise class, middleware...recommended by their Gartner analyst because of its ability to scale and features. All they needed to do was download it. So they downloaded it in about a week, and in less than a month they had it up and running. In the following month they had a pilot, and in the third month they were well on their way to a referenced implementation that is not only being used in the U.S. (first production deployment is Social Security Adminstration), but is now being considered globally to address electronic health information exchange. Now that it is deployed, they are talking about getting a support contract in place. So the choice is simple...three months or three years?
There are numerous great examples like this one all over the federal government, mostly in defense and intelligence, where agencies have moved to open source not only because it is the most secure, but also because it can be deployed much faster...weeks verses years. It can also scale very quickly, so if it needs to be deployed to 7,000 new sites, it can be done quickly and then followed up later with a support contract. No one is held back by "the process."
Check back soon for the No. 3 reason to move to open source.
