The community aspect of Open Source allows organizations more agility around innovation

Hemant Gaur
Head of Presales & Solutions, STS, Pitney Bowes
 

Open Source: A disruptive technology

Open source acts as an enabler for inclusiveness for businesses. Organizations use open source to serve small and medium businesses with low cost products and build a competitive advantage through cost and volume over dominant players who are focused at enterprise segments. The strong community aspect of open source may allow organizations more agility around innovation and also allow addition of newer segments of the market around the products and services. In different words the strongest aspect of open source is that people or communities can innovate for themselves rather than waiting for a business to do it for them.

Advantages of Open Source

We at Pitney Bowes provide all our customers, ranging from eCom sellers to 3PL companies, digitally integrated new-age commerce solutions. An engaging customer experience is central to these solutions and allows our customers agility to respond to evolving markets. These solutions will be democratizing the shipping and mailing for small and medium businesses by leveraging power of community(ies).

We are leveraging open source softwares like Linux, Android, Jetty, Tomcat, Postgresql for crafting affordable, digital first shipping solutions and services. We are also enabling some of the biggest Indian and south Asian 3PL providers with digital transformation of their operations including parcel collections, tracking and load management for increasing their efficiency and viability.

Open Source & organizational strategy

Open source allows significant innovation at different levels like technical, product and organization and has advantages of network effects for its users. The perception that it is singularly contributing towards just lowering the development costs of (new) products is not precise as because of the strong community the features, limitations and performance of the products are highlighted quickly.

With the greater penetration of open source in the market, enterprises are now forced to review missing market segments and low end consumers more often than earlier. Enterprises are aware that they may be disrupted very quickly by a combination of good enough product and big enough community and not necessarily the best product or a bigger/richer organization. With the advent of cloud and ‘pay as you use’ infrastructure, there is democratization of infrastructure that complements open source technologies very well and allows startups to disrupt businesses.

Yet another dimension for enterprises in today’s world of xAAS (anything as service) is that customers are now paying for the service and value and not the software. This allows for higher open source technologies adoption.