10) With Open-Source Software, ROI Tough to Peg

As to companies eyeing to marching into opening software source, proprietary software matched with ROI by the applied metrics may not invariably provide the ideal results. Founding such decisions on the spending related to licensing fees, support, hardware and maintenance (without exception to conventional ROI elements), neglects the skills of employees who are able to create and operate software providing free source. This was an argument brought into being herein at the 7th annual Convention of O'Reilly Open Source held by Robert M. Lefkowitz, Deputy President of Research and Education at Optaros Inc., a Cambridge, Mass. systems integration and IT consulting seller for big businesses.

Within his speech, Lefkowitz mentioned about what corporations should do to figure out the ROI models by themselves when they are assessing open-source approaches instead of depending on other ROI calculations from somewhere else. He refer to this concept as conventional business steps of ROI concentrates on financial savings; whilst current IT corporations need to take into consideration expertise attained as well.

"Provided the top-level workers are applying open-source, that's why we should go there," Lefkowitz stated. "And provided the top walks of life are applying something else， you'd like to go there. What interests the enterprises most is the prospect."

"This difficulty with conventional ROI calculations is its expensive cost to gather minute, well-timed information of a corporation for analysis of an ROI. Rather than getting precise data on their own systems, corporations usually use the roughly same data collected from similar-sized companies which have done ROI researches by themselves or obtained assistance from analysts." But that data can not give a precise description for each corporation.

"One can find data to support a point. One can also find a research to reverse a point," Lefkowitz said.

"Arguments over ROI are traditionally made by those who find out way and place to develop, as sellers make ROI plans to find out sales pitches to clients," he added. "The ROI presents the document to set up consensus plan."

"It is not easy to measure or recognize ROI for common employees and developers," Lefkowitz said, "however, we should consider when to look into whether a corporation needs to carry out open-source software."

"This way offers a systematic approach to identify good employees for good employees improve themselves and learn skills they may use all over their careers," he added. "Skills are important. the better team you own, the better solutions you can find to software as well as hardware."

Amidst the examples he quoted search engine corporation Google Inc., who set up a large IT system along with generic white-box computers -- making a strong network irreplaceable and with high efficiency to be applied on almost every kind of hardware available now to human beings. "Google is special," he said, "because the developers of Google have done innovative jobs using open-source software and creative thinking. The insufficient resource only is the skills."