It was as a satisfied consumer of the Drupal content management system that Bachana first realized the business success potential of moving away from proprietary licensing structures. “When we made a decision to do more interactivity on our Web site, we determined that it made the most sense for us to implement a content management system on an open source platform.” Bachana began hiring what he calls “open source gurus,” and he found their enthusiasm for community-based development contagious. “They evangelized within the company about the merits of open source. Having some new people in this environment, which had always been traditionally Microsoft-based development, well, they were sort of getting people excited about what could happen.”

It didn’t take Bachana long to connect the benefits of open source content management, such as drastically reduced capital requirements and greater flexibility, to meeting the needs of his clients. “I get really excited about solving business challenges,” he says, calling consulting a “buffet lifestyle. You get to solve challenges in lots of different businesses. We found a number of our customers didn’t have the budget to purchase licensed products. In university settings, or museum associations, or even more recently media companies, there’s been some issues around decelerating of their revenues. They just couldn’t afford [proprietary]. For us it was a logical next step to offer those customers open source.”

Bachana says DPCI also began getting requests from clients specifically for open source solutions. “They asked us to go out and recommend platforms in the open source world that we could help them implement and customize. When we first started nine years ago, we were either building custom solutions from scratch, or we were implementing proprietary solutions from big-name companies.”

Moving to open source inside and outside the company has benefited DPCI in more ways than one. “Rapid deployment,” Bachana says, is the biggest benefit. “Not only within the framework of Drupal, but other open source modules and components that we can integrate. And we work in a LAMP environment, so it is quick for us to implement new functionality that we want internally.”

Using open source software also benefits DPCI from a business strategy perspective. “One of the drawbacks of consultancies is that there are typically a lot of solo practitioners that can’t do the bigger projects. We use a team approach, and by matching this with open source, we think it gives us a strategic advantage, because the team can implement changes very quickly [for] our customers. That’s been a terrific benefit for us.”

Bachana says the challenge in open source is putting all the pieces together. “The market is not fully mature,” he says. “There are pieces to the puzzle that we’d like to see, like customer relationship management, accounting — all the different pieces you’d see in managing a business. There’s still a lot of satellite initiatives that haven’t converged yet. The disconnect is that there’s no one entity or group or central place where people are thinking about how all the pieces snap together. I’d like to see that happen, but we’re not big enough to effectuate that. We can snap the pieces for our own benefit and for our customer, but that still isn’t doing justice to the whole world. If there was some kind of roadmap, you’d see a lot more companies buying into the open source vision, in the same manner that they’re buying into Oracle or Microsoft.”

Bachana recommends starting your company’s open source journey at the Web level. “There’s plenty of resources out there where you can get information on the different platforms available. Implement Web servers first. Hire a couple of really great developers that know the LAMP environment and task them with getting a roadmap for the back office using open source. If you start that way, you could map all your needs to readily available open source solutions out there. But it starts with getting at least one person who is a technologist that could support them in the back office.”

The OSUOSL fosters open source development projects as a service to the community. The lab “is all about using open standards to promote technologies that help the University stimulate its lasting attitude of inquiry and social responsibility,” according to the FAQ at its Web site.

Corey Shields, lead systems engineer for the lab, oversees the management of 60 servers that are logged to a central host using syslog-ng and stunnel. Before Splunk, the log host environment was set up to output files into directory hierarchies, with new files for each day. When there was a problem with a server, Shields had to search through all the log files manually to find out what was wrong. “To find problems in this setup, there is a lot of grep and awking to do,” Shields says, “and that is when you know what you are greping for.” Looking through the logs by hand took a lot of time, especially when multiple servers were performing the same functions and generating gigabytes of log data every day.

Shields remembered seeing Splunk demonstrated at San Francisco’s LinuxWorld Conference and Expo last year. “I thought it was a pretty good idea.” Splunk is kind of like Google for server logs. It “sucks up every type of log you care to feed it, indexes them, and then makes them easily searchable via a nifty AJAX-enabled Web interface,” writes OpenSolaris.org’s Ben Rockwood.

Shields says installing Splunk on a Hewlett-Packard ProLiant DL140 server running Debian took just a few minutes. “Everything is pre-packaged, and the installation asks a few questions. It indexes data in quite a few different ways. I played around with some of the methods for a day, and settled on having syslog-ng output data to a named pipe which Splunk then watches,” he says. “This allowed us to keep our existing log host configuration, and use Splunk to supplement it.”

“I had a slight challenge in the beginning getting data into Splunk,” Shields says. He posted a question on the user forums and got a “quick response” that got him back on track.

“Almost immediately Splunk showed its worth in helping to find problems I didn’t even notice the symptoms of,” he says. “I was [using Splunk to] browse the logs of one of our development testbeds and noticed a cron job that was running every minute out of an old account from a developer who had left the group six months before. Given the alternative of just looking through the log one page at a time, I would not have been scouting for possible problems.”

Shields says the time-saving element of Splunk has proved invaluable to the lab. He hopes that in the near future Splunk will provide greater reporting opportunities. “Statistics are important,” he says. “They can mean bragging rights, new job lines, resource needs. When you have a cluster of machines all performing the same job, the difficulty of collecting statistics seems to increase with the size of your resources. I would like to see awstats-like reporting from any given search or data set on the fly. Overlay a couple of search results graphed on top of each other and you get to compare trends. Now, wouldn’t that be great?”

Splunk is available either as a freeware download or a commercial application called Splunk Professional, which is priced based on the amount of data that needs to be indexed per day and charged on an annual basis. A company that needs to index up to 500 megabytes per day would pay $2,500 a year.

Patrick McGovern, one of the founders of Splunk, says his company is looking at the possibility of opening parts of the source code within the year. “At this point we are doing a bit of a hybrid,” McGovern says. “We’re providing the software at zero cost, and we are providing all the API to allow developers to extend and customize our search engine to suit their needs. We’re also keeping parts of the code closed, so that large data centers have a reason to purchase the professional version of our software.”