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.”

eHarmony.com, with more than 11 million registered users, is expecting an influx of even more new registrations since it launched a site for married couples who want to improve their relationships. With all those paying customers, eHarmony can’t afford to have server outages. “Down time on our site costs over $1,000 per minute,” says Douglas. So when it comes to selecting the best network monitoring and Web development apps, “we’re not driven by saving money, we’re driven by the best product.”

For example, eHarmony uses Hyperic’s HQ server management product to keep tabs on 140 servers in its data center. HQ is a collection of tools that has always included some open source pieces, like the plugin development kit that make Hyperic usable with almost any server statistics management application. Hyperic recently announced it is releasing the entire product group under the GPL. “We’re really happy with it,” Douglas says. “It works well and supports everything we have, even the esoteric stuff.” He says Hyperic compares to commercial products, but the proprietary stuff “doesn’t have the same kind of tech support.”

eHarmony’s Web sites run on open source Tomcat, JBoss, and Apache. “It’s most of the stuff everyone is using,” Douglas says. “Open source is not new to our company. We use it extensively, because the best product is often open source. We’re not zealots about open source, we just go out and look for what’s best.”

To keep its sites running smoothly and with a minimum of down time, eHarmony updates them a couple of times a week. “There are new builds twice a week,” Douglas says. “Maintaining the sites drives our day, because 100% of our revenue comes off those Web sites, and something’s generally going wrong somewhere.” Hyperic’s server logs send alerts to Douglas and his staff when there’s a problem that needs attention.

“We’re kind of like a football team,” he says. “When we get an alert, it goes to the entire team and everyone chases down the problem. In our environment, every possible problem you can find, we find.” Because of that, he prefers open source software when it comes to bug-fixing.

“When you deal with commercial support, the support team doesn’t want to believe you,” he says. “It takes a while to get issues resolved. You’d think it would be quick because you’re paying them.”

With open source, fixes are readily available. “There’s not a hidden bug list,” Douglas says. “When there’s a problem we can generally find out how someone else got around it. Occasionally, we’ll pull up the source code ourselves. It’s all about speed, because with down time our revenue doesn’t come back. When people use the site for the first time, they’re kind of hesitant. If they have any reason to change their mind, they will. With open source, any information we need, any assistance we need, we can find.”

For IT directors who may be considering switching to open source software, Douglas has this advice: “Just pick the right product. Usually the concern about open source that I’ve witnessed is, ‘how am I gonna get support?’ But even if you’re not paying for support there’s a ton of information out there. I would just find the best product for whatever I’m trying to do, and if that’s open source, there’s generally a company that will help you.”

For some products, open source provides “the only real feasible technology. Like Filezilla,” Douglas says. “With that, there are features that are hard to find in anything else.”

On the other hand, “We have a lot of applications where open source is not the right choice. We use Oracle as a database. That’s about as expensive as you can get.

“We don’t make that big a distinction between open source and commercial. This is what we use because it’s good software.”