Total cost of ownership reduced by at least 40%

Enterprise scalability, performance and security 

Significantly improved project delivery times

Open Business Associates (OBA) exists to help companies realise the promise of open source. Our services framework and structured methodology are designed to deliver value across all aspects of the business not just within IT.

Open Source and Corporate Culture

To simply swap out existing technologies for open source misses the point of the real value in adopting open source and, in the worst case, can actually lead to increased total cost of ownership. 

Open source is a management practice. It is characterised by co-operation and collaboration. And it only works because of honest peer review.

For open source to really succeed in your company, every part of your organisation needs to understand this cultural shift.

A recommended corporate open source programme typically involves helping you to answer questions such as:

• How do you/will you communicate successes and best practices?
• How will you assess the readiness for open source, the risks and the benefits across processes, resources, strategy and technology?
• The Open Source community continually develops the Open Source products – how will you manage future releases and upgrades?
• How will you make sure that if something goes wrong you can get it fixed quickly?
• How do you manage business continuity?
• How will you train your staff and make sure the training is a re-useable asset?
• How will you continue to develop the Open Source solutions to reflect your ongoing business needs?

We can engage for a specific project or let us work with you on an annual retained basis. For a fixed fee we will attend all key business and technical meetings, advising on the best areas for open source impact in the organisation and helping to drive those projects through to completion.

Talk to your account manager and arrange a meeting to discuss the best approach for your organisation.

Evaluation and Procurement

• What’s the best project to start with and which product is right ?
• Use OBA to review your IT strategy, issues, requirements and help define the most appropriate Open Source projects
• Use OBA to cross reference your requirements with what is available in the market.  We will document the appropriateness of what’s available to meet your requirements and recommend how to enhance a product to ideally reflect your needs. Our technical evaluation process includes a consideration of several factors, including:

• Functionality
• Cost
• Market Share
• Support
• Maintenance/Longevity
• Reliability
• Performance
• Scalability
• Usability
• Security
• Flexibility/Customisability
• Interoperability
• Legal/license issues

Architecture, Integration and Development

How will you integrate and customise an open source solution?

• We will source, develop, integrate and implement any open source solutions for or with you
• OBA will manage any future requirements to enhance the solutions and manage the Open Source community to develop those enhancements

OBA has people with 10's of years of experience at building and integrating complex IT solutions and business applications at companies like Cisco, IBM and JP Morgan Chase ready to work with you.

Because of our direct involvement in the open source community and our unique open source associate business model we can engage developers directly from key projects when appropriate. This level of support and expertise simply cannot be equalled by most traditional software and integration houses.

We also specialise in developing Web 2.0 applications and typically make these available as open source projects. This dramatically reduces costs and development time as the community becomes involved. One example of this is the workflow application being developed in conjunction with a number of large enterprise customers.

Operational Support and Maintenance

• How will you support this new set of technologies ?
• Do you rely on vendor subscriptions ?
• Do vendor subscriptions cover consulting or only bug-fix, remote problem solving ?
• How do you ensure that open source products are integrated into your backup and systems management processes ?

OBA will support and maintain any open source solution.  This includes structured upgrade paths and structured release management.

OBA can train your staff and provide CBT collateral for future training.

OBA is trusted by large UK organisations to provide advice and guidance to minimise the risk of adopting open source. We can help design your disaster recovery process to include open source components ensuring business continuity and minimising risk to corporate revenue and reputation.