Craig Murphy has had enough. As chief technology officer at Sabre Holdings, which runs the world's largest airfare and ticketing network, Murphy has spent millions of dollars on database and other software from companies like Oracle. But last year, when Sabre was building a new computer system for online shoppers, Murphy took a flyer on a database program from a little-known company in Sweden that charges only $495 per server computer, versus a $160,000 list price for Oracle. Guess what? The Swedish stuff works great. Fired up, Murphy is hunting for other places to use the cheaper software, called MySQL.Forbes also points out that while hardware costs have been dropping over the past 15 years, software prices have been increasing. In 1990, software accounted for only 10% of IT spending. Today it accounts for 20%. It's hard to justify why software deserves an increasing slice of the IT spending pie.
Forbes includes an interesting graphic that shows major categories of commercial software with their open source and other low cost alternatives, such as ASP or subscription-based solutions, partly reproduced below:
I think that the trend toward open source and other low cost alternatives is finally reaching a tipping point.
Category Commercial Examples Cheap Alternatives Operating Systems MS Windows; Unix Linux Web Server MS IIS Apache Database MS SQL Server; IBM DB2; Oracle MySQL Desktop Apps MS Office Sun StarOffice and OpenOffice MS Exchange; Lotus Notes Scalix Apps Server IBM Websphere; BEA Weblogic JBOSS CRM Siebel Salesforce.com; NetSuite IP Telephony Cisco Call Manager Asterisk Scripting Language MS Active Server Pages; Sun JavaServer Pages PHP Spend Mgmt Ariba Ketera
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