Does open source have a place in the enterprise outside experimenters? find out how Radio Africa group is running almost entirely on open source and how Madison insurance has blended in the open "sauce' to derive the best benefits of both worlds.

Radio Africa is a media company that invests in radio, television and print. The group operates 5 radio stations, a single TV station and a newspaper and employs just under 500 employees. The group has offices in Mombasa as well as sales and correspondence offices in Nakuru, Kisumu, Eldoret and Meru. Other operations include a printing press in Nairobi's Industrial area.

Joseph Okech, the Group ICT Manager says that IT is heavily utilised in the group's operations, from paging and refining of newspapers, IT support in the printing press to support of factory machines. Under TV business, ICT supports all broadcasting operations that require IT. The IT department has 6 employees including an intern.

Applications run by the firm include the Sugar CRM for client relationship management, Zimbra for email, Orange HRMS for human resource and Converge for production workflow of the newspaper, radio and TV. All the three applications are open source. Other solutions include a custom PDF server and Asterisk for communication. For workstations, designers and video editors use Apple Macs, while those in sales and admin run on the open source Ubuntu.

The group had planned to move everyone other than the designers and video editors to Ubuntu, but ran into a problem with radio and TV news editors who do a lot of clip reading and modification. The group is still on Windows and is yet to be migrated. Okech says that they need to find proper alternatives of the Windows software they are used to in order not to disrupt production before moving them to Ubuntu.

The group had planned to move everyone other than the designers and video editors to Ubuntu, but ran into a problem with radio and TV news editors who do a lot of clip reading and modification. The group is still on Windows and is yet to be migrated. Okech says that they need to find proper alternatives of the Windows software they are used to in order not to disrupt production before moving them to Ubuntu.

Okech admits he found most of the open source structures and migration policies in place when he joined the company in April 2012. "Our group CEO (Patrick Quarcoo) is someone who is very tech savvy and likes to read a lot and plan everything. Before I came in, he was handling the IT department personally because there was really no IT manager and so he made most of the decisions due to the superiority of open source software," he says.

About two years back, the company was using Microsoft Exchange for mail, and there were lots of issues with it. Quarcoo researched, read on Zimbra and got an implementation team to do the roll out. "It was my greatest joy to find all of them running because it was something I always wanted to do, to take a whole company open source and to make sure every single thing is done on open source," Okech says.

Okech says he feels open source is superior because of the support and updates from community. This he contrasts with proprietary software which has a team solely focusing on development."From my perspective, I would have initiated this move. The problem with such moves is that management usually resists but here it is management that started the process," he says.

Okech says that management in most firms tends to resist open source because of lack of understanding. "Management do not care how your mail is delivered, all they want is the mail in the inbox, but do not know how everything works in the Internet. If they were aware of how much open source software is in use out there to make your mail come from one point to another, they would know this is more superior," he says.

The second reason as to why management oppose open source is that they think there's no real support. A firm using Microsoft Exchange would pick up a phone and dial for support, or lodge a ticket for assistance. Zimbra may offer paid support, but other open source mail solutions like Exim do not have a person you can contact directly for support. "To get into open source, you have to get people who are knowledgeable in open source first, plus I think people are just plain scared of it," he says.

Okech says a big advantage of open source software (OSS) is that they tend to be the first to implement new ideas and new features before they make it to proprietary systems. He does warn that OSS also comes with a lot of beta software for testing that would give you trouble if installed in a production environment

OSS also tends to give the best of many worlds. "Apache may not have been the very best HTTP server back then, but it was a mixture of the best brilliant ideas from all the other HTTP servers and the foundation is very strong. The flow of ideas comes on very fast," he says.

Another benefit, which many users see is cost. "Costs are not zero, but your costs are reduced," Okech says. Radio Africa mostly uses Dell laptops. An average Dell laptop with Windows 7 costs KSh. 72,000 due to licensing. The same laptop supplied without an OS or with Ubuntu costs between KSh. 59,000 and KSh, 61,000. Every machine bought thus saves the company KSh. 10,000 to KSh. 15,000 due to licenses.

Further reductions in costs come from elimination of antivirus licenses. "Previous, I had an antivirus for every single machine on Windows. Here, I am bringing a system that is maybe prone to malware, but not prone to viruses," he says.

Okech says managing the machines on Ubuntu from a central location is much easier. He is able to push security updates and patches, restore systems much more easier than he finds it under Windows. This he says he couldn't manage with Windows and that the remaining Windows machines also need to be managed individually due to stuff such as antivirus updates. This he does using an OpenLDAP which provides authentication and policies for all workstations.

The biggest challenge with OSS is the common user, who has been used to working with Windows and other proprietary solutions. "Support calls actually grow more, but the good thing you can support them form where you are sitting. The people are not comfortable with that and there's lots of resistance to change. People see it as my idea and say 'This Ubuntu of yours is not working.' You get some people who tell you that you need to return them to Windows. You ask why and you find out that they don't know how to use Ubuntu. So you show them what they need to do and they are happy after that."

Okech says that most users tend to be very occupied and stressed with their work, hence prefer to call for IT support rather than go through the knowledge base. He however believes the same culture would still be present under Windows. The issue is people's resistance due to what they were used to. He gives the example of Audacity software which he says is much better than what was in use before, but users found it challenging to switch.

The manager says that the overall policy is about getting the right software. For video editing, the group says it has found that Mac is perfect, where there's really no open source alternative especially for video editing.

Okech says open source is more of a choice, and people should opt for a solution that works best for them. When looking for a solution, he first looks to see if an open source solution is available.

Blending in Open Sauce

Madison Insurance is a composite insurance company in operation since 1988. The company offers general insurance and life insurance across 21 towns in Kenya. The company has more than 100,000 active life policies and 60,000 general policies. All the 21 branches are connected to their Community Head Office through a dedicated MPLS link. The company has about 250 full time employees and a sales force team of 450.

James Nyakomitta, Madison Insurance's Head of ICT says that the firms ICT services are structure around service provision that supports business operations. The firm looks at building on existing and emerging ICT technologies in a bid to offer superior services to their competition. The ICT department has 10 employees, led by the Head of IT, and reports directly to the CEO.

The company's sales force team is completely mobile and ICT ensures that they are able to connect back to the office and communicate as necessary. Nyakomitta says that his team also lays a lot of emphasis on securing the sensitive client information they hold.

Madison's core insurance software is Turnquest ERP developed by a local firm, Turnkey Africa, and is used for all operations ranging from general business to medical business, life business, financial, human resource management and payroll. The company has been using the software since 2004 and is looking to soon upgrade to a more recent version.

For email, the firm uses Microsoft Exchange 2007 for their internal employees and is looking to upgrade to a newer version. However, for the sales force, the firm has deployed the open source Zimbra and Postfix which allow the sales team to connect from the field.

Other applications in use are the open source Eclipse in the development environment. Eclipse is integrated with another open source application, Jboss which is then used to model the firm's business processes. The company also uses the open source Sugar CRM for customer relationship management.

Another open source tool in use is Opsview for network monitoring as well as the proprietary WhatsUP Gold free version. For backups, the firm uses the open source Bacula to manage daily file backups. Openoffice is used on some few user machines, though most users are on the licensed Microsoft Office. Madison also uses Internet Explorer as its browser, though most users have a huge preference on the open source Mozilla Firefox which is heavily deployed across the company.

For security, the firm has deployed the proprietary McAfee Antivirus and MailMarshal email gateway. For operating systems, the firm against blends the open source Linux and Free BSD operating systems with the proprietary Microsoft Server 2008. More open source tools used on the servers include Apache for web services, Wordpress for blogging and Joomla for content management.

They also have a number of mobile applications running on the open source Android platform.

Madison does small scale development in-house using the proprietary VB.NET and the open source Perl, Python and PHP.

"We create a blend between the open source tools and proprietary software because as much as you have a lot of benefits to derive from the open source tools, you may not be able to immediately adopt a fully fledged open source platform," according to Nyakomitta.

This he attributes to open source challenges such as the software not being straightforward to use. One needs to put in a lot of effort and also have lengthy training for staff members before they can understand how to use open source. "Most of the times when we bring an open source tool we ensure that we have an expert who is able to fully implement the tool and is also able to train the users," he says.

Another challenge he says is that some tools tend to have parallel versions (development for older versions continues alongside newer releases for security and to maintain stability especially for enterprises running on legacy apps and not in a position to upgrade. Examples include Python version 2 and Python Version 3 which vastly improves on version 2, both still under development) under development and it may be had to tell which version has the features you need.

Another issue comes from modern hardware not fully supporting open source platforms, forcing you to bridge the gap by installing third party drivers before you can run open source tools on your hardware. (Most open source releases do not include a number of drivers due to their proprietary nature)

The ICT head finds open source tools very secure compared to proprietary software. As an example, he says that recent discovery of vulnerabilities on the Android platform would not have been possible if the code was not available for all to scrutinise. A fix was soon put in place. This gives a security guarantee of an open source system compared to a closed one. "You will be relying on the word of the vendor for a proprietary system," he says.

Additionally, the ability to view the code makes it easy to audit the software from a security perspective, compared with proprietary tools where one can't view the code.

Another advantage is that bugs associated with open source software as fixed in the shortest time possible due to the large number of developers that work on the system. He says that Microsoft vulnerabilities take weeks, if not months, to fix while open software is patched in days.

Open source software also provides more quality in comparison to majority of the proprietary systems in use. This he says is due to the large number of developers working on open software.

Nyakomitta also sees a lot of flexibility with open source, in that it allows tweaking and modification of the code to meet your requirements, with no concern. Proprietary software leaves you at the mercy of the developer to make any needed changes.

In addition, he says proprietary software tends to come with intensive annual updates that require a cycle of new hardware every time one updates, which tends to be quite expensive. Open source tools however comfortably run on old hardware and don't dictate the hardware platform you must run it on.

Open source also gives freedom; users do not have to worry about the vendor's dictates, timetable, pricing and priorities.

Support ranges from excellent documentation, mailing lists, groups and vast communities allowing his team to easily get support for his open source tools compared to proprietary tools. In addition, further support is available at a small cost far below the cost of support from a proprietary vendor.

"The fact that we save a lot of cost adopting open source software makes it quite beneficial for us. If you consider the cost of acquiring a proprietary system, you must spend on the software itself; spend on virus protection, support charges, ongoing upgrade expenses and related costs associated with being locked in to that specific vendor. For an open source tool you will get all that at a fraction of the cost. The fact that they give you the flexibility of trying the software before buying gives a serious benefit compared to some proprietary benefits you must buy before you use," Nyakomitta says.

"It's not always recommended to adopt a complete open source platform, unless you fully understand the requirements and have done a thorough analysis of your requirements before switching to open source because of the challenges. A number of corporates will run to open source simply because of the cost,' he says.