The bad economy forces everyone to cut costs. At every level, personal, organizational, as well as national, costs are cut, to ensure survival in these though times.
Even though people understand the need for IT in the enterprise very well, cost cuttings do not exclude IT departments.
What is the best way of living with the reducing budgets and still make a good impression?
One option would be to switch to open source. However, some have concerns, open source might be cheaper, but are they feature rich? Is thee enough insurance? Would not it be safer to continue with regular closed source vendors for mission critical applications, irrespective of their costs?
With reducing budgets, either you like it or not, you have to think twice and prepare to let some expenses go. If you are afraid of risk and stick to the same costly vendors, the risk of you loosing in this economy would be much higher. If not for whole IT, at least for some parts, it might be a good idea to go for low cost alternatives.
WSo2 Carbon offers a comprehensive suite of products, with unmatched feature set, that can take care of all your IT needs. The feature set is so rich that WSO2 Carbon can compete side by side even against WebSphere or WebLogic, but with much less total cost of ownership (TCO).
How can you live with little budget in these difficult times? Here are some tips:
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Leverage whatever you already have to the maximum.
May be you already have application servers running under capacity. May be you can make use of that unused capacity to enhance your IT.
How WSO2 Carbon can help : Any WSO2 Carbon based product can be run on any Java application server -
Look if you can replace costly subscriptions with lower cost alternatives, without giving up on quality.
The biggest concern here is that, how could you have all the features that you used to have with the alternative. The counter question would be that, are you really using all that feature set that you are paying for.
How WSO2 Carbon can help : All four WSO2 Carbon based products are free with Apache license. You can try them free and get loads of help from forums and mailing lists. Hence you can evaluate Carbon based products, as an alternative to your current expensive stack. Evaluate not only by browsing through the feature set, but by using it for real. If you really need, you can get paid support, either development or production support. You have the option of doing it on your own or getting help from the WSO2. -
Negotiate for discounts, and cut down acquisition costs
Negotiating for discounts is part and parcel of the inquisition process. However, if the array of products that you are using comes from the same vendor, it just makes life easy. One of the problems with going open source for your IT is that you have to go to many organizations to fulfill your full requirements. However, going for the same vendor too would not make sense, if the different products from the same vendor are priced in silos and prohibitively high in these times
How WSO2 Carbon can help : Registry, WSAS, ESB and BPS are separate products, but based on the same platform, namely WSO2 Carbon. You could have the whole platform from one vendor, one stop shop. The technical design of the platform as well as the pricing of it has been done with product unification in mind. -
Cut down integration costs
For many software vendors, application integration was a cash cow. And if you pause for a moment and look around in your IT infrastructure, you will realize that, even though the various products would be from the same vendor, you might be paying tons of money to get those integrated. Hence, look for solutions that solve integration pains out of the box, rather than creating more opportunities for integration.
How WSO2 Carbon can help : WSO2 Carbon is a SOA application platform. It is designed with integration in mind. One of the reasons that the various products from the same vendor that you have do not work together is because the products were developed by various teams, who are perfect strangers. Also, the products address the specific feature set of that isolated product. They hardly look into the platform aspect. WSO2 products had the same problem, prior to the Carbon era. But with WSO2 Carbon, we have fixed it big time. Not only that we made sure that it was designed proper, we also made sure that we implemented it ensuring integration characteristics, by verifying the implementation along the way.
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