Open Source in Australia: Vic company develops custom app for Toll Transport

Australia is something of a hotbed of innovation at present when it comes to development around open source. HotMagna is one of many companies out there at present that offer a viable and more cost-effective alternative to proprietary-based software installations.

Established in 2000 as a specialist software engineering company, HotMagna develops open-standards and open-source software solutions to meet the business needs of Australian corporations.

Here, HotMagna general manager Henry Okraglik talks about what HotMagna is all about, points to a recent customer success story, and moves to dispel the notion that open source solutions lack the support offered with proprietary systems.

"We specialise in designing and developing solutions that provide our customers with the flexibility and robustness to accommodate current and future business needs. This includes the freedom to choose and change the software, hardware and vendors at the time that customers decide to change any one of these. We consider customer access to the source code and intellectual property to be critical in facilitating freedom, choice and flexibility.

"We believe that flexibility and choice is best delivered through appropriately using both open source and open standards software. Every one of our employees has greater than ten years commercial software development experience and is committed to delivering on our principles of freedom, choice and flexibility for our customers. We have assembled an expert team of Java and J2EE developers.

"By designing and developing customer specific business solutions that take into account current and future business process and IT systems we deliver cost effective solutions that avoid the typical expense of integrating off the shelf products with existing IT systems and forcing changes to business processes and user behaviour. This business value is enhanced by avoiding compelling our customers to purchase software licences wherever we believe that this is the best solution for our customers. We compete by offering a total solution that is overall far cheaper with less risk."

HotMagna recently implemented an open source solution for *Toll Transport. Okraglik explains what benefits, other than cost savings, having an open source infrastructure has for Toll.

"The freedom to choose and change the software, hardware and vendors at the time that customers decide to change any one of these. Proprietary software compels customers to upgrade and change as vendors withdraw support for "older" products. These enforced changes typically necessitate expensive consequential changes to hardware and other integrated systems. Changes are therefore externally driven according to the needs of vendors rather than the business needs of their customers. Open source software enables customers to make business driven decisions according to their specific individual needs."

A perception exists among certain large enterprise customers that open source implementations won't be supported as well as proprietary ones. Okraglik insists that this is not the case, and that a number of avenues are open to enterprise customers when deciding how their implementation is going to be supported.

"Open source software enables customers to effectively support their own applications assuming that they are willing to invest in training or recruiting staff that are familiar with both the relevant open source products and the modus operandi of open source communities. The open source community itself offers a rapid and authoritative avenue of support and although it requires some knowledge of how to access this global community of experts this knowledge is easily acquired. It is interesting to compare this to the support offered by vendors of proprietary software - try getting on the phone to Oracle or Microsoft and asking for support.

Unless you are a significant customer with buying power you are unlikely to achieve rapid and satisfactory issue resolution.

"Companies such as HotMagna, and many others, will provide support for customers that have deployed open source solutions. Although we only provide support for solutions that HotMagna builds there are other companies around that offer more generalised support for a variety of open source products and technologies. These companies include commercial companies such as JBoss and MySQL which offer both free and licensed versions depending on user need.

"There are an increasing number of multinational companies that bundle and support open source products. Sun Microsystem's Java Desktop System (JDS) is one of these. Novell and IBM also have offerings in this vein. Red Hat is a well known Linux distribution that provides customers with varying levels of support depending on their need and, of course, the amount they wish to spend.

"The fact that there are a variety of models and support options available and emerging for open source is itself one of its great strengths. Instead of the proprietary one model fits all open source offers choices that suit how customers wish to operate."

*An in-depth look at HotMagna's implementation at Toll Transport will appear in the July/August issue of IDM.

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