Wipro, one of the top India-based IT services providers, said it has seen good potential and traction for open source software among its enterprise customers.
The company, which announced a 2.7% quarter-on-quarter rise in its dollar revenue for the September quarter today, mentioned open source adoption as one of the key trends it is seeing in the market.
KR Sanjiv, Wipro’s head of Analytics & Information Management unit, said clients are increasingly warming to open-source based solutions when dealing with big data.
Open source solutions such as those based on Hadoop and Cassandra (contributed by Facebook) compete with proprietary software from the likes of SAP and Oracle.
Several young companies such as Cloudera, Hortenworks and Mapper have packaged open source software in this area and offer their ‘stacks’ to enterprises. Wipro said it in turn uses these offerings and ‘hardens’ them to offer to its clients.
“One of the key areas in which we see open source getting traction is in the data space,” Sanjiv said.
“We see a lot of our customers interested in starting initatives in deploying platforms like Hadoop, Cassandra and a lot of Hadoop-family-based solutions within their IT space. We see a lot of pilots today.”
Wipro also sees traction for open source solutions in integration and analytics.
“We also see a lot of integration tools playing in this space. A lot of product vendors have come up and providing value in terms of bringing together various data systems to destination systems,” Sanjiv said.
He also said that a lot of traditional open source technologies like System R are making inroads into the analytical space, especially in the core statistical modelling space. “We see a fair amount of adoption happening today,” Sanjiv said.
Wipro also said that the rise of open source software in enterprise does not dilute the margin of services providers like itself, which usually focus on deploying, customizing and maintaining enterprise software.
“Surprisingly, our realization on open source is surprisingly higher than what we get in others,” TK Kurien, Wipro’s CEO, said.
He also said Wipro will not be interested in packaging and branding open source software like Cloudera or Hortonworks does. “We make more money in the customization part than in the core,” he said.