 Hundreds
of Thousands of InstallationsMy
clients are looking for ways to cut costs in
this economy without constraining their
growth. One of the biggest opportunities
that I see is to deploy fee software
applications that get the job done but
at no initial licensing cost. Open source
products like OpenOffice, ThumberBird, and
Zoho, offer immediate returns on
productivity application licensing. Instead
of paying thousands of dollars in licensing
expenses to keep up with their new
employees, some of my clients are connecting
their team without incremental costs. Even
one of my clients has turned off their
servers to run entirely off free
Internet-based services!
Thinking
Creatively and Managing Risk
The small business should always
evaluate the relative risk of software, but
over the last five years, the risk of using
open source solutions has greatly
diminished. Many of these products have gone
main-stream. The challenge is to manage the
risk while thinking creatively about doing
things a new way. If your team is
comfortable with learning new software, and
you're looking to save a few bucks in
exchange for a small learning curve, then
going "open" might be for you!
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