Open source has come a long way since its nascent days in the late 80s. Technology stalwarts like IBM and Microsoft are embracing open source like never before. IBM’s acquisition of Red Hat for $34 billion or Microsoft’s acquisition of Citus Data very well prove that the open source game has upped.
Open source has had a tremendous impact on the business world, owing to the cost advantages and agility that it provides in supporting business initiatives. Few of the reasons why open source became main stream:

• Desire to make the world a better place, at least the technology world. When the code is made freely available, the quality is bound to be better because your code is going to get more eyeballs.
• Source code is freely available which gives developers the flexibility and liberty to customize per their requirements. A word of caution here, with freedom comes the responsibility to maintain that code.
• Open source is safer and reliable. The code gets reviewed by many developers and architects from various parts of the world who are solving a wide variety of problems in their own capacity. The vision for an open source product is not driven by a few business minded individuals but by a group of individuals who are passionate about solving problem in the best possible way.
• Cost effective: This is probably the biggest advantage that open source brings to enterprises which are rapidly being challenged on the cost front. Millions of dollars are no longer locked-in, freeing up capital for additional investments in growing your business. Open source provides the flexibility to suit your rapidly changing business needs.

Needless to say, Southeast Asia (SEA) is abuzz with the adoption of open source. Ashnik along with MongoDB recently hosted an evening of drinks and networking in Singapore at ‘The Exchange’ bar, where we saw a healthy ‘exchange’ of ideas with the attendees :)
MongoDB is being touted as the next generation database – be it on-premise or on multi-cloud. MongoDB is being adopted rapidly by banks, insurance and e-commerce companies for their mission critical workloads. In SEA, we are noticing a huge adoption of MongoDB across insurance companies, telcos, and government agencies for their flagship initiatives. This reflects a changing trend in adoption of open source. I believe the following trends will have the biggest impact in the times to come:

• Enterprise open source companies becoming big: As open source adoption becomes widespread amongst enterprises, enterprise open source will gain prominence. After all, that is how money is going to be made in the world of open source. 2018 saw the likes of Elastic, MongoDB, Mulesoft and Cloudera going the IPO way and the momentum is expected to continue in the times to come.
• Big role in the Big Data world: As the volume of data grows and the nature of data becomes unpredictable, organizations are increasingly going to face the challenge of storing and managing that data. Did you know – open source technologies are going to be the fastest means to meet those demands. Hadoop, MongoDB, EDB Postgres are already making big inroads into this space.
• XaaS gains prominence: XaaS stands for anything being delivered as a service on the internet rather than ownership. Although, Software as a service (SaaS), platform as a service (PaaS) and infrastructure as a service (IaaS) has witnessed widespread adoption, newer models like network as a service (NaaS), container as a service (CaaS) and function as a service (FaaS) are now becoming increasingly popular. The as-a-service model has completely revolutionized businesses like Uber and AirBnB. All this will be driven by open source technologies which provides the business its required agility and innovation.

As we step our foot into 2019, we at Ashnik, are prepping ourselves for another year full of innovations and transformations. If you are looking at expertise in Enterprise open source technologies, we would be glad to have a chat with you.