No one should be surprised to find Sun's VP of Software Infrastructure Marketing Mark Herring urging users to take a look at the proprietary solutions they are currently running with an eye to seeing whether an open source alternative would do as well for less money. And he has a point.

For instance, take the success T-Mobile is having with GlassFish: "High availability allows us to meet our stringent uptime requirements and the Sun GlassFish Enterprise Server enables us to cost-effectively deploy new services while meeting our performance and availability requirements," reports Erez Yarkoni, vice president, T-Mobile, USA.

Herring reminds his readers of another aspect of proprietary solutions in addition to excessive cost: vendor lock-in. This allows the vendor to charge whatever the traffic will bear, he reminds us.

And all of this inhibits the adoption of new software initiatives, he observes. Furthermore, "the capital expenditures and associated financial risk required to deploy proprietary products can either delay the profitability gains of new software initiatives or simply prevent enterprises from attempting innovative ideas to drive new revenue streams," he blogs.

Herring cites the example of using proprietary products from BEA Systems/Oracle, which are far more expensive to acquire than open-source alternatives and don't even offer enterprise developers the flexibility to customize to fit their particular business's changing needs. The strength of the open source community pays off when more than just a few employees of a particular vendor are at work on a solution but rather an entire community. Rollout time is reduced dramatically, Herring notes.

As Herring puts it, "to ensure that problems can be addressed as quickly as possible and to reduce operational costs, enterprises can chose a comprehensive open-source platform backed by an established commercial entity that provides support and understands the interdependencies not only of that platform but of other third-party products that are already in the enterprise's IT infrastructure."

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