Open source for the Small Business

I have entered the IT consulting arena. As I am reaching out to many young firms I continue to see the same things. Even well seasoned professionals that should know better continue to fall into the firefighting mode, and put in solutions that are half baked and not scalable.

It is possible to put in robust solutions that are inexpensive, but you have to build in that capability up front. I have seen examples of this recently in the open source world. Many small business look to open source to provide low cost alternatives to commercial packages. The trade off with open source is usually in the support it takes to configure and maintain .

Often times a poorly configured open source tool becomes a nightmare for support and the tech(s) spend all of there time keeping these low cost tools afloat. I am a large advocate of open source and thing that it provides great alternatives for the small business, but with the total cost of ownership, it is not always the cheapest option.