Open Technology - Disruptive Innovation in Technology

Disruptive innovation is the introduction of new technologies, products or services in an effort to promote change and gain advantage over the competition. In the enterprise, disruptive innovation can be risky because it requires employees to embrace a radically different approach to product development or marketing mix, often a product of out of the box thinking.

Modern examples of disruptive innovation include the development of mobile cellular telephones, digital cameras and e-book readers – at the backbone of many of these developments- Open Technology has been the key player.

What if a real estate agent sold you a house under the condition that you had to arrange the furniture in a certain way or the house would fall apart? Or what if a car salesman sold you a car that you were only allowed to drive on certain roads or the car would fail? Doesn’t it sound crazy?

These artificial constraints are similar to the ones proprietary software vendors impose on customers.

You can buy their software but you must install it on certain premise running on certain type of server and operating system. These artificial restrictions are designed to benefit the company and not the customer.

SugarCRM a giant in business customer relations management adopted Open Technology method.

SugarCRM thought why not write our product in public and distribute it through an open source license? Individuals and companies would be free to evaluate and use Sugar Community Edition without restriction. If users decide they want advanced functionality, professional support and product extensions, they can engage with SugarCRM when they are ready for a commercial relationship. This Commercial Open Source model shortens the costly and time-consuming enterprise sales cycle while allocating more toward engineering (almost half their company is part of R&D).

That is why, in just two years, Sugar Open Source Technolgy has been downloaded over 1,000,000 times and translated into over 75 languages. Over 400 complements and extensions to Sugar Community Edition have been contributed by our user community.

Red Hat Software Linux, Mozilla (Netscape browser core), Apache (Web server), PERL (Web scripting language) and PNG (graphics file format) are all examples of very popular software that is based on open source Technology.

Facebook and Whatsapp also remind me of a classic example who have used open technology to rule the roost.

Facebook looks and feels like a single application, like Microsoft Word or Adobe Photoshop. Facebook engineers built these applications using a wide range of programming languages, by picking a language that matches the requirements of each project, but it creates new challenges when it comes time to sync all these tools together and to ensure they can all communicate.

To solve this issue, Facebook built a tool called Thrift, a means of managing communications between all its various applications.

The social networking giant released Thrift as an open source project back in 2007, and it’s now used by several other web outfits, ranging from Twitter to Evernote to Last.fm. It’s a prime example of how open technology has helped collaborate an entire generation of web services.

On the similar lines WhatsApp - a chatting application for mobile phones has been developed from the early days using open source software. WhatsApp engineers use, contribute to and release a lot of open source codes, which in return have enabled them to amongst the top instant messaging vendors. Anyone with a modern smart phone can download the WhatsApp application and start chatting with other people who have the WhatsApp application installed.

Let us not forget we also use Open Technology in our day to day tasks and also in work. I have in person been working on many open source technologies. We are an IT solution providing company and many of our projects are based out of India, we use a lot of Open Source technologies in our day to day activities like SKYPE and Jabber to communicate with our business users and project team members situated globally, Join Me to share screens in group meeting calls which is very crucial to get an clear understanding of what is been actually discussed and also to train users globally. We as a business analysts have to create a lot of wireframes for our projects – Pencil is used widely, Google Code Playground which enables us, designers and developers to reuse the code and fiddle around with codes has been an innovative and creative tool. And there are lot more Open Technology tools and software which we use in our companies since they are free and also enable one to be flexible.

Let me also list another best in its field Open Technology user example – Joomla and Drupal an award-winning content management system (CMS), which enables you to build Web sites and powerful online applications. Many aspects, including its ease-of-use and extensibility, have made Joomla and Drupal the most popular Web site software available.

Most of the leading companies now share important parts of their underlying infrastructure in an effort to improve the way they work — and speed the development of the company as a whole.

I couldn’t agree more why Open Technology shouldn’t be considered as Disruptive Innovation in Technology, it definitely helps any company, business or process to top the charts and put the others behind or even redundant with its features that come attached with it:

• Lesser hardware costs
• High-quality software
• No vendor lock-in
• Integrated management
• Simple license management
• Lower software costs
• Abundant support
• Scaling and consolidation

Most of the leading companies now share important parts of their underlying infrastructure in any effort to improve the way they work — and speed the development of the business as a whole. Businesses that make money using open technology include:

MySQL (now owned by Oracle): Popular relational database

Red Hat: Major distributor of Linux for server and desktop use

WordPress: Widely used blogging platform

Magento: E-commerce shopping platform

Zimbra: E-mail and messaging server

About Author:

Padma Nambi is a consultant in Systems Plus Pvt. Ltd. Within Systems Plus, she actively contributes to the areas of Technology and Information Security. She can be contacted at padma.n@spluspl.com