– Luis Sala, senior director of product marketing and cloud computing at Alfresco Software (www.alfresco.com), says:
Small and medium businesses can most definitely benefit from leveraging open source technologies. The most obvious benefit is cost of acquisition, even with commercially supported open source offerings, their licensing & support costs are dramatically lower than proprietary products.
Open source technologies have been “moving up the stack” over the last few years starting with the core operating system (Linux) to programming languages, application servers and runtimes to full-fledged applications such as content management, CRM and BI. These all offer great potential to the SMB by commoditizing the marketplace that they’re addressing and introducing much-needed competition thereby providing SMBs with high-quality solutions at low costs.
