“Finally, take the entire organization into account. While a specific open-source project may not offer great ROI, the cost benefits of pioneer applications often materialize downstream in later projects that are able to adopt the open-source package. Even if you purchase enterprise licenses for your commercial products so that your marginal cost for a new application is effectively zero, keep in mind that someday, when those licenses are up for renewal, that marginal cost may be much higher.”

We have seen many of our clients continually expand their use of open-source well beyond their initial project concept. For example, one corporate client started out to create a site to hold images of example shelve set ups. Over several years their intranet site has expanded to do team scheduling, track store status, and enable internal communications, and recently they have started to use .LRN to deliver online training for their employees using SCORM compliant content.

Los Angeles Unified School District has been using ACS for many years in an ever growing facilities management website and are now expanding to use OpenACS to manage documents, integrate with a propriety ticketing system (Maximo) and perform registration for training.

It can be difficult for an organization to put applications that they do not yet know they need into an ROI calculation; however, most dynamic organizations have evolving needs and the ability to meet new needs cost effectively is an extremely compelling argument for using an open-source platform.