Open Source Solutions: Services Overview

It can speed time to market and deliver substantially lower licensing and maintenance costs than other approaches. Open source software offers comparable features and quality as well as greater deployment flexibility, enabling a more expansive use in enterprise applications.

While the advantages are real, organizations pursuing open source must ensure proper safeguards are in place to address the unique challenges it presents—including integration, IT support and system interdependencies.

As organizations implement OSS within the enterprise as part of a continuous effort to improve business and technology operations, they should aim to professionalize open source adoption, dissemination and management by focusing on effective open source solution stacks and governance structures. Accenture has developed tools and methodologies that deliver these solutions quickly and with substantial cost savings over some proprietary alternatives.

Through the Accenture Innovation Center for Open Source, we provide a broad range of assets and offerings around open source solutions, including migration and substitution solutions, governance frameworks and software solution stacks.

To receive Accenture’s latest insights directly, sign up for My Outlook, Accenture’s bi-weekly newsletter that is personalized based on your business and industry interests.

Return to Open Source Solutions home page

Accenture Open Source Software Solution
Large IT organizations need a professional approach to effectively implement and manage open source. The Accenture Open Source Software Solution helps businesses and governments achieve high performance through open source by reducing infrastructure and licensing costs as well as increasing flexibility and control. It includes the following elements:

• Substitution and Migration Solution—A comprehensive approach to planning and executing open source infrastructure migrations for new or existing applications, replacing proprietary technologies with open source equivalents
  
  
• Governance Framework—Methods and tools for defining how to select, control and manage open source to achieve high performance.
  
  
• Software Solution Stacks—Pre-packaged architectures and systems that can be used to jump-start OSS project development faster and more cost-effectively than traditional methods.
  
  

Migrating Infrastructure to Open Source
The Substitution and Migration Solution helps organizations capture and maximize the value of implementing OSS. It provides a comprehensive approach to planning and executing open source infrastructure migrations, beginning with open source application servers and databases. By starting the open source journey with application infrastructure migration, Accenture helps ensure that organizations are securely positioned to realize significant bottom-line benefits and achieve high performance through OSS:

• Clearly-articulated return on investment.
  
  
• Reduced costs for development, operations and maintenance environments.
  
  
• Improved support and faster time to problem resolution.
  
  
• Increased flexibility to accommodate diverse operating environments and technology components.
  
  
• Better performance from reuse of common infrastructure components.
  
  
• Secure, continuous, dependable and reliable service based on improved open source engineering.
  
  

Establishing Proper Governance
Organizations often underestimate their need for effective open source governance. Given the issues that OSS can present, establishing proper governance frameworks can prevent and repair costly and time-consuming pitfalls. Our Governance Framework helps organizations assess, define and implement appropriate open source governance structures in four main categories:

• Management—Brings disparately-collected open source technologies out from “under the radar” and into the scope of IT maintenance and support.
  
  
• Licensing—Identifies and coordinates interdependent licenses to prevent violations and IP leakage.
  
  
• Security—Increases an organization’s application security and version controls.
  
  
• Policy—Defines and establishes practical, enforceable policies around OSS use and management.
  
  

Proven Software Solution Stacks
Accenture delivers proven software solution stacks—pre-packaged architectures and systems that can be used to jump-start OSS project development faster and more cost-effectively than traditional methods. In the context of our Migration and Substitution Solution and Governance Framework, we offer solutions in the following areas, with more in development at the Innovation Center:

• Service-Oriented Architecture
• Portal
• Content Management (CMS)
• Business Intelligence
• Server Virtualization
• Open Desktop
  
  

The Accenture Foundation Platform for Java ™ is a rich and integrated software execution framework, tooling environment and development process that answers challenges common to OSS by standardizing resources, reducing IT costs and speeding software development. It integrates leading OSS frameworks and tools into a powerful, end-to-end software development platform—an “architecture in a box”—that lets organizations focus less on Java technical infrastructure and more on rapid development of business solutions, reducing overall development costs by 10 to 25 percent.

The Accenture Public Service Platform is based on a service-oriented architecture foundation with open source components. Combining commercial as well as open source application components enables updating and replacement with minimal impact, lowering technology and management costs and improving service delivery.