1Tech guest speaker at ApacheCon 2015

1Tech are presenting at ApacheCon 2015 in Texas, USA on April 2015 on best practice design and development with OfBiz. The presentation brief is as follows:
 
Get a jump-start on your next Apache OFBiz project. Learn from an experienced OFBiz contributor how to avoid some common mistakes. Not just for beginners, this presentation draws from more than 10 years of OFBiz experience, looking at time-tested solutions that work! Topics include: 
1) Common getting started problems 
2) Common customization problems 
3) Common design problems 
4) Common integration problems
 
You can view the topic of presentation below. Please visit:
 
http://apacheconna2015.sched.org/event/a85d106de4fa4743baf5ee72a205a9af?iframe=no&w=i:100;&sidebar=yes&bg=no#.VO4VQvmsXNK 
 

Open Source ERP transforms ROI

Enterprise Resource Planning systems share three main characteristics:

  • They are multi-functional, spanning a range of business activities
  • They are integrated, so that functions communicate with one another and share underlying data
  • They are modular, allowing selected elements to be implemented and the progressive adoption of additional modules

 

The Business Case

The majority of large and medium-to-large organisations have already adopted or have plans to adopt an ERP system. This is not surprising, as most organisations can expect a Return on Investment (ROI) of between 100% and 400% from ERP projects, making them strong candidates compared with most other initiatives. However, ERP systems have frequently proved difficult to implement and invariably require significant investment, even though potential returns are high. It is important to recognise and manage the risks involved by controlling costs and maximising the probability of success.
 

Proprietary v Open Source

Vendors such as SAP, Oracle, PeopleSoft and Microsoft have tended to dominate the market for ERP systems. However, the costs associated with the implementation of these systems have frequently far exceeded expectations and in many cases have outstripped the return. In a survey conducted by Nucleus Research, only 46% of SAP adopters achieved a positive ROI with an average payback period of 46 months.
 
 

Open Source solutions can dramatically reduce the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) of an ERP system, typically by as much as one third, whilst achieving at least the same benefits. 

With zero licence fees and no obligation for expensive, annual support contracts, an Open Source approach significantly reconfigures the cost profile of ERP implementation. To read the interesting facts and benefits further you can download the full article Read More

1Tech's new Liferay professional services certification

1Tech and Liferay agree a partnership to deliver certified Liferay professional services to our clients. Being a certified service partner means that 1Tech hold a minimum of 5 certified Liferay developers and systems administrators in our portal practice.

 

Liferay Service Partners (US and International) provide a full offering of Liferay Portal professional services and support around the world. 1Tech are a Liferay certified Service Partner providing Liferay expertise in the UK, Europe and Middle East region.

 

Liferay (http://www.liferay.com) is 1Tech’s preferred open source portal solution. Liferay is the leading open source
portal based on the JEE platform with over 60 portlets out of the box and the most innovative technologies to let you do everything from web publishing, to building an intranet, to simply getting the right documents and applications to the right people.
1Tech are able to leverage many previous experiences of implementing open source portals. 1Tech are a certified Liferay services partner ensuring high quality and cost effective delivery of open source portal solutions.

 

1Tech have delivered over 100 Liferay implementations to our clients in over 12 years. You can view our partnership credentials at Liferay's partner section.

UK Government - Open Source Strategy

Open source software continues to bring new innovations into the software industry with the latest trends in Big Data likely to have one of the most significant impacts on technology developments given the support in this area of leading vendors such as Oracle, IBM and Microsoft. While  many other countries have seen significant support from their own governments, the UK has seen mixed signals. It seems that this is all about to change.
 
In a recent development, the UK Gov is also going to start buying open source from SMEs. Liam Maxwell, Cabinet Office director of ICT futures, told the audience at the Intellect 2012 conference that open source has grown up and it's time to dispel lingering misconceptions about this technology and development process.
 
Maxwell said: “Open source software is not three guys in a shed anymore. There are a lot of misconceptions about open source but open source is the future model for delivering IT.”
 
Underscoring the government’s interest in open source Maxwell said that recently he'd accompanied Cabinet Office minister Frances Maude, overseeing the government's digital transition, on a tour of Silicon Valley tech companies working with open source and big data – Cloudera, specializing in the Google-inspired Hadoop data munching framework, and MongoDB specialist 10Gen. Maxwell also introduced his ministerial boss to cloud software infrastructure specialist Joyent and eBay's payment arm PayPal.
 
“We have a minister who really gets this," Maxwell said. "That's where the future is moving. It's moving to a new model of service and delivery, it's big data and big data is going to be open source. We are going to spend a lot of time looking into that. If we move to being one common government we need open source,” he further added.
 
The idea is to move away from what Maxwell called “black-box” contracts involving big IT vendors to more agile systems delivered by small and medium sized enterprises. The thinking seems to be SME equals open source and open standards, while big means the same old proprietary vendors, reports The Register.

10 Reasons Open Source is Good for Business

With the many business and government organizations that now use open source software such as Linux, it's becoming increasingly clear that price is not the only advantage such software holds. If it were, companies that adopted it during the Great Recession would surely have switched back to the expensive proprietary stuff as soon as conditions began to ease, and that's clearly not the case.
 
Rather, free and open source software (FOSS) holds numerous other compelling advantages for businesses, some of them even more valuable than the software's low price. Need a few examples? Let's start counting.
 
1. Security
 
It's hard to think of a better testament to the superior security of open source software than the recent discovery by Coverity of a number of defects in the Android kernel. What's so encouraging about this discovery, as I noted the other day, is that the only reason it was possible is that the kernel code is open to public view.
 
Android may not be fully open source, but the example is still a perfect illustration of what's known as "Linus' Law," named for Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux. According to that maxim, "Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow." What that means is that the more people who can see and test a set of code, the more likely any flaws will be caught and fixed quickly. It's essentially the polar opposite of the "security through obscurity" argument used so often to justify the use of expensive proprietary products, in other words.
 
Does the absence of such flaw reports about the code of the iPhone or Windows mean that such products are more secure? Far from it--quite the opposite, you might even say.
 
All it means is that those products are closed from public view, so no one outside the companies that own them has the faintest clue how many bugs they contain. And there's no way the limited set of developers and testers within those companies can test their products as well as the worldwide community constantly scrutinizing FOSS can.
 
Bugs in open source software also tend to get fixed immediately, as in the case of the Linux kernel exploit uncovered not long ago.
 
In the proprietary world? Not so much. Microsoft, for example, typically takes weeks if not months to patch vulnerabilities such as the recently discovered Internet Explorer zero-day flaw. Good luck to all the businesses using it in the meantime.
 
2. Quality
 
Which is more likely to be better: a software package created by a handful of developers, or a software package created by thousands of developers? Just as there are countless developers and users working to improve the security of open source software, so are there just as many innovating new features and enhancements to those products.
In general, open source software gets closest to what users want because those users can have a hand in making it so. It's not a matter of the vendor giving users what it thinks they want--users and developers make what they want, and they make it well. At least one recent study has shown, in fact, that technical superiority is typically the primary reason enterprises choose open source software.
 
3. Customizability
 
Along similar lines, business users can take a piece of open source software and tweak it to suit their needs. Since the code is open, it's simply a matter of modifying it to add the functionality they want. Don't try that with proprietary software!
 
4. Freedom
 
When businesses turn to open source software, they free themselves from the severe vendor lock-in that can afflict users of proprietary packages. Customers of such vendors are at the mercy of the vendor's vision, requirements, dictates, prices, priorities and timetable, and that limits what they can do with the products they're paying for.
 
With FOSS, on the other hand, users are in control to make their own decisions and to do what they want with the software. They also have a worldwide community of developers and users at their disposal for help with that.
 
5. Flexibility
 
When your business uses proprietary software such as Microsoft Windows and Office, you are on a treadmill that requires you to keep upgrading both software and hardware ad infinitum. Open source software, on the other hand, is typically much less resource-intensive, meaning that you can run it well even on older hardware. It's up to you--not some vendor--to decide when it's time to upgrade.
 
6. Interoperability
 
Open source software is much better at adhering to open standards than proprietary software is. If you value interoperability with other businesses, computers and users, and don't want to be limited by proprietary data formats, open source software is definitely the way to go.
 
7. Auditability
 
With closed source software, you have nothing but the vendor's claims telling you that they're keeping the software secure and adhering to standards, for example. It's basically a leap of faith. The visibility of the code behind open source software, however, means you can see for yourself and be confident.
 
8. Support Options
 
Open source software is generally free, and so is a world of support through the vibrant communities surrounding each piece of software. Most every Linux distribution, for instance, has an online community with excellent documentation, forums, mailing lists, forges, wikis, newsgroups and even live support chat.
 
For businesses that want extra assurance, there are now paid support options on most open source packages at prices that still fall far below what most proprietary vendors will charge. Providers of commercial support for open source software tend to be more responsive, too, since support is where their revenue is focused.
 
9. Cost
 
Between the purchase price of the software itself, the exorbitant cost of mandatory virus protection, support charges, ongoing upgrade expenses and the costs associated with being locked in, proprietary software takes more out of your business than you probably even realize. And for what? You can get better quality at a fraction of the price.
 
10. Try Before You Buy
 
If you're considering using open source software, it will typically cost you nothing to try it out first. This is partly due to the software's free price, and partly due to the existence of LiveCDs and Live USBs for many Linux distributions, for example. No commitment required until you're sure.
 
None of this is to say, of course, that your business should necessarily use open source software for everything. But with all the many benefits it holds, you'd be remiss not to consider it seriously.
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