Tim Churches wrote:
ManyI think this is a unique new strategy to examine in more detail. Essentially what Tim is saying is that if Big Projects (independent) of their IT departments, invested a relatively small amount in a, perhaps risky, venture enterprise, that if successful would not only provide risk mitigation (or insurance) but would also lower future costs even if a vendor solution gets the go ahead.
projects allocate much more for risk management, not to mention 10% for
unspecified contingencies.
Treat it as risky investment with high payoff potential. The more people who invest, the greater the likelyhood of a payoff.
One might even be able to get government seed funding for such an investment as well.
It's interesting to look at recent actions the German government took to encourage an open source alternative to Microsoft Exchange. They provided contracts to three commercial companies to develop the product. These companies used existing open source tools and created a new KDE based project and are ready to release their Exchange replacement into testing this year! This development took less than a year!
