Open source saves money. Less money spent on complex sales cycle, more effort going in bottom up innovation, it has clearly won the hearts and minds of implementors in IT food chain. What has traditionally been difficult was to conclusively win this debate at the ’suit’ level. CFOs had their concerns, in some cases valid, about putting $ value on open source software. Whereas CIOs were worried about not getting sufficient support and infrequent fuds about legal challenges associated with code ownership.

Over time open source industry has neutralized lot of these objections. With IT forces converging from different angles - social computing, SaaS, cloud computing and open source, debate is now going back to cost. This time open source has definite advantage. Deployment advantages provided by cloud computing has lessened, to great extent, legal and support concerns expressed by executives.

CFO magazine’s recent article titled ‘Open Secret’ is surprisingly positive on consistent open source growth. Magazine’s core audience is mostly bean counters so don’t be surprised if CFOs chime in during project evaluation - ‘Have we looked at open source solution?”. That will be a big win for open source adoption.

Also statements like these influence the overall evaluation process:

SugarCRM will cost us about 65 percent less then other name-brand solutions that we evaluated - Dean Manzoori, senior vice president of service delivery and technical operations at Broadcore

thanks to the absence of licensing fees, Alfresco consistently quotes prices 90 percent lower than those of its proprietary rivals - Matt Asay

If you are facing difficulty getting finance to approve your budget. Send them this CFO article and also migrate to open source.  Be a hero in recessionary times!