Succeeding with Open Source

Executive Summary

To this point, we have assessed a product's maturity by looking at the product itself and at how it can integrate into an organization's software stack. In this chapter, we turn our focus away from product-specific elements to focus on an increasingly important factor in software implementation: professional services.

Many IT organizations rely extensively on professional services organizations. They are used if the organization does not have sufficient resources to implement a project or lacks specific technical skills. Today, many IT organizations have moved to being very lean in terms of headcount; for them, using services firms is not a temporary engagement but is, instead, a way of keeping running expenses down.

In locating ...