How to tackle cost-cutting in IT due to Recession..
Posted by Dnyanraj on November 3, 2008
Whole world is facing problems due recession in IT field. IT companies, IT professionals, IT students, share brokers, investors, IT dependent services & industries are going through hard time. Everywhere we can see cost cutting these days.
In India, things are better in product companies than service companies. I heard there is cost cutting in all possible things like employee salary, canteen, AC, electricity usage, extra resources(human), hiring freshers instead of high paying employees, unproductive people, stationary usage ( even i heard some companies are doing cost cutting in toilet papers ).
But what is the way to do tackle this problem?? Is this type of cost cutting is the solution to tackle this problem..? of course not.. What companies should really do is to start using Open Source products, which will save lots of money forever.. There are very good Free & Open Source products available in market which are better than proprietary products & still much cheaper than them. Only thing is people either do not know about these products or they have some misunderstandings about them. e.g. Linux (a Free & Open Source Operating System), people still think that Linux is very hard to use, it does not have a good GUI etc.. but fact is Compiz & Beryl (3D Desktop) in Linux can do many more things than other operating systems in its class.
There are many other Free & Open Source softwares which can be used for PMS (Project Management System), CRM (Customer Relation Management), CMS (Content Management System), Office suite, Email Clients, Messengers etc. These are available for free, they can be customized with respect to requirement & industry type. They are Free to distribute, tied under GPL licensing.
There is ample help available over internet about this, there are lot many consultants who can help in using and implementing Free & Open Source softwares.
So, if Companies, Educational Institutes, Banks, Government, Schools etc. in a developing country like India can switch to Free & Open Source softwares, a large amount of money can be saved & invested into some meaningful R&D.
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Sue Massey said
Nice writing style. I look forward to reading more in the future.
ashish said
Good post regarding good issue.
Regarding open source, there was documentation available since long.
But in countries like India, very few people(end user) will go through that. Providing quality software is not the solution, we have to train them how to use that. People need some responsible entity that will provide support after words as it is new for them. I know some in Pune and in other cities. but still requires more.
People are getting trained for MS office and windows applications through programs like MS-CIT in India, which produces large no. of windows users. So the efforts should be taken at that level to improve user database and course syllabus for government curses.