The Open Learning Centre

• Strategic Benefits
  • Shorter time to market for new business capabilities
  • Better application integration based on open standards
  • Ability to influence or create new features in future releases
  • Safety from vendor lock-in or abandonment
  • Open source methods and tools aid partner co-development
  • Reduced security, liability, regulatory and downtime risk
  • Usually lower acquisition costs than for proprietary software
• Financial Benefits
  • Free or "fair" software acquition cost
  • Buy or Source once and copy to every machine that needs it
  • Freedom from Vendor Lock-in upgrade fees
  • Free or low cost community support for non-mission critical services
  • FLOSS typically runs fine on older hardware reducing or delaying hardware upgrade costs
  • Rapid development of new features or bug fixes
  • Reduced Security Costs
• Performance Benefits
  • More uptime, less downtime
  • Rapid testing and deployment due to instant availability
  • Scaling (The Internet is built mainly on FLOSS)
  • Platform Independance
  • Rapid turnaround for bugs and/or security flaws.

Go to the next page for some interesting information why Open Source is better for your businesses security...