Earlier this month, Rachael King at BusinessWeek ran a story, “Cost-Conscious Companies Turn to Open-Source Software.” The story compares our current recession-driven IT budget crunch to the tech bubble burst, and examines how some large businesses have, and continue to, test out and implement various flavors of open source software to work around shrinking tech budgets.
One of the companies adopting open source is E*Trade. The article kicks off:
“In 2001 and 2002, the online stock trading company shrank its tech budget by one-third. “We had to go through and figure out every penny that we were spending…and make alternatives to reduce those costs,” says Thompson, vice-president and chief technologist of E*Trade (ETFC). So he began using software that can be downloaded at no cost via the Internet. By the end of 2002, he was saving $13 million a year thanks to use of these freely available applications known as open-source software, and the fact that he could run that software on less expensive hardware.” (more…)
Filed under: Marketcetera, open-source | 2 Comments »
