Businesses, no matter the size or sector, are feeling the pressure of producing secure, reliable and scalable software – fast
This is an essential component of business transformation, enabling them to remain relevant in fast changing marketplaces and under our current climate, businesses must pivot faster than ever before. Open source is at the heart of business transformation, enabling organisations to innovate at speed and scale.
Open source enables innovation
The organisations that are most effectively speeding up business transformation are those who have turned to open source software development to succeed in a fast changing, digital world. As businesses embrace open source best practices and bring those within the corporate firewall, a practice called ‘innersourcing’, they become more efficient by building on existing code, and focusing on solving new challenges, reducing duplicate efforts, breaking down barriers and achieving faster collaboration, so teams can share skills and ideas across the entire organisation and drive innovation at speed.
This is changing the way organisations build technology, bringing teams and departments together to enable faster, more secure development. A new breed of innovative companies has emerged––that give back to open source as much, if not more, than they consume it themselves––enabling any organisation to ‘stand on the shoulders of giants’ by building on leading edge software projects developed by the best.
Open source secures innovation
Security is at the top of the agenda for businesses driving transformation, that’s why partnering with an organisation that provides tools and processes to allow businesses to code securely throughout the entire software development lifecycle, is key. By following secure coding practices and fixing vulnerabilities when they are discovered, everyone collaborating on open source helps minimise vulnerable targets, making hacking more difficult and less profitable. A safe and healthy open source community isn’t just good for open source, it benefits the millions of critical technologies that depend on it.
Embracing open source, also delivers softer benefits that are just as critical to speeding up business transformation. It enables cultural change, boosting collaboration within the organisation. This creates an environment where creative thinking is encouraged and innovation becomes a reality – leading to better technology solutions and more fulfilled teams. In fact, GitHub and IDC found that there is an intrinsic link between developer happiness and better software development – a win for everyone.
Open source attracts top talent
Organisations that attract the best developer talent will be better placed to excel at transformation initiatives. The good news is that adopting open source and contributing to the community also enables organisations to access, recruit and retain the best talent. This is not just a nice-to-have – there is commercial impact at stake. The difference between an average and a high-end DevOps team can result in real-world productivity gains of between three and ten percent. This in turn can yield double-digit investment savings by accelerating transformation processes by up to 20-30 percent.
Open source can help organisations of all sizes and sectors to speed up their business transformation. Those that embrace open source practices, will be on the front foot when it comes to software innovation and will be the best placed to navigate the next wave of business disruption and transformation, leveraging open source.
About the Author
Kai Hilton-Jones is Senior Director, Solutions Engineering, EMEA at GitHub. GitHub is the best place to share code with friends, co-workers, classmates, and complete strangers. Over 31 million people use GitHub to build amazing things together across 97+ million repositories. With all the collaborative features of GitHub, it has never been easier for individuals and teams to write faster, better code.
