There has been a shift in the direction of public sector IT…..there had to be.

It is no longer feasible to spend more than £100k on licensing an ETL tool, finding yourself contractually and emotionally bound by that investment. Still now, proprietary solutions are being under used and over spent. Software is sitting on the shelf and organisations feel obliged to utilise that software rather than looking elsewhere….why? ….because its there …..oh and the 22% maintenance fees.

There has been a wave of government strategies and agendas recently. G Cloud changes how government procures, IT becoming more ‘flexible, modern and better value’ according to Francis Maude (let us forget his jerry can remarks….)

He goes on to say “The easiest way to think of cloud is as the IT equivalent of a Boris bike – pay for what you need when you need it, and forget about costly ongoing maintenance that you can live without”

Open Source solutions has been already pushed as an IT strategy for Public Sector with Pentaho and Talend singled out as recommended technologies for Business Intelligence. Liam Maxwell has previously stated that ‘Open Source is the future model for Delivering IT’

The strategy is to branch out from what Maxwell called “black-box” contracts involving big IT vendors to more agile systems delivered by small and medium sized enterprises

“For years we spent on IT systems built for bureaucrats, they were not built for people,”

As in my previous blog, more organisations are using open source technologies and experiencing a drastically reduced total cost of ownership, faster ROI, improved quality, bug fixing & reliability.

So, as the only UK based SME Pentaho reseller and Talend reseller with a division focused on Public Sector, we are the best placed to help develop the following:

• open source business analytics
• open source ETL and Data Integration
• open source reporting
• open source dashboards
• open source scorecards
• opens source SaaS
• Open Source BI Cloud

By Scott, Voodoo IS

scott.cunliffe@voodoo-is.com