The current market scenario puts greater emphasis on controlling operational costs while maintaining and even exceeding quality and performance expectations. Very few solutions and systems have been able to capture the essence of both these crucial parameters the way Open Source Solutions have. Applications and solutions on Open Source platforms enable a full range of functionality, have a rich feature set and compare favorably with their licensed contemporaries.
For your digital business, here are a few ways in which Open Source Solutions (OSS) help you deliver true tactical value –
1. High Degree of Customer Engagement – For any business, the degree to which its employees gel with each other is a key success factor. In order to encourage this theme using technology, there is no better option than going Open Source. Liferay is one such Open Source Stack that helps to maintain your knowledge and innovation resources in a central location for further use.
For us at CIGNEX, customer engagement is central to our focus and energies and quite a few projects demonstrate the value we added in this context. Our recent client engagement with a leading provider of Risk Management, Insurance and HR solutions is a case in point in this direction, where we used Liferay and its integration with Cognos BI, Taleo, SAP and amCharts, to deliver a high performance and personalized HR portal. It provided a single point of document reference and policies access for all HR related functions such as benefits and payroll. Since it was deployed as a SaaS on the cloud, it provided a substantial reduction in operational and maintenance costs.
2. Improve Sales and Revenues – With cutting edge modern technologies built on OSS stack, it becomes very easy to replace legacy systems. By harnessing the benefits offered by Open Source Solutions, your business can increase revenues and maintain a competitive advantage in the face of changing market trends and preferences.
A good illustration of this benefit was seen in CIGNEX’ recent project for a global manufacturer and supplier of premium liquid and powder coatings where we used Liferay and Magento to help migrate 3 different legacy systems into a single, unified platform. The strategy focused on providing a global, unified, and personalized e-commerce interface. This meant a seamless migration of data on 5000+ products across 34000+ users that resulted in an average of 7.2 million transactions a month. As a result, the new platform not only bolstered top lines by 4x with engaging UX experience, but its low cost of operations and elimination of licensing costs enhanced bottom lines.
3. Boost Operational Efficiencies – OSS helps enterprises gain a tremendous boost in operational productivity and also improves efficiencies. CIGNEX’ has proved this with its recent Alfresco based Enterprise Content Management (ECM) project for a Singapore based Financial Services company to automate procurement & contract systems. We not only helped the client migrate 5000+ legacy contract documents but also enabled a central document asset repository for its 14000 employees spread across 14 countries. As a result, productivity jumped up by 500% and country specific compliance was enabled.
4. Accelerate Innovation – An implementation of the OSS in the form of an innovation portal based on Liferay can help foster innovative practices within the organization. A case in point is CIGNEX’ use of live streaming (Wowza), rich user interface (OpenInviter), SSO (Siteminder) and strong database (MySQL to Oracle migration) on Liferay platform, which helped a Fortune 50 Banking & Financial company to increase intranet collaboration and sharing of ideas. As an outcome, the client saw a 100% increase in the number of ideas submitted in just six months of release. Additionally, this solution came at a much lower cost and lesser maintenance.
The last few years have seen a massive jump in Open Source adoption by enterprises in the startup, mid-size and enterprise categories. As the demand for Open Source Solutions keeps increasing, software service providers will be forced to deliver tangible business advantage to enterprises that will result either in cost reduction, an increase in revenue or boost innovation or all of the above. We have a healthy portfolio of 500+ Open Source Enterprise implementations that help our clients grow exponentially and attract better business worldwide. Click here to learn more about the achieved business advantages offered by us in the Open Source space.
