datum – an item of factual information derived from measurement or research

The key question in philosophy is “What should I do?” Business is no different but with less beards! LINUX or Microsoft? Open Source or proprietary? Web based or …. ? We can help. We have the experience, the recognition that change is the only constant. Business is not an academic exercise. What we do matters. What we do makes the difference between profit and loss, growth and stagnation. Technology and how we use it is the key question.

ICT is a dynamic industry never more so than now. Always connected smart phones means there is no escape! Open Source code – LINUX, OpenOffice, WordPress etc have changed the way business generates and maintains it’s web presence. Cost has moved from the applications and the associated licensing costs to configuration skills and design. Social media (Facebook, Twitter etc) integrated with smartphones using Android and iOS has generated a new paradigm in business connectivity. At datumIS we stay ahead of the curve and pro-actively share that knowledge with our client base.

The key issue in business strategic planning in relation to ICT is how to deploy open source based systems and how to effectively integrate smartphone technology and social media integrated into the corporate website. Why Open Source? Why Social media?

“The Open Source community attracts very bright, very motivated developers, who although frequently unpaid, are often very disciplined. In addition, these developers are not part of corporate cultures where the best route to large salaries is to move into management, hence some Open Source developers are amongst the most experienced in the industry. In addition all users of Open Source products have access to the source code and debugging tools, and hence often suggest both bug fixes and enhancements as actual changes to the source code. Consequently the quality of software produced by the Open Source community sometimes exceeds that produced by purely commercial organisations.” (QINETIQ2001).

 

Open Source is reliable, developed to standards, dominant in major business process applications, free to the end user and is constantly improved and updated with a strong end user and development community. Open source Operating Systems like LINUX dominate the server market as does web server apps like Apache/PHP/MySql. Open source based software suites are now challenging MS Office on the desktop. The most widely used ecommerce platforms are now OpenSource and the dominant web development platfor WordPress accounts for 65 million sites or 13.5% of the net.  Office suites like OpenOffice of the range of net based Google applications obviate ongoing licensing costs and legal compliance issues. Social media is all pervasive as are smartphones. The business model must take cogniscense of this as it is the channel to your customer base.

Open source when applied to website design produces state of the art cost effective well designed SEO optimised sites. Anything from full spec e-commerce to personal blogs.