I am a Google Office user because work has Google Apps for us all, but maybe I should start using Google for work and Zoho for home. In a post by Matt Asay he talks to Raju Vegesna, evangelist at Zoho. He notes that the back end of Zoho is completely open source.

Could Zoho.com exist if it were built with proprietary software?
Vegesna: Technically, we could do the same thing with proprietary software but the cost would be prohibitive. Imagine Google trying to run 600,000 servers on Windows. Could it do so technically? Probably. But it’s doubtful that it could give so many different services away for free if built on pricey, proprietary software.

Without open source I can’t imagine SaaS [software as a service] taking off. The economics simply wouldn’t work.

Open source gives us flexibility so that we can add our own layers of business logic. For example, we use OpenOffice for document conversion. There are some conversions that OpenOffice doesn’t support, however. Because it’s open source, we can split the code to allow our proprietary software pick up the slack where OpenOffice can’t handle transformations.

Most of our applications are built from the ground up by Zoho. Ninety-five percent of our employees are engineers. We use open source strategically but we need to be able to understand our code intimately, so writing it ourselves is important.

We use the best of open-source software, contribute back strategically, and write our own software where it makes sense.

Awesomeness! Read the entire post here.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 28th, 2009 at 8:57 am by Nicole C. Engard and is filed under Applications, ILS, Open Source. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.