Other Support Options

You can subscribe to support services from your stack provider or leverage the services of an open-source service provider like Source Labs or Spike Source. If you have doubts about open source support, you need to read this article that debunks the myth that you can't get good support for open source software.

Other Solutions

If the stack vendors are not for you or if you only need a certain product to supplement your existing stack, there are many proven open-source alternatives to choose from. Here are a few, in addition to the ones I mentioned above:

• Portals: Liferay Portal, Apache Jetspeed

• BPM: Intalio, jBPM

• Business rules: jBoss Rules

• SOA governance: Centrasite, freebXML

• Testing tools: SoapUI, PushToTest

• Integration: Snaplogic

This short list only scratches the surface of what is available. Eric Roch, CTO at Perficient, has worked on numerous SOA initiatives as a consultant over the years. He has seen many companies mix and match open source with commercial products. He says that by doing so, a company can pick the best products across the stack for their specific requirements. Buying an entire stack from one vendor does not always give you the best products.

Roch has also seen clients leverage open source to fill a specific need within the stack. For example, a company may decide down the road to add a rules engine or a repository several months after they implement their first few projects. Instead of going back to the well to ask for more funds, some choose to fill the gap with open-source products.

On the project that I worked on, we had a fixed amount of capital to work with. We used several open-source tools to complement our commercial ESB, BPM and data services tools. Roch does caution that not all of these tools are mature, and some are lacking features that developers may need from a productivity standpoint.

When evaluating open-source software, make sure that the product or service has a large community following, has a good track record of support and that the product has a good roadmap coupled with several successful implementations. You can leverage open source across the entire stack and across all of the tools, or you can supplement your commercial purchases of software with a few open-source alternatives. The choice is yours. I highly recommend that all vendor evaluations consider at least one open-source alternative.