The open source community has long been delivering Enterprise-ready operating systems and infrastructure at low costs. Examples of these are Apache, Tomcat, and Linux. We now see that there is a greater demand to produce enterprise-ready solutions for most application domains, as enterprises seek to lower costs and obtain the same benefits they saw with open source operating system and infrastructure. However, open source solutions have many dependencies, middleware components, such as databases, web servers, servlet engines, scripting languages, authentication servers, etc. each with its own deployment and support issues.

Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) or on-demand software can be delivered, integrated, customized, deployed and used, resulting in unprecedented speed and with significant cost savings for end customers using Essentia’s experience.           

Inexperienced product development organizations sometimes try a minimal approach to open-source and SaaS development with the expectation of saving money and time. This approach does not deliver the high expectations of the end-users regarding the functionality, extensibility, stability, quality, and 99.99% uptime. Reconciliation occurs after production (Post-Production) when the product is deployed and found to be unusable. Financial reviews of both actual and opportunity cost will indicate that a minimal approach is very expensive to the organization, both in terms of increased expense and the overall business risk.