Free isn’t Free
It is easy to understand the appeal of Open Source tools. After all, immediate gratification, community and a “free” price are certainly attention-getting for many developers. But IT Ops teams and their managers need to be careful to consider all of the costs when choosing free software such as open source versions of Puppet or Chef (especially if they are operating in large scale, mixed Linux and Windows environments).
Hidden Cost Drivers
The hidden cost drivers behind open source include the considerable time and effort in writing and maintaining scripts to deliver enterprise level support, reporting, performance and scale. These unpredictable development and maintenance costs bloat your total cost of ownership, significantly extend your time to value, inhibit an Agile implementation and destroy the ROI that made “free” so attractive in the first place.
*How high is your ROI?
Lastly a quick note about ROI. Use our ROI Calculator to quickly estimate your savings based on finding, fixing and implementing config changes, developing and maintaining and configuration tools, migrating middleware and even gathering data and reporting on configuration changes.
It is easy to see that fully supported, enterprise-scale, Linux and Windows-friendly Orca delivers a compelling ROI even when compared to ‘free’ tools.
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