InfoWorld: Is open source in fact cheaper or are there a lot of hidden costs? Is it cheaper than commercial software or is it just as expensive once you add up the service, support, and all the other issues?

Polese: Well there's certainly been a lot of discussion about this topic and [I will] be glad to tell you just how expensive open source can be when it comes to implementation and maintenance and lifecycle management. In fact, there are significant costs involved in ongoing patch management, testing, certification, and updating of these components, when you're starting to use more than a handful of them.

So we can make a case that open source software can be as expensive as proprietary if you have the overhead of having to staff the internal team and almost becoming your own vendor just to maintain that open source software. And that's of course one of the reasons that we were inspired to start this company, Marugan Pal and Ray Lane founded the company back in 2003. They saw that cost rising, they heard some CIOs who were frustrated with what they saw as increasing complexity in using open source, and Marugan saw an opportunity to create technology to eliminate a lot of that overhead for companies.

InfoWorld: Is there anybody else doing anything similar to what SpikeSource is doing, IBM Global Services or anybody like that?

Polese: There are a couple of other companies that are sort of pure-play providers of open source services. We [see] OpenLogic and SourceLabs, but the traditional systems integrators are not providing automated testing in lifecycle management for open source stacks. They typically have a team of consultants that they bring in and are on-site on an ongoing basis, but there's not a specific service that I'm aware of from the large SIs that provide what we are providing, which is a wide choice of components across multiple operating systems, including, by the way, Windows. So we do certify on Windows as well as Linux. And then the ongoing maintenance updates, alert [notifications]… that is a unique service. I'm not aware of others, certainly in the systems integrator space, who are offering that. And as far as we know, we provide the greatest breadth of coverage of testing from the open source market today.