50 Open Source Replacements for Really Expensive Software

50 Open Source Replacements for Really Expensive Software

The “Great Recession” has businesses and consumers alike looking for ways to cut costs. That includes looking for cheaper alternatives to expensive software.

  1. Accounting: TurboCASH, Phreebooks 
  2. Business Intelligence: Jaspersoft, Pentaho, Palo BI Suite, JMagallanes, OpenReports
  3. Business Process Management: ProcessMaker 
  4. CAD: BRL-CAD, Archimedes
  5. Customer Relationship Management: Sugar Community Edition
  6. Database: MySQL, Firebird, Kexi 
  7. Desktop Publishing: Scribus
  8. E-mail/Collaboration/Groupware:  Zimbra
  9. Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP): OpenERP, Openbravo, ADempiere
  10. Gateway Security Appliances: Endian Firewall Community, Untangle
  11. Graphics/Drawing: Dia, Gimp, Inkscape, Paint.Net
  12. Office Productivity: OpenOffice.org, KOffice, NeoOffice, Oracle OpenOffice  
  13. Operating System: Red Hat, SUSE, Ubuntu, Debian 
  14. PDF Tools: PDFCreator
  15. Point of Sale: Openbravo POS, Lemon POS
  16. Project Management: OpenProj, GanttProject
  17. Speech Recognition: Simon 
  18. Video Tools: Blender, Cinelerra, OpenShot Video Editor, Kdenlive, CineFX, Avidemux
  19. Web Application Tools:  Open BlueDragon
  20. Web Site Authoring: Kompozer, NVU, Bluefish, SeaMonkey

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Reference: 50 Open Source Replacements for Really Expensive Software

Leverage cloud financial intelligence systems with AWS

Leverage cloud financial intelligence systems with AWS

The use of cloud financial intelligence systems, typically from cloud financial management system providers, offers insights into cloud usage. Cloud financial management providers, such as Cloud Cruiser and others, can tell you how effective the cloud platforms are in delivery of services. This includes how each service tracks back to cloud resources that support the services, as well as who is consuming the services and by how much.

However, the true value of these systems is not the simple operational cost data that they are able to gather and report on — it’s the ability to leverage deeper analytics to determine usage patterns, and how those patterns will behave over time. This means you have the ability to better understand how your AWS instances (and other cloud services) were put to use in the past, and more importantly, how they will be leveraged in the future, including the ability to properly estimate cloud resource utilization in the context of complex and widely distributed architectures.

It’s all about the ability to make the most out of data from multiple components of the architecture, not just AWS. Most enterprises that deploy cloud-based systems do so using either public and private clouds within a multi-cloud architecture, which may also be mixed with traditional (or legacy) systems. This makes the financial tracking much more complex, but also much more valuable.

For example, a production management system may leverage core storage services from AWS, session management services from their OpenStack private cloud and core database services using a traditional Oracle database running in their data center. Thus, the cloud financial management system needs to gather information for many different system components, including the private and public clouds , as well as the local database. System owners can use this information to determine the amount of resources consumed, as well as patterns of consumption over time. They have a complete picture as to how a holistic system is functioning, including cloud and non-cloud components.

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