Ecommerce Thrives on the Open Cloud

If you’re an Ecommerce retailer looking for a web-hosting solution in the cloud, there’s only one-way to go: open source. Not only has open source software saved businesses an estimated $60 Billion a year since it began in 1983, according to a report by The Standish Group, but it has contributed to even greater cost savings, better security, higher-quality software and the ability for businesses to avoid vendor “lock-in,”according to PC Magazine’s David Murphy.

Ecommerce retailers can’t afford infrastructure downtime, nor can they afford to lose sales because of incompatibility issues. Every aspect of their online store has to work, all the time, and open-source software can offer greater security, high-quality, reliable software and the ability to move freely between cloud platforms if a solution isn’t working out.

The issue of vendor lock-in is critical for most Ecommerce retailers, and it’s a major reason why most prefer using open source cloud solutions like OpenStack.

As Rackspace’s Mahesh Gandhe writes, “… One thing that sets us apart is our broad product portfolio … [which] gives our customers the flexibility to chose the right solution for any given business problem … Our solution architects share best practices around performance optimization and security. Rackspace Advisory Services helps our customers experience a seamless journey to the cloud. And Rackspace Critical Application Services guarantees 100 percent production platform uptime, provided a recommended architecture is deployed,” Gandhe said.

He adds that Rackspace’s extensive knowledge of and partnerships with Ecommerce and retail ecosystems and applications like Magento, Oracle Commerce, hybris, and IBM Websphere Commerce make it easy for customers to get end-to-end support for nearly any solution – even those that include multiple products from different vendors.

That’s the beauty of open source and the driving force behind OpenStack. That building a community to produce a ubiquitous cloud computing platform for both private and public clouds can make a simple, scalable and feature-rich solution available to any developer, retailer, service provider, enterprise or small business who can run it.

Sharon Florentine is a freelance writer who covers everything from data center technology to holistic veterinary care and occasionally blogs for Rackspace Hosting.