Case Study: Backcountry.com Bets the Shop on Open Source - ' Open Source On the '

Backcountry.com began in 1996 as a home-based Web site that quickly turned into full-time careers for two nontechie outdoors enthusiasts. President John Bresee had taught skiing in Stowe, Vt., while Jim Holland, now Backcountry's CEO, had been a member of the U.S. Ski Team. The two cobbled together some Web pages and a simple shopping-cart script and convinced a few suppliers to sign on—all with just $2,000 in startup money.

By 2000, the company was netting $3 million a year, and Bresee knew that he needed a more comprehensive e-commerce system. "We looked at WebSphere, Oracle and others, but we just didn't have the money," he says. Then he came across Red Hat Inc., which was developing an open-source e-commerce platform called Interchange. Because the dot-com world was showing signs of deterioration, with software startups quickly going out of business, Bresee realized he'd need a system that would allow him to control the source code. "Otherwise we could get stuck," he says. The cost to install Interchange and set up Backcountry with the necessary open-source architecture: $100,000. Jenkins estimates similar proprietary systems would have cost at least five times as much. Thus began the company's love affair with open source.

Unlike proprietary systems, which place customization restrictions on users and often require heavy license fees, open-source software allows users to make and distribute copies of applications, share source code freely and improve or customize software as needed—at a fraction of the cost of proprietary software. And Backcountry.com isn't the only company that's taken notice. Gartner Inc. predicts that 90 percent of the Global 2000 will have formal open-source management strategies—including assessment of risk, total cost of ownership and return on investment—by 2010. According to a CIO Insight research survey published in November, 81 percent of companies have deployed or are considering deploying open-source applications, and 67 percent of companies say that open source has helped lower IT costs.

So what does an open-source enterprise look like? Jenkins, who worked for Red Hat where he was Backcountry's sales rep before he was hired away to become the company's CTO, says the company operates a hybrid of what's known as LAMP architecture: Linux for the operating system, Apache for the Web servers, MySQL for the databases (though Backcountry works on PostgreSQL), and Perl for the application scripts. The firm uses Firefox for its Web browsers and manages e-mail with open-source software from Zimbra Inc. "With an open-source product like Zimbra, we can do things like tie e-mails directly into our order management system," Jenkins says.

For example, customer order numbers in Zimbra e-mails are linked directly to the order management system, so customer service reps don't have to open separate applications. Jenkins estimates that "gearheads" —Backcountry's affectionate nickname for its CSRs—save three hours a week as a result, translating to roughly $150,000 in savings a year. "It wouldn't be possible to do something like that with Microsoft Outlook or some other proprietary system," he says. "Plus, it's one-tenth the cost." And while Jenkins admits that some copies of Microsoft Word and Excel still exist, he also says, "We are following a policy of attrition. We will not buy any more Windows licenses—only open source."

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