Open Source Software – A Viable Option for Sustenance to Small and Medium Enterprises

There is strict coherence in between use of ICT and growth of SMEs. The use of ICT in SMEs can improve performance in terms of employees empowerment, speed of operations, economies of scale, foolproof information to decision makers are to name a few. The importance of SME in economic growth happened to be one of the prominent themes to decision makers at large and academia in specific. There were only few thousands of SMEs in 1974 but the same was in lacs by the end of 2007. SMEs contributions to employment, production and export & imports are not mere, but very strong. ICT needs of SMEs is very pretty unlike to large organizations. Simple applications can be handy rather than big software deployments, owing to size and volume of the business. Software is very much necessary to leverage either fullest or moderate advantages of ICT. Unfortunately, proprietary software is very costly and unaffordable to many of SMEs, reasons are aplenty. Some of the reasons can be; overly cost, lack of feasibility, packages might not be flexible or can’t be integrated with existing software of the concern, scarcity of technical man power and etc.Open Source Software (OSS) can be a very best option to SMEs. OSS is not a simple phenomenon; it is otherwise a second world of ICT arena. OSS is a wholesome field with all most all substitutes for proprietary software, ranging from Operating Systems to a very complex and high priority software packages like ERP.