The big guys are increasingly getting into the open source game with preconfigured stacks and supporting services. Unisys, which recently threw its hat into the ring, is a perfect example. Matt Asay blogged about this and echoed the case made by Forrester that these fixed stacks are a good way to give their enterprise customers the stability and safety they want, even if the price of those benefits is reduced choice and flexibility.

At OpenLogic we don't think it is an "either/or"? option. We think enterprises require both. On one hand the production data center needs fixed stacks that work and don't need a lot of tinkering and updating. (In fact, change at any level is resisted here as it can bring down production servers.) On the other hand, development teams need rapid access to many sets of components, integrated in ways that cannot be imagined or pre-built by anyone other than the team members themselves.

Even the most basic OS/database/app server combos can vary widely. Since no one is going all open source all of the time, the reality is that everyone has a mixed environment. These normally include commercial products from vendors like Oracle, IBM and BEA, mixed right into the sauce with JBoss, Geronimo and PHP.

When you combine the production data center, the wide array of development teams, the large number of open source products, and the installed base of commercial and proprietary software, the reality is that fixed stacks do not work in the enterprise. They may have been a good starting point, but are not a viable end point.

That’s why OpenLogic focuses on building a technology platform that gives enterprises the flexibility to create their own open source stacks with an easy to use interface. OpenLogic Enterprise leverages a built-in knowledgebase that has the "smarts"? to automate the technical configuration, integration, and testing to ensure that all components–open source, commercial, and proprietary–work together. This approach, along with commercial-grade maintenance and support, gives enterprises the stability they want and need in their open source infrastructure.