Mark Taylor believes that OpenLDAP is the catalyst that will finally make open source fully enterprise-ready. And he's willing to stake his business on it. Taylor is founder and CEO of Sirius IT. Based in the United Kingdom but focusing on all of Europe, Sirius provides training, deployment, and support for open source technology in the enterprise.

OpenLDAP is the open source implementation of the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol, (LDAP), an protocol that programs can use to look up contact information from a server. Taylor asserts that, since businesses are organized around people and resources, OpenLDAP is valuable because it allows open source technology to access those resources and produce useful information.

With OpenLDAP, Taylor believes there will be even closer integration between the different open source projects related to enterprise groupware and utilities. "They will collaborate to ensure the seamless integration between technologies," Taylor says.Even so, Taylor says, to most businesses, the technology used in any given solution is mostly irrelevant. "What matters to them is not carrying the cost and resource burden of complying with many proprietary software licenses. And what the majority of them are really worried about is not being locked into a future that they don't control.

"Our business focus is delivering to clients a package that solves those problems."

Taylor sees LAMP as the foundation for much of the currently available and utilized open source technology, but envisions a not-so-distant future where OpenLDAP will be the "axis upon which the whole open source enterprise stack revolves."

Prashanth RaiSource: News ForgeVia: EmergicTags: LDAP, Open Source, Enterprise.