Home » Publications » The OpenGeo Suite Enterprise Edition

1. Executive Summary

Today, enterprises rely on web map services to communicate and collaborate with their staff members and customers, other enterprises, and the general public. They increasingly rely on open source geospatial software to deploy these services. These vital services are at risk, though, when they are not backed by certified, supported, and well-documented services by professional experts. OpenGeo was founded to solve this problem. The OpenGeo Suite Enterprise Edition integrates the best features from leading open source geospatial software communities into stable and supported product offerings. These community projects, including GeoServer, PostGIS, OpenLayers, GeoWebCache and GeoExt, are open for anyone to use in application development. However, the rapidly changing nature of community projects, as well as their lack of formal, reliable support and integration, dictates that community projects are best suited for proof-of-concept development. This paper outlines how the OpenGeo Suite Enterprise Edition augments the innovation of these open source software communities with the testing, certification, and maintenance necessary to create and maintain reliable, long-term enterprise production web services. Further, it provides an overview of OpenGeo Suite Enterprise Edition packages and their value for organizations of any level of familiarity with open source web mapping.

2. Architecture

The OpenGeo Suite achieves a substantial performance advantage over other web mapping services through its flexible architecture. With a single code distribution, the OpenGeo Suite bundles together five open source community projects in a system that can be deployed as one unified whole, or as individual modules, right out-of-the-box. OpenGeo Suite components include PostGIS, GeoServer, GeoWebCache, OpenLayers, and GeoExt. The Enterprise Edition provides unlimited support to deployments of these individual components as well as to the bundled stack.

The power of the OpenGeo Suite is in the freedom it affords enterprises for production deployments. Its powerful components can be used together, individually, or in combination with existing infrastructures for maximum flexibility.

An effective architecture provides a complete solution, but in a modular manner. Typical legacy web mapping applications cannot offer such flexibility without completely rewriting a significant part of their code to take advantage of open standards. It is not enough to port existing software onto the web and expect it to work.

3. The Enterprise Advantage

As noted, the OpenGeo Suite builds one unified web mapping service from the ongoing developments of five separate open source communities. This software package is available in two versions: the fully-supported OpenGeo Suite Enterprise Edition, and the freely available, unsupported OpenGeo Suite Community Edition. A new Community Edition is released 10 or more times a year, bringing new features and the latest capabilities to users on frequent basis so that they can explore, experiment, and test the Suite’s latest features.

The easy access and usability of the OpenGeo Site Community Edition makes it a snap to use. IT professionals can quickly in set up new web mapping services with it. However, the lack of support for the Community Edition, as well as its rapid development cycle, makes it unsuitable in a production mode.

Stability and support need to accompany creativity and functionality when organizations deploy web map services in production. The OpenGeo Suite Enterprise Edition combines innovation and robust capabilities with the testing, certification, maintenance, and support necessary for software in production. The Enterprise Edition comes in four Levels – Basic, Professional, Platform and Strategic – to provide a range of service and cost options to organizations deploying production level web mapping services. All levels of support cover every OpenGeo Suite component, whether deployed individually or as part of a stack.

4. For Production

The OpenGeo Suite Enterprise Edition delivers the long-term support, updates, and backwards compatibility that organizations need for their enterprise systems. Using the OpenGeo Suite Enterprise Edition reduces testing and validation time, minimizes trouble-shooting and downtime, simplifies management, and enables organizations to refocus resources on higher-value projects. Developers and system administrators benefit from the stability, scalability, and power of the Enterprise Edition. Managers and users benefit from the long-term development and support that OpenGeo provides.

5. Support Contract or Software License?

Generally, proprietary software companies require that clients "license" their software and separately purchase annual maintenance. On top of that, clients are typically required to purchase separate licenses for plug-ins, database connectors, etc. As enterprise deployments succeed and become used more widely and frequently, the costs for licensing the software on more and more servers can lead to rapid and large cost increases. The "success" of a web services deployment can quickly turn into a nightmare of budget over-runs.

Users of the OpenGeo Suite Enterprise Edition avoid this trap: clients only pay for an annual subscription covering OpenGeo’s support and services – there is no "license" for the software. Furthermore, there are no extra fees to add up and drain budgets. OpenGeo’s support costs scale very slowly and offer Enterprise Edition users substantial savings versus proprietary offerings, when scaling to larger and larger configurations.

6. Side by Side Comparison: Enterprise vs. Community

	Enterprise Edition	Community Edition
Long-term Stability	Provides maintained, supported code with backwards compatibility of fixes and security patches. Maintained by OpenGeo Engineers.	Users support themselves. Compatibility is not guaranteed.
Integration	Supported on a variety of commercial and open source servlet containers and databases. Platform installers plus WAR distributions for upgrades and production deployments. Maintainability is improved.	Compatibility is not guaranteed. Releases often contain experimental code. Maintenance, including dependencies and selected sub-projects, falls on the user.
Patches & Updates	Unlimited bug fixes against the OpenGeo Suite and all of its underlying projects. Certified patches, security updates, and bug fixes. Support for production deployment and back-porting of updates.	Community releases are simply replaced altogether.
Enhancements	Release process is structured. Subscription includes release notes, and migration documentation.	Code is released into the community for testing and feedback, but may require several releases to finalize. Changes from original can be significant. Enhancements mingle with other uncertified community contributions.
Security	Customers benefit from a formalized enterprise security resolution process. Issues are tracked, identified, classified, and resolved by OpenGeo engineers.	There is no formal security response process. Issues may or may not be addressed.

7. Increased Productivity: For all levels of users

	Enterprise Edition	Community Edition
Access to Source Code	The OpenGeo Enterprise Edition is completely open source.	The OpenGeo Enterprise Edition is completely open source.
Support	Multi-level support backed by Service Level Agreements. Both developer and production support. Escalation support delivered by the code developers. Performance and tuning support and review.	No support other than public forums. Advice in forums may not come from OpenGeo and is not guaranteed.
Feature Development	Customers can directly influence development in OpenGeo Suite and its sub-projects. With core committers in each of the community projects, OpenGeo can move feature development.	Users have limited influence over project development. Timeframe for feature completion is unknown.
Education	All-inclusive training available on-site. Subscription includes full, professional software documentation.	Documentation availability varies by project.
Quality Assurance	Rigorous QA is completed for every release. QA tests covers performance, scalability, availability, and reliability testing.	No formal QA process.
Compatibility	Software is tested and certified on a variety of operating systems and architecture combinations.	No compatibility certifications.

The OpenGeo Suite Enterprise Edition increases organizational productivity by providing a flexible, certified, and scalable package to develop and deploy web mapping services. But an innovative software package can only increase productivity so much. Organizations evolve over time, and they require an infrastructure of support services from their software provides to support all levels of their users at all times within their application development cycles.

For organizations new to open source or web mapping services, OpenGeo provides, through the Enterprise Edition package, a complete web mapping software stack along with the education and support to easily deploy web mapping solutions on time and within budget. Some organizations with more experienced IT staff and developers may not run the Suite, but rely heavily on one or more of its components in their existing implementations. OpenGeo provides feature development for the components they depend on, as well as multi-level production support. OpenGeo Enterprise Edition comes with unlimited access to a team of experts dedicated to identifying specific issues and taking action. The expertise employed by OpenGeo means that a quick and comprehensive resolution to issues, bugs and upgrade support is something that an organization can rely on.

8. Summary

The OpenGeo Suite Enterprise Edition delivers the benefits of open source community projects without the risks and potential costs of deploying them in production or embedding them in a product for resale. Government agencies, IT organizations, and independent software vendors alike can greatly benefit from adopting the OpenGeo Suite Enterprise Edition as their choice for the development and deployment of mission-critical web mapping applications and services.

9. Risk-free Evaluation

It’s free and easy to gain access to complete OpenGeo platforms on a supported (Basic Level) evaluation basis.

10. About Us

OpenGeo is a social enterprise working to build the best web-based geospatial technology. The company brings the best practices of open source software to geospatial organizations around the world by providing enterprises with supported, tested, and integrated open source solutions to build the Geospatial Web. OpenGeo also supports open source communities by employing key developers of PostGIS, GeoServer, and OpenLayers. the company has provided successful consulting services and products to clients like the World Bank, Google, Ordnance Survey Great Britain, Portland TriMet, MassGIS, Landgate, and the Federal Communications Commission. OpenGeo is the geospatial division of OpenPlans, a New York-based 501(c)(3) non-profit that informs and engages communities through journalism and open source software. All of OpenGeo's revenue has been and will continue to be re-invested into innovative and useful software in support of the OpenPlans mission.

Redistributable under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike license.