Google+Facebook+iPhone: Google Corporate IT Builds Before Buying

Bucking the corporate practice of buying instead of building internally, Google's corporate IT department will typically build management software itself, or adopt an open source software package, before investigating the feasibility of purchasing proprietary software.

"In the long run, it is cheaper to build and not buy," said Justin McWilliams, a software engineer in Google's corporate engineering department, which provisions and manages computers and other technology for Google employees. McWilliams shared some of the company's practices at the O'Reilly Open Source Conference (OSCON), being held this week in Portland, Oregon. "We typically don't default to buying a commercial offering. We think about building it from scratch first, or look to the open source world," he said.

Google uses a number of home-built or modified open source programs for IT management, including software for full disk encryption (FDE), remote computer management, compliance management, virtual private networks (VPN), video teleconferencing, and for single sign on (SSO).

Over the past few decades, IT departments at large organizations have learned to purchase commercial, off-the-shelf software to manage their infrastructure, typically because it is less expensive than writing and maintaining the software in-house. Due to a number of factors, however, this approach does not work well at Google, McWilliams explained.

Source: http://googlefacebookiphone.blogspot.com/2012/07/Google-Corporate-IT-Builds-Before-Buying.html

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