Q. What is your company all about and what role does technology play in day to day operations of the company?
We, at Cimnpress, deal in mass customisation. Mass customisation is about producing small, individual orders with the reliability, quality and affordability of mass production; so each and every one embodies the personal relevance inherent to customised physical products.Our focus on mass customization lies at the intersection of three important areas, including empowering people to make an impression, computer integrated manufacturing, and large scale in small quantities.
We bring our technology and operational capabilities together into a shared platform, to aggregate the production volumes of multiple brands so that customers have access to more personalised, customised products of great quality at an affordable price.
Q. What all are the areas where you have deployed open source technology?
We deployed open source technology to( specifically using ELK stack ) develop customer insights by combining lexical analysis on unstructured data and to develop deep understanding of systems working by aggregating non-readable data.
Q. Why did you choose open source technology over proprietary solutions?
It provides greatly flexibility to develop cost solutions for non-commercial use and deliver more intrinsic value to business.
Q. When did your tryst with open source technology begin and what aspects of the technology influence you to make it a career choice for you?
I have been programming using Java stack for last 14 years , which has influenced my firm’s belief in open source and hence I have always tried to explore ways to deploy open source stack for delivering more value to business. Open source software can be freely used, changed, and shared (in modified or unmodified form) by anyone. Open source software is made by many
people , thus bring good qualities and rapid improvements very fast to its consumer base.
Q. Was you company open to adopt open source solutions? If no, what kind of struggle did you face?
We have been open to adopt open source solutions for internal purposes for quite some time now. I haven’t faced much struggle in this respect.
Q. Have you deployed open source technology in your company at the end user level too? If yes, please elaborate?
We have ELK stack being used for log monitoring purposes and there are other aspects of customer insights that are being used by customer service organisation. We consider our stakeholders in business as our customers , in that sense , yes we have deployed to end-user level as well.
Q. What do you think is the scope of open source technology in the modern day ever-evolving technology world?
The scope is unbound and limitless. Let’s take the example of Cyanogen. It is an Android community operating system which is being rapidly adopted by many mobile device providers. Mircomax is attempting introduction of mobiles phones based on Cyanogen, which is very exciting as it will allow more low cost mobile penetration.
Q. Do you and your team contribute to open source tech too? If yes, please name the projects and share your reasons for being associated with those projects?
Yes, we do. We have a formal process within the organisation for responsible usage and contribution to open source projects. We have been contributing in a small way by publishing packages to Github under the following links :https://github.com/Cimpress-MCP
Q. What are the newer areas of technology where you see scope for open source technology to grow further?
IoT is next big thing in terms of deploying open source hardware coupled with operating system. Machine-2-Machine communication will offer greater possibilities and countless application of open source software
Q. Do you reach out to the community for solutions in case you get stuck with any tech issue? if yes, please quote an incidence.
Yes we do . Specifically hard to point out as it depends on specifics of the problem.
