LAMP for Small Business Enterprises

A key consideration for small-sized business enterprises (also known as SME - Small and Medium Enterprises) is to use cash wisely. Buying licensed software is a major expense head for small business enterprises. The percentage expense on software as compared to the total expenses could be significantly high for many small business enterprises. This motivates them to find cheaper yet reliable alternative software. Cost is important but so is reliability before a small business enterprise decides to adopt any software technology.

Open source software has become a strong competing alternative of licensed software for business enterprises, especially the small-sized ones. One of such solution package available to enterprises is the LAMP stack.

The LAMP stack offers a proven yet cheap solution for small business enterprises to put IT to effective business use. LAMP stands for a set of four proven open source software technologies:

Linux Operating System - this is a robust platform for hosting both web-based and non-web-based applications and database services.

Apache Web Server - this is a robust web server which can be scaled up like any other commercial-grade web server. As the future of application hosting clearly seems to be web-based a proven yet cheap web server will be immensely useful.

MySQL Database- this is a robust database. As the future seems to belong to data-intensive applications a proven yet cheap database will be immensely useful.

PHP Language - this is a powerful yet simple to use scripting language. As the future seems to belong to application development through integration of pre-built software components using 'glue' code rather than writing 'fresh' code every time a simple to learn and use scripting / programming language will be immensely useful.

LAMP surely needs to undergo improvements to make it more robust and usable but the direction it seems to be taking appears to be the way the business world is headed towards. LAMP has the potential to provide a powerful yet cheap IT solution development platform and is surely going to help the small business enterprises in conserving their cash.

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