Cost effectiveness is increasingly forcing the world to innovative ways of doing business. For examples low-cost Indian software companies like Infosys, Wipro and TCS have forced internationally acclaimed IT services companies like CSc, IBM, and Accenture to open their services centers in India with tens of thousands of people working.

Big companies have processes and knowledge management solutions to run their companies. Lot of them have spent tremendous amount of resources and infrastructure to implement these solutions. For examples companies like Wipro, TCS and Infosys have robust intranet / knowledge management solutions developed in-house. Some companies even buy them from several vendors. There is a definite cost involved in implementing all these solutions. Globally many big companies in the traditional sectors have adopted IT and knowledge management solutions in a big way. Probably the use of IT has increased their business.

Any company is considered to have legitimacy if its actions are in line with a widely accepted set of beliefs and processes. Most of the time customers are used to do business with companies which follow the accepted patterns of the industry. SMBs can acquire the legitimacy by imitating the processes and knowledge management solutions of big companies. However the path of buying infrastructure, software products or developing them is not financially viable for SMBs. Open source provides a viable alternative by providing solutions with no big inherent costs.

Small companies can think and imitate big companies by adopting open source solutions for their intranet and other knowledge management solutions. Some of the viable open source solutions for small companies are given below. Most of the solutions / products mentioned here are based on LAMP platform i.e Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP based solutions. So any person who knows the above technologies or any company which has expertise in those areas can easily implement the processes with the below mentioned products.

www.compiere.org
Compier's ERP package provides lot of the features provided by commercial ERP vendors. This solution is a comprehensive fully integrated ERP, CRM and SCM solutions. There are options for integrating Accounting Modules aslo.

www.sugarcrm.com
www.sugarforge.org
SugarCRM is an open source CRM solution working on Linux. SugarCRM provides robust platform for implementing your Customer or Contact Management System. This is a commercial open source solution, where the company hosts your CRM on their server for fee or you can download the whole product and install and manage it within your company without any fee.

www.joomla.org
Joomla facilitates development of website to a comprehensive Content Management System. Joomla provides lot of add on modules to choose from and add features as and when required. So companies can start with a simple website based on Joomla and keep on adding required features to manage their content / knowledge. Companies can also look at another important Content Management System called Drupal (www.drupal.org). Some websites you are accessing on the internet might actually been hosted on Joomla or Drupal platform.

www.twiki.org
There are lot of web based collaboration management systems which have come up in the last few years. One of the most famous collaboration based information system is wikipedia. Online communities contribute information to wikipedia (www.wikipedia.org). Lot of companies use collaboration management systems for building and maintaining products and services within their companies. Twiki (www.twiki.org) provides a simple collaboration management system for a company to start collaborating on any of the projects they are currently doing.

www.dotproject.net and www.phprojekt.com provide web based project management system for companies which want to adopt open source Project Management System.

www.moodle.org provides an open source Cource Management System called Moodle. This helps in organizing the intranet based cources for the employees.

http://www.nongnu.org/cvs/
A typical IT organization needs source code control for all its development activities. GNU based CVS provides one of the robust source code management solutions. The development community can use any of the free CVS clients like WinCVS or TortoiseCVS for accessing and committing source code into the repository.

www.bugzilla.org
One of the few open source Bug Tracking Systems existing for sometime is BugZilla. Once installed on a Linux system, this web based Bug Tracking System can help maintain and manage the Bugs in the development project.

www.koha.org
Koha implements a web based Library Management System for intranet purposes. This can be used either for intranet or internet purposes. Lot of universities are using this open source platform for offering their journals and other periodicals online.

So Open Source allows small and medium businesses to think big and implement the processes and knowledge management solutions followed by Big companies. And these solutions come at a fraction of the price the big companies might have paid for implementing them.

There are lot of companies providing LAMP based Open Source solutions for companies and these solutions come with the implementation cost and no licence fees.