Benefits of Outsourcing Your Software Supply Chain

This whitepaper details the advantages of outsourcing your open source software supply chain to a modern third party vendor like ActiveState:

• Software vendors are in the software supply chain management business, whether they realize it or not:
  
  
  • Software is mostly assembled from open source components (>80%) rather than written from scratch, but only the largest vendors have the time and resources to treat their software supply chain as a first class citizen in their software development process.
    
    
  • Most organizations cobble together multiple point solutions to address the maintenance and security associated with the open source components they use, and then hope for the best. Hope is not a plan.
    
    
• Instead, software vendors can take a lesson from traditional manufacturing who outsourced their supply chains some 50 years ago in order to better focus on the final product.
  
  
  • The result was a sharp increase in both efficiency and profitability.
    
    
  • In the same way, software vendors can lower security risks, improve productivity and lower costs by letting a qualified third party securely source, maintain and update open source components on your behalf.