The value of open source
When your technology works for you, your organisation can move faster, serve your community better, and make decisions based on what you actually need, all on a timeline that suits you. Open source makes that possible.
Control your own direction
Having genuine control over your technology means having both the freedom to choose direction and the capability to act on it. With open source, you have genuine insight into how your systems work, adapt them when priorities shift, and are empowered with solutions tailored to your organisations goals, and community needs.
Strengthen your digital resilience
Open source software is modular, so you can modernise continuously rather than face high-stakes overhauls that risk disrupting operations. It also means you're not tied to any single vendor's decisions - if a supplier changes their pricing, ends support, or disappears, the code remains yours and enables another partner, or your internal team, to keep it working. Catalyst Cloud, our sister company, is based on OpenStack infrastructure and provides the option to store your data in New Zealand.
Build on what has already proven
A worldwide developer community continuously improves open source platforms, which means you can draw on globally proven solutions and adapt them to your community's specific needs rather than building from scratch. Open source also makes it easier to share what works - reducing duplicated effort and cost across organisations facing similar challenges. And when your organisation solves a problem well, that solution can become a foundation others build on. Open source solutions are compounding digital leadership.
Move when the moment is right
When community expectations shift or an opportunity opens up, the ability to respond quickly on your own terms matters. Open source gives you that flexibility - these systems built to adapt meaning you can experiment, iterate, and scale what works without waiting on a vendor's roadmap or approval cycle. Your timeline, your priorities, your pace.
Catalyst and open source
Open source has been at the heart of what we do since 1997. That means when you work with us, you're not starting from scratch, you have access to a worldwide community of developers continuously improving projects you can adapt and build on. It's how we help organisations respond faster and create better technology more cost-effectively.
Over the past three decades, our team has made active contributions to some of the world's most widely used open source platforms, including Moodle, Tōtara, Drupal, Koha, PostgreSQL, Perl, PHP, Git, and others, and maintain affiliations with the Debian and Ubuntu projects.