The Open Road

The European Commission may be taking its time analyzing the competitive impact of Oracle's proposed acquisition of Sun/MySQL, but the industry can't afford to dither. On Tuesday, MySQL competitor EnterpriseDB announced that Red Hat joined its $19 million Series C funding round, which follows IBM's own investment in EnterpriseDB.

Is the software industry, once devoted to MySQL, preparing to shift allegiances to Postgres?

Probably not, but clouds are forming. On Monday, I talked with EnterpriseDB CEO Ed Boyajian, a former Red Hat executive, and he suggested several reasons for Red Hat's investment of "a significant amount of money" in the open-source database vendor, EnterpriseDB. As he told me:

This is a great step forward for our company and for Postgres. Red Hat has done heroic work bringing commercial open source to mainstream enterprise adoption. And it's making a difference: arguably billions of dollars of spend in operating system and middleware has gone back to customers. You want to talk about returning control to users? That's the real yardstick. That's real disruption.

For EnterpriseDB to have the trust and support of Red Hat as a partner and investor is a huge help to our company and I think it gives another strong indication to enterprise customers challenging their old spending habits, that there is more they can do.

It's important to note that Red Hat has been distributing Postgres for some time. It's in every copy of Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Fedora that Red Hat ships. As such, it's already in the hands of thousands of Red Hat customers and users, and is in heavy demand in some geographies, particularly Latin America. But until now Red Hat has not provided robust support for the database on par with its support for Linux and JBoss.

That's about to change.

The change is good for Red Hat customers, but this isn't the only area in which Red Hat has been seeking to expand its influence. Red Hat has been actively looking for opportunities to invest in a variety of open-source companies, most recently investing in JasperSoft.

Red Hat, once content to go its own way in the software industry, is increasingly concerned with ensuring the vitality of its peers. After all, if Red Hat remains the only sizable open-source vendor, that's an indication of the weakness of the model, not its strength.

Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst, however, nicely marries pragmatism with idealism, as suggested by his comments on EnterpriseDB's subscription model:"EnterpriseDB is also working to create customer value through a subscription support model. Clearly, this is a model we see as beneficial."

He's right, but it's interesting to hear him laud a model (i.e., a subscription to proprietary and open-source software, plus maintenance and support) from which he distanced Red Hat in Red Hat's Q1 earnings call. ("I certainly hope for and we certainly like to work with other open source companies out there. But those are fundamentally different business then what we're doing.")

He's right the second time (in the EnterpriseDB news release). They are not fundamentally different business models. I suspect his comments on the earnings call reflected an attempt to get out of an inaccurate and misleading question from the ever-entertaining Trip Chowdhry.

Regardless, Red Hat's investment in Postgres vendor EnterpriseDB suggests that it, along with IBM and others, is prepared to bolster alternatives to MySQL in its larger quest to provide real competition in the database industry.

To be fair, Red Hat's interest in Postgres and EnterpriseDB precedes the EU's intervention in Oracle's proposed acquisition of MySQL. The interest is understandable: Postgres is a great choice for a wide variety of database workloads. It's built for transactions and higher-end use cases, like the Oracle and IBM database workloads that it can replace (or augment).

EnterpriseDB plays into Red Hat's overarching strategy of commoditizing key infrastructure, as Whitehurst has noted. Given that the $20 billion database market is concentrated in just three vendors who control 85 percent of the market, databases are ripe for disruption, disruption that Red Hat can feed from a distance.

Red Hat's investment in EnterpriseDB says more about Red Hat's increasing awareness of its larger role in the open-source ecosystem than it does of any competition with MySQL. It's about time.

Postgres for years has lived in the shadow of MySQL's media attention: the "boring" database that quietly goes about its work while its sexy Web 2.0 cousin wins the popularity contest.

Recent data from the Eclipse Foundation, however, suggest that Postgres may be ready to make significant waves in the enterprise, even if it doesn't make headlines.

In a recent letter to European Union's commissioner of competition, former MySQL CEO Marten Mickos stressed that MySQL's target market is the emerging Web database market and that the enterprise IT market was never really a source of strength (or focus).

Postgres is the opposite.

Postgres is an enterprise Java database, more suitable for carrying corporate data than the Web's consumer data. According to a 2009 survey by the Eclipse Foundation, MySQL (27.7 percent) and Oracle (27.3 percent) were the top-two databases used by those surveyed, with Postgres registering a respectable but still distant 9.9 percent.

Given that Oracle database users are far more likely to use Java as their programming language to develop server-centric applications, while MySQL users are three times more likely to use PHP as their primary language (17.4 percent of those surveyed use it, versus 5.4 percent for all users) to builde RIA/Web applications, Postgres is clearly more Oracle than MySQL.

Granted, the Eclipse community is traditionally Java-centric, so it's not surprising that Java would be prominent among its developers. But it's also the case that enterprise IT remains a Java/.Net market, and in such a market Postgres could be poised to boom if it can muster sufficient marketing to make its message heard.

This is where EnterpriseDB comes in.

The MySQL community would not be as well-developed as it is without MySQL, the company. MySQL AB has funded the overwhelming majority of MySQL database development, but it has also provided the marketing muscle to make a name for the Web database.

Postgres has traditionally been a standalone, organic open-source project with little concerted corporate involvement. EnterpriseDB has started to change that, but for too long wrongly fixated on competing with MySQL, a database that serves a different market and different developers. The company also spent too much time talking about Oracle migration technology, rather than focusing on why Postgres is a great database.

That may be changing.

Postgres just released version 8.4 of the venerable database. In EnterpriseDB's discussion of the release, there's no mention of Oracle, MySQL, or any other competitor. Instead, EnterpriseDB seems to be focusing more on its commitment to Postgres development, adding significant enterprise hardening through its open-source Postgres Plus distribution.

It's a welcome change, and one that could position Postgres to take a bigger share of the enterprise Java database market--not because it's cheaper than Oracle or more open than MySQL but because it's a great database in its own right.

That's the right messaging for EnterpriseDB...and Postgres.

Arguably Microsoft's biggest threat is its irrelevance to Web developers. Though the company dominates personal computing and is a major force in enterprise computing, it remains a distant also-ran to LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP/Python/Perl) development for the growing Web ecosystem. On Thursday Microsoft announced its WebsiteSpark program to build inroads with the Web crowd, but the program is unlikely to make a serious dent on LAMP's dominance.

The reason? There are some big strings attached.

Microsoft has gone after Web developers before, but products like Expressions haven't made much headway with Web developers, as The Seattle Times reports.

WebsiteSpark, following on the heels of successful student (DreamSpark) and start-up (BizSpark) technology seeding programs, will likely make more of a dent. Free, high-quality tools to Web developers, as TechCrunch suggests, are going to be a big win.

But it's not going to be enough.

The problem isn't one of cost. At least, not primarily. WebsiteSpark has that nailed. The program gives thousands of dollars of technology away for just $100 at the end of three years, and then two options ($999 per year for everything or a scaled down $199 per year option) that aren't much more expensive.

But this overlooks the larger issue: Microsoft constrains who can join the program (start-ups with fewer than 10 employees) and meters their growth after the three years. Open-source alternatives do neither.

The first constraint isn't a big deal. Many aspiring Googles have fewer than 10 employees, and will continue to be small through their first few years.

The second, however, is the killer. At the end of the three years, Microsoft doesn't require WebsiteSpark participants to buy anything, but if the start-up is successful, it faces big bills as it scales out its Microsoft technology. This wouldn't be a big problem if there were no free alternatives that offer equal or better performance. But there are.

Microsoft tries to spin the open-source LAMP alternative as disjointed, and further argues it is a more expensive development path, and even that Microsoft offers better Web performance than LAMP-based development.

But this isn't the way the Facebooks of the world see it. They view the open-source LAMP stack as the proven, scalable winner in Web development. Microsoft can't match that with a price tag.

LAMP gives Web developers control over their destiny, both in terms of source code (they can finely tune LAMP to fit their needs) and in terms of cost (they need not pay anyone to scale out). They may choose to pay someone like Red Hat or MySQL for a support subscription, but at scale, companies like Google simply don't. They have the expertise in-house to support themselves.

But that's at scale. The problem remains, however, for Microsoft, that many of those sub-10-employee shops are dreaming of being Google, not being a mom-and-pop shop forever. So, if they're seeing thousands of servers in their future, tying themselves to the Microsoft stack, with all the license fees associated with it, is going to look like a poor decision.

Most companies will fail. Most of the rest will remain small. Rationally, most of these small start-ups, then, should be content to get Microsoft's technology for a song, assuming they don't care about the flexibility that comes from LAMP.

The other side is that with open source--which many of these Web developers will have picked up while at school or just on their own--there are no barriers to how the developer wants to use the software. Ultimately, Microsoft's WebsiteSpark requires Web developers to color within the lines that Microsoft dictates. That may be well and good for a big population of developers, but it's not the path that Digg, Google, Facebook, etc., have taken.

Microsoft is huge in enterprise computing, in part because it lowers the cost and complexity of development for enterprises of any size. But the Web is built on open source. Microsoft is playing catch-up in this market, and it's simply not going to be enough to wave great tools in front of developers for a low fee.

Microsoft isn't alone in making such a pitch. Oracle, for its part, is touting the development of OraTweet, a Twitter clone built with Oracle Application Express Web development platform. But the reality is that enterprise ISVs like Oracle and Microsoft are largely invisible in Web development.

This is one reason Oracle is interested in picking up MySQL, the leading Web database. MySQL is almost entirely complementary, not competitive, to Oracle's enterprise-focused database.

Microsoft, however, has no such plans to buy its way into the open-source development community, which means it must rely on programs like WebsiteSpark to catch up. It's a start-up, but it's not enough.

As cloud computing edges its way into the enterprise, the open-source Apache Hadoop project may well prove to be the poster child of the movement. Hadoop effectively gives enterprises the power of Google or Yahoo Web indexing for free, or for the cost of a CloudEra subscription if you want to involve Hadoop's core developers in your rollout. Credit card giant Visa is an early corporate adopter of Hadoop, and points to a bright future for the open-source project.

I caught up with Visa's Joe Cunningham, head of the technology strategy and innovation group, to talk about the company's adoption of Hadoop.

Q: What got you interested in Hadoop initially and how long have you been using Hadoop?
Joe Cunningham: It's early days for us here at VISA for Hadoop. It's still very much classified as a research and development activity.

My role is the head of technology strategy and research and development for the company. Our task is to look outside the company for interesting technologies on the landscape and identify potential opportunities for those technologies to add value to either the VISA business of VISA technology and then bring them in and play with them in our lab research environment until they are ready for mainstream or commercial activity.

Hadoop is one of those technologies we've been looking at for about a year and we think it offers certain value as an augmentation to existing systems and capabilities VISA has.

Q: How do you use Hadoop at VISA? What made you think it could be the best solution for what you're trying to accomplish?
Cunningham: The most important thing to remember is VISA obviously has a heritage of offerings--very large, very scalable, very reliable, and very secure services to the payments industry. And we're continuously trying to innovate and make those services more valuable to our clients and ultimately to cardholders.

We have a data challenge we attempt to meet every day in terms of the number of transactions we handle and therefore we think there's an opportunity to look at the skills VISA already has in the data analytics space with the power of Hadoop to handle very, very, very large volumes of data.

To put that in context, we handle approximately 200 million transactions a day at VISA. That works out to be about 8,000 transactions a second, and with that comes huge volumes of data and Hadoop offers the potential to harness some of that along with some of our existing capabilities to extract more value from those transactions.

We have a data challenge we attempt to meet every day...[and] think there's an opportunity to look at the skills VISA already has in the data analytics space with the power of Hadoop to handle very, very, very large volumes of data.

--Joe Cunningham, VISA

Q: Are there particular directions in which you'd like to see Hadoop evolve?
Cunningham: I think we're interested in looking at Hadoop and looking at its evolution over time. We're certainly interested in how the Hadoop community continues to operate in this open-source environment.

My specific interest is how can Hadoop evolve from the alpha beta environment in which it is today to the mainstream and how can we continue to integrate it as a mainstream technology with all the existing platforms we have here at VISA.

I'll give you two examples. The operations management space is very important to us: how we guarantee the reliability and security of our systems and how Hadoop can be merged or integrated into that environment. And secondly, and I guess this is a common question, but how can we enable SQL-like access to some of the data via the Hadoop file system or via the Hadoop engine?

Q: Given that it's still early days for Hadoop at Visa, it's interesting that you're speaking at the upcoming Hadoop World conference, along with JP Morgan Chase, China Mobile, and other Hadoop users that may be further along the adoption curve. What are you going to be talking about?
Cunningham: I plan to talk about the application stream, so I'll be taking a business-focused view of how we see Hadoop offering value to Visa. If there are tech junkies in the room, they are probably not going to be as interested in what I talk about.

I plan to spend a little bit of time showcasing Visa's technology today to set the scene. I will talk a little bit about our research and development function and how it works with the rest of Visa. Then I'll spend some time expanding on what I call our information products business.

The information products business for Visa offers services to our clients that are, obviously, information-based. So, some of the use cases where we see Hadoop potentially offering value in the future are in the areas of transaction analysis (particularly for risk products and the modeling of risk scenarios), fraud analysis (assisting our clients in potentially managing fraud more carefully), and in the loyalty space where Visa offers services on behalf of our clients to cardholders.

There's an opportunity for us to combine the power of Hadoop with data analytics capabilities that Visa has to augment those services and products on behalf of our clients.

In fact, that's an area that I'm hoping to learn a lot at the event. In some industries, Hadoop is very much mainstream but for some others, it's still emerging and I'm trying to understand whereabouts on that hockey stick or [Gartner] Hype Cycle Hadoop is, or whether Hadoop is already mainstream and it's just a matter of us catching up.

It's always good to gauge and plot that evolution. I think you need to get to these events and talk to other companies and key leaders in the community to really understand where we fit and what we should be doing next at Visa.

For those interested in attending Hadoop World in New York, the organizers are giving Open Road readers a 25 percent discount if you register by September 24.

The best open-source projects have little problem with adoption. Their problem, increasingly, centers on monetization of their popularity. From Drupal to MySQL to Audacity, sometimes the best things in life truly are free...which can be a problem. The solution, however, may be cloud computing.

I've articulated this before, but theory met reality this past week with announcements from DimDim, an open-source Web conferencing provider, and Acquia, the focal point for Drupal support and value-adding services. Both have interesting new cloud strategies that promise to deliver customer value while funding the vendors' payroll.

DimDim, as TechCrunch reports, recently launched DimDim Webinar, a hosted webinar service targeting small and medium-size businesses (SMBs). The service "is accompanied by a couple of helpful resources that guide organizers through the necessary steps to monetize and analyze the performance of their webinars," making it easy to set up and track the value of the webinars. This is just the sort of offering my own company (an SMB) would find useful.

Acquia, for its part, isn't really targeting its new Drupal Hosting to the SMB market, instead focusing on helping companies "scale [their] site[s] to millions of page views, and more if necessary." While small and midsize businesses will undoubtedly also sign up, Acquia's service promises to be a great way to minimize the IT investment required to successfully deploy Drupal-based websites.

In both cases, DimDim and Acquia are improving upon their open-source code offerings...by making the code somewhat irrelevant.

Some, like Gartner, warn that cloud computing threatens to undermine the appeal of open source. But this is only a problem if open-source communities fail to offer cloud-computing options, as SugarCRM has, options that also include source code in case the buyer ever wants off the cloud.

Recent data from the United Kingdom suggests that cloud computing promises to be a winner for Microsoft alternatives like Google Apps. There's no reason that open-source companies can't also benefit from this shift. Microsoft has billions of dollars in profits tied to its 'desktop' dominance. Open source does not.

Open-source companies should be leading the shift to cloud computing. Some, like Red Hat, clearly are, with Red Hat actively seeking to become the platform for cloud computing, just as it's the dominant Linux platform for Linux server-based computing in the enterprise.

Cloud computing is the fulfillment of much of the marketing behind open-source software, promising to shift value to services and away from software. DimDim and Acquia are two examples of open-source companies that "get it" and will marry the best of cloud computing with open source.

They're among the first. They won't be the last.

Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.

Drupal is a fantastic Web publishing platform that derives much of its value from a disparate community of contributors, as Xconomy recently wrote. With more than 4,000 contributed modules from over 3,000 active contributors (741 of which contribute to Drupal Core), Drupal has something for everyone, which is both its greatest asset and biggest liability.

Choice is good. Too much choice, however, can be bad.

The same holds true for Red Hat, which charges a premium for its Red Hat Enterprise Linux distribution to enterprises that want to tap into Linux but don't want the bother of rolling their own version of Linux from Kernel.org.

The problem, however, is that such a business model depends upon the complexity of the underlying platform. If that complexity goes away, does the business model?

The Drupal-focused company Acquia is thriving because deploying Drupal, what with its myriad of choices, can be complex. Ditto for Red Hat. There are thousands of packages that comprise Linux, making it worthwhile to pay a trusted guide like Red Hat.

But Red Hat CTO Brian Stevens suggests that "you need product complexity" to make its model work. Does this mean that Red Hat and Acquia will be hitting the unemployment lines if they do their jobs too well, and Drupal and Linux become too easy to use?

I don't believe so, but that is certainly one way to read IDC data that shows unpaid Linux adoption is now outpacing commercial Linux adoption, which has the potential to disrupt Red Hat, Novell, Canonical, and other Linux vendors.

It's less an issue, however, for Acquia, which has been rolling out for-free software and services to augment Drupal, including enterprise-class search. Acquia's Drupal distribution teases the complexity out of Drupal, but it also extends beyond Drupal with enterprise-only features. It is therefore well-positioned to foster the Drupal community while simultaneously feeding its top and bottom lines.

For this reason, I believe Acquia's model has more staying power, though it has a long way to go before it generates Red Hat's nearly $1 billion in annual revenues. Acquia's model allows it to thrive even if Drupal becomes easy, and also affords the company greater latitude to enter new markets, like the application market, where product complexity is not as much of an issue.

Red Hat, on the other hand, must resolutely focus on core infrastructure, an area of the software stack that is naturally prone to such complexity, because of its adherence to its complexity-dependent business model.

Both models are generating impressive returns. But Acquia's open-source model seems to offer more potential in the long term than Red Hat's does.

Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.

It's increasingly difficult to separate "open-source vendors" from "proprietary vendors," but Demandware, a proprietary software-as-a-service (SaaS) vendor, is attempting to do so in an effort to stem the rising tide of Magento, an open-source e-commerce project. Demandware's criticism of Magento largely falls flat, however, because it uses outdated descriptions of open source.

Demandware walks through a litany of complaints about open source--requires too many developers! forces you to upgrade your software all by yourself! forking and fragmentation!--but none hit the mark. Why? Because each is only somewhat accurate of the state of open source 10 years ago. As a critique of open source today, and specifically of Magento, Demandware's criticisms fall short.

There is a big difference between community open source and commercial open source, not to mention a diverse array of quality even within the "community" or "commercial" open-source areas. Some of Demandware's critiques might be true of certain community-led open-source projects, but they seem wildly off-base for any of the more popular projects, including Magento.

Unfortunately for Demandware, it turns out that open-source vendors care just as much about quality, stability, performance, etc. as proprietary vendors do. The difference is that open-source vendors shift the risk of deployment onto themselves rather than foisting it onto customers.

Equally unfortunate for Demandware, most of the leading open-source projects are increasingly under vendor guidance and control, as Gartner finds. This means that Demandware's complaints are relevant only to a dwindling population of open-source projects.

What's particularly ironic (and a bit galling) is that Demandware, after spending so much time criticizing open source, then goes on to describe its own software as...open source:

Much of our software stack--operating system, application servers, etc.--is open source. But we build a commercial SaaS platform on top of it and do all the heavy lifting for our customers.

How interesting. This sounds much like the model that Varien, the company behind Magento, uses. In fact, it describes the commercial open-source business model: give away a free and open-source version of the software but then charge customers for additional packaging, support, etc.

Fortunately, prospective customers of Demandware don't need to take the company's word for it on Magento. As open source, they can download it for free to see if it works for them. The same cannot be said for Demandware. If you're interested in evaluating Demandware, it appears that you've got just one choice: contact the company and let it start the sales machine:

Apparently Magento is good enough to sell itself. But you won't hear that from the Demandware sales representative.

Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.

What is the value of an open-source asset? Over the past several years, and most recently with SpringSource, we've seen a number of open-source companies acquired at valuations of 10x or better. Did the buyers get their money's worth?

It's a tricky question to answer--and likely depends upon far more data than I have at my disposal. It also depends on the acquiring company executing, which has not been the case with Yahoo (which bought Zimbra) or Sun Microsystems (which bought MySQL). No open-source company can offer a panacea for an acquiring company's failure to execute.

But after talking with a range of the companies involved, it would appear that the answer is "yes"--open-source acquisitions are paying good dividends.

Consider:

• JBoss, bought by Red Hat for $350 million at a valuation 15 times sales (i.e., a 15x valuation), has gone on to grow twice as fast as Red Hat's core Linux business and is the key to its ability to sell strategic value to CIOs, rather than simply commodity Linux servers.
• XenSource, inarguably the richest acquisition at 166x, was doubling its customer count every quarter at the time Citrix bought it for $500 million. This would be less significant except that the company had already pulled in 1,000 customers. Compounding that number...? That sort of growth is hard to hard and continues to feed Citrix today. XenSource's valuation was overly rich but then, it was bought on the heels of VMware's explosive IPO. Some valuation hubris was to be expected.
• Zimbra, which Yahoo paid $350 million to acquire, has largely been buried in the belly of a company that has yet to figure out what it wants to do when it grows up (and out of Google's shadow). Even so, the company, which was doing north of $20 million at the time of acquisition, continues to grow quarter after quarter. Yahoo may not know what to do with Zimbra, but Zimbra's customers apparently do: buy more.
• And then there's MySQL. Ironically, Sun's $1 billion acquisition of MySQL, which was ridiculed as dramatically rich in valuation, has the lowest multiple of the lot, given that MySQL recorded sales of over $90 million the year it was acquired. Despite Sun's myriad problems over the past year, MySQL is growing, recording some of its best quarters ever.

Open-source assets, then, are growth assets. And their growth appears to be hard to check, even in cases of significant mismanagement. Perhaps this is the nature of open source: the company behind it may falter, but ultimately, the success of the project is only a download away, provided that the development community remains vibrant (and, in each of the examples above, it has).

So long as development continues, so will downloads. If downloads continue, there really should be no reason that a company can't benefit from it. It may derive substantial or anemic benefits, but it should benefit.

Looking around, it's hard to find a company that, on balance, isn't happy with its open-source investments. If open source didn't work, we'd expect to see companies exit, but in addition to the companies mentioned above, Oracle (Sleepycat), IBM (Gluecode), Cisco (Jabber), and others have increasingly bought into open source, and none shows any signs of abating its interest in increasing its open-source activities.

One might think that buying an open-source asset, rich in adoption but relatively light in monetization, would be a poor investment. Based on the data I've seen, however, this supposition is wrong.

Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.

There are times when I think open source is an unstoppable force. And then there's OpenGoo.

OpenGoo declares its mission to be to "make the best Web Office. Period." But then it proceeds to undermine every benefit that a true Web office productivity application, like Google Docs, provides to its users. Like the Web, for starters.

That's right. The first thing that struck me when trying to use OpenGoo (aside from its rather unfortunate name, which is yet another reminder that marketing is an essential function, not an afterthought, for open-source projects) was the download page.

Download page?!? I thought this was a Web office productivity suite. Why would I want to download an application?

I never found out. Once I had downloaded and unzipped the file(!?), I was greeted with this:

I tried finding the application launcher, but couldn't. More pertinently, why should I? It's a Web application, right?

I finally gave up and used the demo, instead. It works fine, though it's nowhere near as polished as Google Docs, and still left me wondering, "Why do I care, as a lay consumer, that this is open source?"

Yes, there is value in having access to source code should OpenGoo go down (particularly as it appears one is meant to install and run OpenGoo inside the enterprise firewall, which sort of defeats the purpose of it being a "Web Office," but...). But would open source make OpenGoo a more resilient service, in the way that some are (wrongly) claiming open source would make Twitter more impervious to denial-of-service attacks?

Of course not.

The OpenGoo site brags that by using OpenGoo, "you are free of vendor lock-in." But I would gladly trade a little lock-in for some ease of use.

There is tremendous value in open source, but the OpenGoo developers have mistaken where it begins and ends. Open source should be invisible to the end users that care about a Web-based office productivity suite. By making it a feature, OpenGoo demonstrates misunderstanding of its audience.

Zoho also uses a lot of open source, but it doesn't sell open source as a feature. This is probably why you've heard of Zoho but, until this article, you likely hadn't heard of OpenGoo.

UPDATE @ 12:12 PT on 8/18/09: My post above was written in some haste, which prevented me from adequately explaining my points. I apologize for the confusion. I understand (and clearly implied) that OpenGoo is not a direct competitor to Google Docs, as it's meant to be run behind the firewall (i.e., it's an on-premises installation, not a cloud application).

But this, as I noted, is its biggest deficiency (well, after the name). It is neither fish (locally installed Microsoft Office) nor fowl (cloud-based Google Docs), and so it's unclear what value, if any, it provides, simply on architecture/installation alone.

No one is going to beat Microsoft Office with a light upgrade in deployment options, least of all OpenGoo, which I continue to find underwhelming in its UI and feature set. Open source is unlikely to improve on this. Given how much OpenOffice has struggled to attract significant development from outside Novell and Sun, in part because the development community isn't interested in rebuilding Microsoft Office (why would it? I doubt many developers have a Microsoft Office "itch" to scratch).

So, OpenGoo isn't Google Docs and doesn't want to be. What does it want to be? The premier Web Office, according to its website. It's not, as I note above and underline emphatically here, because it's light on Web and not innovative in its approach to Office.

I apologize for my hastily written post, but OpenGoo doesn't get any better on further reflection.

Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.