Even as CIOs accelerate adoption of open source in an effort to trim costs and improve innovation, the world's top system integrators (SIs) have largely played it safe on the sidelines. Accenture, given its close partnership with Microsoft, has perhaps been one of the most conservative SIs when it comes to open source.
Or so it has appeared. Despite a partnership with SpringSource, an open-source infrastructure leader, Accenture's open-source activities have largely gone unnoticed. Even Accenture's Innovation Center for Open Source, a collaboration with Red Hat and other open-source vendors, was more whispered about than promoted.
I caught up with Alex Wied, senior manager at Accenture and head of its Innovation Center for Open Source, and Tony Roby, partner in Accenture's Global Architecture and Core Technologies group, to find out what, exactly, Accenture has been doing with open source, and how the global consulting firm expects to use open source going forward. They collaborated on the answers to my questions below.
Accenture is not the first company that comes to mind when one thinks of open source. After all, you have a joint venture with Microsoft and have been pretty quiet on open source. Is open source alive and well at Accenture? If so, what are the areas of focus for Accenture?
I'm curious to find out why that is the case! Accenture has strong relationships with many leading technology companies--that is what our clients expect.
Open source is growing within both Accenture and our client base. We continue to be substantial users of open source, particularly in custom Java development, and our focus is expanding beyond this space to cover the gamut of open source portals, content management, business intelligence and data management. We also continue to contribute to open-source projects where we expect the results to benefit our clients.
Is open source client-led or Accenture-led? Meaning, are your customers asking for it or are you embracing open-source solutions for your own reasons? If so, what are those reasons? If clients are asking for it, what reasons do they cite?
It's a mixture. There is a tremendous amount of education still to be done regarding open source. We have clients who still have policies not to use open source at all; others who want to use open source wherever possible. But the majority is in between: they are open to using whatever makes most sense from a technical and commercial perspective.
What is clear is that the current economy is driving many who were ambivalent about open source to explore its potential more closely. Regardless of the economic environment, Accenture is a strong open-source advocate and will continue to work with our clients to help them achieve business benefits with it.
Is "vendor lock-in" a serious concern for your clients? If they had to choose between zero cost and 100 percent lock-in or a hefty cost and no lock-in, which would they choose? Or is that even a fair question?
Yes and no. No one wants to be locked in, particularly if that lock in results in ever-increasing expenditure that is disconnected from the value being realized.
But our clients in general look for a balance. "One throat to choke" is high up in the requirements for making major technology investments and is often prioritized over "lock-in." Also, in the context of very large projects, the cost of the software compared to everything else is frequently a small part of the equation.
Nevertheless, we are seeing a noticeable increase in the use of open source, driven largely by the "free" aspect. Few are fooled by the notion of open source being free (as in no cost): lower cost, flexibility and the ability to be supported at modest cost are key drivers of the increased uptake.
Are there particular open-source projects that are of interest to you/Accenture? Which ones, and why?
We do a lot of work with the Spring Framework, so I would say that has historically had the bulk of our interest. That said, we have people active in a number of community projects and we are making increasing use of Alfresco, Liferay, and Talend, to name a few in the technology area.
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I spent some time talking with an Accenture veteran this morning, and came away with an intriguing idea: enable open-source projects to provide corporate benefits like health insurance to their developers so that they can ditch their day jobs to focus on their open-source passion.
If you've ever started a small business, you know that getting "enterprise-grade" benefits like health insurance is very difficult. At Alfresco, for example, we ultimately joined a PEO (Professional Employer Organization) called Trinet [PDF], which aggregates many smaller companies to negotiate insurance plans with companies like Blue Cross Blue Shield that would normally not consider providing small companies insurance.
Yes, individuals can get insurance, but it tends to be very expensive to go it alone.
In the recession there will be an increasing number of people that lose their jobs, but there will also be a rising number of enterprises that need to maintain legacy systems, build new ones, and otherwise drive innovation and productivity while cutting costs. As more companies turn to open source for this benefit, why couldn't open-source projects "employ" more of their developers to provide basic corporate benefits like health insurance?
Developers would pay into the project a nominal fee/commission on services rendered to cover the project's cost of administrative overhead. But the developer would take care of financial arrangements with the end-customer. The project would simply be an administrator of benefits like health insurance and would be responsible for maintaining the brand.
This would enable more developers to have flexibility, benefits, and an organization to help improve their personal brands. It would also lead to better open-source software. It would enable a Maven developer, for example, to spend even more time working on Maven without going hungry.
Ultimately, a consulting organization like Accenture really is nothing more than an aggregation of personal brands, one that serves as a pseudo-guarantee of quality to a customer. When General Mills hires Accenture, it's doing so to ensure a steady, predictable stream of quality services.
Open-source projects can provide this Accenture-like benefit, as well. What am I missing? Is this a bad idea or does it have potential?
Sometimes "free" is not so free.
I recently discovered this when a large, global system integrator (SI) deployed Alfresco Labs, our free and unsupported product, for a large client in Europe. The SI wasn't a partner of ours, and as the client soon learned when its deployment stumbled, the SI wasn't capable of providing enterprise-class support on the product. Yes, it knew the product well enough to deploy it and get paid over $50 million for its trouble, but when the deployment hit a glitch, guess to whom the SI came crawling for help?
It's not just my company. I know of another global SI that has deployed well over 100 Mule ESB instances, without buying support through MuleSource for its clients for a single one of them. If something goes wrong with those installations, the enterprise clients are going to end up paying a premium for the SI to figure out how to resolve the problems on the client's dime, never mind potential indemnification issues.
Not all SIs act like this, at least not all the time. My own company works closely with Satyam, SAIC, Booz Allen Hamilton, and others, and Accenture sells supported instances of the Spring Framework, but this is the exception to the rule for the large SIs, many of which seem happy to deploy open-source software for their clients without buying support or production-grade versions of the software.
Such SIs seem to believe that life has started raining free lunches.
This is a myopic way to do business, as the large SI in my initial example found: in that example, spending $50,000 (in the midst of a $50 million project) would have saved the SI the embarrassment and cost of trying to support a product that experience proved it didn't know nearly as well as it thought it did. The SI risked the success of a $50 million project to boost its margins by $50,000, only to find that one problem with the software ended up costing it and the client far more than $50,000.
If you're an enterprise looking for a strong SI on a project, here are a few things to consider:
... Read moreIn an example of the real news lurking behind the press release, SpringSource and Accenture have announced that they are teaming up to provide an open-source batch processing solution to the market:
Accenture and SpringSource on Tuesday will unveil a production-ready version of Spring Batch, an open source framework for batch processing. The framework enables large organizations to use open source software to develop customized batch processing applications, the companies said. Spring Batch already is in use at more than 35 Accenture clients...
That's ostensibly the news (though it's really a year old), but I actually think there's something much more significant in play: Accenture is actually partnering with an open-source company, rather than just deploying the open-source software.
Open source is nothing new to Accenture and other global system integrators. Indeed, Accenture uses a large and increasing amount of open source in its business.
What is new is the "novel" idea of helping the company behind the project actually get paid. The SpringSource announcement is the only real record you'll find of Accenture partnering with an open-source company, despite widespread deployment of open-source software by Accenture.
... Read moreCMS Watch has an interesting article that asks whether systems integrators are the neutral parties that they sometimes make themselves out to be. According to a US federal government suit against Accenture, the answer is "No."
As CMS Watch notes:
[T]he U.S. Department of Justice is suing Accenture for allegedly receiving kickback-like payments from technology suppliers it recommended and/or implemented at DOJ. The alleged fraud was a collusion with big-name IT suppliers (e.g., HP, Sun) and smaller vendors (e.g., Vignette) to defraud the Government.
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