There was a time when vendors knew how to color inside the lines. A database vendor sold databases. An operating system vendor peddled operating systems. And application server vendors were in the business of selling application servers.
Customers knew what "application server" meant, which is what paved the way for low-cost, high-value open-source application servers like JBoss, Geronimo, and others to arise. The category was well understood. The only thing the customer had to decide was whether she wished to overspend on a brand-name application server or buy into an open-source upstart.
As the economy continues to pressure IT budgets, a new breed of application server is rising, one that doesn't color nicely within the lines of the traditional "app server" definition.
First there was SpringSource, which in April 2008 claimed it had developed the first "proper Java application server" to hit the market in more than 10 years. IBM, Oracle, and Red Hat (JBoss) must have found this surprising, given that "proper Java application servers" were what they presumed to be selling to their customers.
SpringSource, pressing the issue further, this week announced Spring Roo, an "interactive, lightweight, user-customizable tooling that enables rapid delivery of high-performance enterprise Java applications." At just 4MB, Spring Roo is tiny, but its promise is big: "working applications within 10 minutes of finishing the download" (video here).
Red Hat is taking notice of SpringSource's moves, but SpringSource founder Rod Johnson is dismissive of Red Hat's ability to compete:
Red Hat recently announced a defensive move (JBoss Open Choice strategy) motivated by trying to play catch-up with SpringSource. Clearly the momentum of SpringSource tc Server and dm Server has Red Hat worried, along with the continued advance of the Spring Framework as the de facto standard component model for enterprise Java.
The "JBoss Open Choice strategy" appears to be a repackaging, rather than new technology, which attempts to position JBoss as still relevant in a brave new world of changing requirements. On a positive note, it appears Red Hat has finally realized that many developers and customers have long since moved away from the full Java EE stack; that the traditional heavyweight application server has declined in importance; and that the Spring programming model is important to their customer base.
The paint is barely dry on JBoss' incursion into IBM's and Oracle's application server territory, and already it's under attack from SpringSource, which is positioning JBoss as old technology, despite barely being out of its teens. It's a sharp attack, but perhaps a sign of open-source competition to come.
Consider MindTouch. The entire idea of a Java application server got a shaking this week from MindTouch, which announced a new application packaging feature for its collaboration platform, as TechCrunch reports. This feature:
(A)llows developers to create a compressed file for import into other MindTouch instances, letting enterprise users install add-on applications easily. This addition represents MindTouch's ambitions to become an application platform where installing applications (is) as easy as adding Firefox add-ons.
This may not sound very groundbreaking, until you consider that MindTouch is essentially announcing that it has turned the wiki into an application platform. Until last year MindTouch was mostly known for its DekiWiki technology. This application-packaging technology basically allows customers to build on wiki collaboration, which is much more than just a MediaWiki-style wiki, as ReadWriteWeb notes.
Neither SpringSource nor MindTouch fit the old application server mold, but it's not clear customers should care. Enterprises just want to get work done.
Just as Google is shaking up e-mail with Wave and Wolfram Alpha is redefining a corner of search, so too are SpringSource and MindTouch redefining what application server means for the modern enterprise, while open-source companies like Acquia redefine Web content management, Marketcetera pushes the envelope on financial trading platforms, etc.
Open source is the new innovator, and not merely the commodifying force in the market.
Indeed, with traditional software markets perhaps reaching a critical saturation point, we may see much more "coloring outside the lines" in enterprise software from open-source projects and companies. Oracle's response has been to consolidate, but others seem to be responding with a different strategy: innovation.
Disclosure: I am an adviser to MindTouch. Red Hat is a business partner. Acquia is in some ways a competitor.
Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.
In May, I reported on the rising fortunes of Funambol, Mozilla, and other open-source companies. Signs of "green shoots" notwithstanding, the economy doesn't seem to be getting any better, but open-source companies continue to log impressive growth as open source pervades the enterprise, as Forrester analyst Jeffrey Hammond (@jhammond) recently noted.
Importantly, according to Hammond, while open source starts as a cost-saving exercise, it often morphs into something far more strategic:
[O]rganizations tend to start [with the goal of saving money with open source]. And then what tends to happen is the more that they become comfortable with using open source, and the more that they apply it successfully, the more they start to realize that there are benefits other than cost savings that they can take advantage of. And that's when you start to see them turn from open source opportunists into open source advocates.
Those "advocates" are funding the payrolls of a range of open-source companies. Here are just a few examples of those benefiting from this enterprise shift to open source:
- The VAR Guy (@thevarguy) reports that both xTuple and Sopera are profitable. While he doesn't comment on how much they're doing in sales, profitability is, in itself, a significant achievement. (Alfresco, my company, is also profitable, and I'm sure there are others. Please let me know.)
- Likewise, an open-source authentication and identity management company, announced that it is on track to record 100-percent sales growth in 2009. We'll call that a "pre-announcement."
- MuleSource, an open-source Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) company, reported "another record for the company, with a 140 percent year-over-year increase in quarterly bookings and over 100 percent growth for the year-to-date period."
- MindTouch, not to be outdone, also issued a release highlighting its revenue growth (without giving any gee-whiz statistics but did us the favor of providing a pretty graph). More interesting, however, is MindTouch CEO Aaron Fulkerson's (@roebot) review of the various things the company has done right and wrong in commercializing its open-source collaboration project (Spoiler: favoring an enterprise build over a "community build" via stability and support is a bad idea).
(Credit:
MindTouch)
- Meanwhile, though not financial reports, it's encouraging to see Kuali adoption take off in earnest within higher education. "The colleges involved say they have the potential to achieve millions in savings while gaining more control over technology systems that are essential to the smooth functioning of their institutions." Nice.
- Also, a member of the Perl community looks to Canonical's Ubuntu in search of a solid revenue model for Perl. Interesting read, though I'd probably look to foundations that have proved their financial mettle like Mozilla and Eclipse before I'd emulate Ubuntu, however much I may respect what Canonical is doing with Ubuntu.
Unfortunately, most open-source companies are private so the "earnings" reports are somewhat self-serving and mostly unverifiable. Still, it's good to hear of growth in the midst of a weak economic climate.
Disclosure: I am an adviser to MindTouch and MuleSource. I'll gladly report on other financial successes in the open-source world if you care to send them to me....
Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.
A bad economy is good for open source, goes the increasingly conventional wisdom. However, while it's undoubtedly a good time to be in the market with a low-cost, high-value alternative to proprietary software, there are tell-tale signs that the recession isn't blessing all open-source companies equally.
Ross Mayfield, co-founder of Socialtext
For example, at the Enterprise 2.0 conference on Tuesday Socialtext founder Ross Mayfield declared, in the words of a conference attendee via Twitter, that Socialtext's first quarter "sucked" and that its "pipeline collapsed." Socialtext, once described as a highflier in a "sizzling market," has apparently come down to earth.
Or has it? Is this a one-time blip for Socialtext? While Socialtext CEO Eugene Lee announced layoffs in April as the company looked to cut expenses, Mayfield on Tuesday declared that the company's second quarter looks strong. Even the best companies can slip in a brutal market.
Or perhaps Sociatext is fighting a weakness in enterprise collaboration ROI (return on investment) and demand, rather than open source?
If that were true, one would expect all companies in Socialtext's space to be hit equally, but this hasn't been the case. During this same first quarter, Socialtext competitor MindTouch experienced double-digit growth, while Microsoft's proprietary SharePoint product also continued to boom. (Disclosure: I am an adviser to MindTouch.)
I suspect Socialtext experienced a road bump, not a barricade. The difference is that, in true open-source style, Mayfield was candid about the slip up.
Open source remains alive and well. It's important to remember, however, that this doesn't mean every open-source company will do well.
Open source is not magic pixie dust that makes bad companies good. It's not a cure for the common recession. Companies still need to execute well, regardless of their licensing strategy. And, importantly, the wrong open-source licensing model can handicap a company, making it harder to profit from a project's popularity.
The recession, in short, will sift good companies from bad, whether open source or proprietary. As for Socialtext, its fate will not be decided by a single quarter. It's in a good market with a good model. It should do fine.
Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.
I thought of just Tweeting a few of these news bits, but some deserve to be blogged. Alas! I lack the time today but....
- Joomla has surpassed 10,000,000 downloads. It's hard to describe just how impressive this is, and particularly given the fact that these have come in the past four years, and after a fractious fork from Mambo.
- The University of Southern Mississippi and the Department of Homeland Security's Science and Technology Directorate have launched the Homeland Open Security Technology (HOST) program, along with Open Source Software Institute (OSSI) and the U.S. Navy, to invest $1.5 million in the development of open-source technology.
- A new report from Gartner suggests 42 percent of CIOs surveyed chopped their IT budgets in the first quarter of the year. Less budget almost certainly will mean more open source.
- MindTouch (Disclosure: I am an advisor to MindTouch) CEO Aaron Fulkerson asks what's the big deal with Google's new Wave collaborative platform, given that wiki technology (like MindTouch's Dekiwiki) has been "waving" for years. Rafael Laguna, Open-XChange CEO, agrees. I still think Wave is cool.
- Speaking of Google, the company recently launched Page Speed, an open-source Firefox add-on that "web developers can use...to evaluate the performance of their web pages and to get suggestions on how to improve them. Google continues to demonstrate ever-stronger commitment to feeding the open-source community.
- Given that no one has yet settled on the optimal open-source code contribution model, MySQL developer Brian Aker discusses the Drizzle fork of MySQL and how he and the project team is handling third-party contributions to it. Very interesting insight into code contribution policies, copyright assignment, etc.
- Acer, meanwhile, is crippling its Android Netbooks by having them dual-boot Windows. I don't have anything against Windows (well, that's not really true...), but this seems like an exercise in futility. If customers want Windows, give it to them. If they want the lower price (and different experience) of Linux, give that to them. But don't give them both, or they'll likely revert to Windows out of sheer habit.
- Cloudera CEO Mike Olson indicates that Web applications are just the beginning for Hadoop. Indeed, Cloudera's easier-to-use commercial version of Hadoop is doing so well that Cloudera had to raise another $6 million just to keep up. Fortune, for one, thinks that Hadoop might be perfect to help power the electrical power grid.
- Back in Redmond, Microsoft is coming under increased pressure from the European Commission, reports The Register, which may force Microsoft to offer rival browsers with Windows. Microsoft probably feels pretty beleaguered, but Roy Schestowitz offers up some data that indicates it's spending its free time pressuring European groups to side with it. It doesn't seem to be working.
- Finally, Oracle executives didn't mince words in a town hall meeting with Sun employees, stipulating that some tough choices will be made about Sun technology and personnel. Indeed.
When I first saw the headline "MindTouch and SnapLogic Announce Deki for CRM to Enhance the Value of Leading CRM Solutions," I didn't think much of it. Despite being an adviser to MindTouch and watching SnapLogic for the past few years, I couldn't get excited. How sexy can it be to "enhance the value" of SugarCRM and Salesforce.com?
Reading through the press release, it became much more interesting. My company uses SugarCRM, and the idea of connecting SugarCRM with our accounts payable system (through SnapLogic) and integrating the ability to take free-form wiki notes in SugarCRM's set page structures made a lot of sense to me.
Suddenly my team would be able to see what our customers were doing after the sale: when they were invoiced and when they paid. We'd be able to take deeper notes on account activity. And we'd be able to see information in our CRM system that we'd never otherwise see or, at least, not in context.
Consider: sales guy calls lead and as he's talking he notices in his Deki-enhanced SugarCRM account page commentary from the lead's executive management in a blog and/or Twitter talking about an issue related to the sales guy's product. He mentions it, develops a rapport and clearly sells his value proposition against that executive commentary, and closes the deal as a result.
This is, in fact, a true story from MindTouch's sales team, and it's the sort of thing I'd love to see within SugarCRM. It makes CRM a flexible, living business tool, something that is more than simply a record of past transactions and instead a glimpse into the future.
Unfortunately for IBM Global Services and other consulting organizations that make a lot of money on complex software, Deki and SnapLogic's CRM solution is easy to deploy. Drag-and-drop easy. Maybe HP should return EDS before all software becomes this useful and easy to set up and administer.
Disclosure: I am on the advisory board for MindTouch.
Double disclosure: I really, really like the latest release of MindTouch Deki (formerly "Deki Wiki").
MindTouch has always thought that a wiki should be about more than simply creating basic web pages. With its new "Kilen Woods" release, the company has significantly bent the rules as to what constitutes a wiki, and just which data sources can feed into a wiki.
LinkedIn? Yep. Salesforce.com? Sure. SugarCRM. Uh-huh.
MindTouch Deki enables businesses to connect and mashup the growing number of application and data silos that exist across an enterprise - including legacy systems, CRM and ERP applications, databases, and Web 2.0 applications....For example, MindTouch Deki can visualize content from a Microsoft SQL Server or Microsoft Access databases and mash it up with other services, such as Microsoft Live Earth or Google maps, LinkedIn and a CRM system - offering a common wiki and web-service interface for content and behavior from multiple sources.
eWeek and others have some good reviews. Me? I just like that I don't have to learn any wiki language to use it. Take a look for yourself:
... Read moreWhile it's true that open-source companies, in general, are starting from a small base of revenue and adoption, it's equally true that the real measure of any company is growth. If it's good, it will grow.
Hence, it's great to see MindTouch, a commercial open-source collaboration company, booming:
... Read more
- Over 200,000 active installs - 100 percent increase
- Installs on all major Linux distributions - 600 percent increase
- More than 3,000 registered members at the developer community - 30 percent increase
- Translated into 16 languages - 500 percent increase
Microsoft's SharePoint has now topped $1 billion in licenses and is perhaps the fastest-growing product in Microsoft's history. What is driving that growth? The same thing that has driven all of Microsoft's most successful products: Microsoft removes complexity (and cost) from existing markets, as Craig Roth notes:
To a certain extent, the excitement about SharePoint has really been a reflection of disillusionment with existing collaboration, content management, and portal products. The people that are interested in SharePoint - despite already having incumbent alternatives - see at first glance a product that may finally provide easy-to-use, inexpensive, web-based collaborative solutions.
Love them or hate them, Microsoft does lower the bar to computing. Its products can be shoddy (SharePoint is no winner in that department - just try scaling it) but that's a trade-off many are willing to make in order to have something, anything that works reasonably well at a reasonable price.
... Read more
(Credit:
Google)
Google Sites was just launched and its target is clear: Microsoft SharePoint. While it has an uphill battle--security and a lack of the complex features that SharePoint has, for example--its biggest problem is that it doesn't connect with the content production tools that most people spend their (enterprise) content-producing lives in:
Microsoft Outlook and Microsoft Office.
Of course, Google Sites is free, which will cover a multitude of other problems, especially since Microsoft SharePoint turns out to be amazingly overpriced for a Microsoft product. Microsoft has, according to CMS Wire's analysis, completely priced the SME market out of SharePoint.
... Read moreI guess it's true that you often get what you pay for. In the case of Microsoft Sharepoint, Microsoft sells licenses. That's pretty much all its users get. Info-Tech reports that some users are waiting up to six months for Microsoft's technical support team to resolve issues with the product. Six months. 180 days. A very long time to wait for a usable system.
Info-Tech surveyed 258 Sharepoint customers to see what they think of Microsoft's fast-growing product. A large majority are happy with Sharepoint's functionality and total cost of ownership. Nearly 25% say its support, however, stinks.
It turns out that customizing Sharepoint is a big problem for CIOs. Managing Sharepoint implementations, which often grow like a weed, is the other biggie:
... Read more
