The Open Road

Cisco Systems CEO John Chambers calls video "the killer app," but apparently, he hasn't been paying attention to trends on the Web, or even to his company's own emerging-collaboration story.

Video, while great, takes too long. We e-mail, instant-message, and tweet for a reason: it's short and to the point. Who has time to watch a video each them they want to communicate?

Perhaps even more critically, as Hampus Jakobsson pointed out to me (over Twitter, no less), video "requires full attention--the scarcest of all resources."

Cisco gets this. At least, groups within Cisco get this. That's why Cisco Senior Vice President Doug Dennerline's WebEx team has been adding presence and instant messaging through Jabber, e-mail through PostPath, and more to its Web-conferencing suite.

It's also why Cisco will almost certainly add some form of office productivity suite to WebEx, despite protestations to the contrary from Alex Hadden-Boyd, director of marketing for the collaboration software group at Cisco. (Apparently, Hadden-Boyd didn't see the memo from his boss, Dennerline.)

Zoho, anyone?

Zoho is a leading competitor to Google Apps and, in many areas, actually surpasses Google Apps. While some of Zoho's applications directly overlap with Cisco's current products, the sheer breadth (and, in some cases, depth) of its office productivity and collaboration story must be intriguing to acquisition-hungry Cisco.

Some suggest that Google will struggle to make it in the enterprise due to security concerns with Google Apps. Cisco doesn't have that problem. Its brand oozes "enterprise." As such, it may well be Cisco that changes the face of enterprise computing...by initially changing the way we communicate and collaborate within the enterprise.

Just don't hold your breath for video to part the waters. Video has its place, but it's a highly verbose form of communication, and the Web's most popular technologies increasingly teach us to speak sparingly.

Indeed, I think that we'll see Cisco acquire Control Yourself, the company behind open-source Twitter lookalike Identi.ca, before it changes the world through video.

Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.

Cisco Systems doesn't seem to know how to color inside the lines.

The networking-equipment giant has been foraging in a diverse set of new markets lately, taking on Microsoft in the collaboration and unified-communications markets, but now sticking a finger in the eye of longtime server partners Hewlett-Packard and IBM by jumping into the server market, as The New York Times reports.

Is Cisco reckless, or simply smart?

Whichever the case may be, Cisco just took on a host of powerful competitors. All at once. Sun Microsystems' Zack Urlocker notes that Sun, among others, is jumping into Cisco's profitable network equipment market. It was bound to happen that partners would become competitors to Cisco, as they sought to eke out a living in a recessed economy.

What wasn't certain is just how grand Cisco's ambition could be and how fast it would happen. As CNET's Marguerite Reardon writes, Cisco isn't going halfway with its new Unified Computing push:

It shouldn't come as a surprise that the company's new data center server strategy, announced Monday, is fueled by a grand vision to not only help its corporate customers improve efficiency and reduce costs, but also (to) transform how average consumers can access loads of cool new applications on cheap devices.

Few companies have the luxury to make such bold moves. Cisco, as well as IBM, Oracle, and Microsoft, is one that can.

Intriguingly, Cisco's Unified Computing initiative puts it into close collaboration with Linux leader Red Hat, as the two are collaborating to ensure that Cisco's new servers run seamlessly with Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). While VMware and Microsoft got a lot of coverage in the Cisco announcement, my conversations with executives behind the scenes reveals a different picture:

• Cisco has been working on this project for more than a year, and it initially figured that it could cover the market with VMware for virtualization, and Windows and RHEL as the operating systems. However, when the company talked with early prospects roughly nine months ago, the vast majority reported that they were using VMware or virtualization in only 5 percent to 10 percent of the workloads Cisco was targeting for its Unified Computing push. They weren't using Windows, either. Virtually all of them were using Unix or RHEL, with a large swath embracing RHEL.
• RHEL, in fact, is expected to claim 80 percent to 90 percent of Cisco's Unified Computing customers: those using VMware for virtualization but running RHEL as a guest server operating system, and those not yet comfortable using virtualization in high-end computing workloads, will use RHEL as their base operating system.

While Cisco's Unified Communication technology is hardly open source--Cisco has built its own proprietary Ethernet, for heaven's sake!--the initiative will largely depend on open-source software. In my conversations with executives involved in the initiative, Red Hat, specifically, and open-source proponents, generally, are deemed to be critical to its success.

This isn't surprising, given how integral open source is to Cisco's other new initiatives, such as its push into collaboration, which involved the acquisitions of PostPath (which also includes Zimbra's open-source Web client in its offering) and Jabber, as well as a variety of open-source projects from the Apache Software Foundation and elsewhere.

HP's vice president of marketing for enterprise servers and storage, Jim Ganthier, dissed Cisco's foray into his market with a dismissive hiss:

It may have looked like a really great idea on paper, but as they start to wade into the water, they may find out that there are some things in the water that they don't like.

Maybe. But Cisco has the heft to completely dam HP's river and fill a lake. That's the plan. And open source will play a major role in making it happen.

Follow me on Twitter at mjasay.

Who is Microsoft's biggest competitor? Some say "itself," and with good reason, as Computerworld points out. Microsoft's biggest Windows competitor is pirated Windows.

But there's another company that is increasingly setting its sights on Microsoft, and it's doing so largely unnoticed. The company is networking giant Cisco, which through a mix of open-source software and collaboration technology is launching a credible campaign to deep-six Microsoft's desktop dominance.

In the past year Cisco has acquired PostPath, which enables it to move Exchange users to its Linux-based, drop-in Exchange clone (PDF), and Jabber, which adds presence and instant messaging. It already had WebEx and more, giving Cisco a well-rounded collaboration story that mimics Microsoft in key places, like Exchange/e-mail, but surpasses it in others.

We typically pit Red Hat or IBM against Microsoft, but is Cisco Microsoft's most determined competitor?

It's not just in applications that Cisco increasingly competes with Microsoft. Cisco has been overtly targeting Microsoft with Linux, and has become a top contributor to the Linux kernel. The only thing it lacks is a desktop operating system, but in the cloud-based future that may well be a strength, not a weakness.

I'm not sure how Cisco has managed to fly under the radar for so long, but I imagine Microsoft is keeping a close eye on Cisco. Unlike Intel and others that would like to shed their dependence on Microsoft, Cisco has little need to placate Microsoft, because the bulk of its revenue doesn't depend on Windows. That's a frightening proposition for Microsoft, and one worth watching.

Follow me on Twitter at mjasay.

More than a decade ago, Microsoft won the office productivity suite war against WordPerfect, and arguably, Office has seen little innovation since.

Just as Mozilla Chairman Mitchell Baker has argued in the browser market--namely, that once Microsoft had beat out browser competitors, it failed to innovate for years--so, too, has Microsoft rested on its Office laurels for far too long.

Enter DocVerse, a stealth San Francisco start-up created by two former Microsoft employees that aims to make Microsoft Office operate more like Google Docs, as reported by the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. DocVerse provides a 1MB plug-in to Office 2007 that enables online-document collaboration.

As ZDNet's Mary Jo Foley points out, this functionality is not actually new. After all, Microsoft, too, is offering similar functionality in Office Live Workspace.

However, as DocVerse co-founder Shan Sinha tells Foley, Microsoft's efforts so far leave much to be desired: "Office Live Workspace doesn't provide a feature set that comes close to what we offer, making it a poor user experience (and in our estimation the cause for its lack of uptake)."

I'll go one step further. I don't think Microsoft's heart is in its Live services, and it won't be until it is forced by the market to take the cloud more seriously. Microsoft makes billions of dollars every quarter on its Office product: stodgy, offline Office. It's not going to touch that revenue stream with anything that might jeopardize a cash cow.

So it makes sense that Office innovation will happen outside of Microsoft. Unfortunately, DocVerse is going to find out that innovating on a closed platform is likely to be an exercise in frustration. Microsoft owns Office. It therefore owns the types and scope of innovation that can happen on the platform.

Even so, it's good to see innovation in Microsoft Office again--even if it happening outside of Redmond.

Follow me on Twitter at mjasay.

Even as Forrester Research predicts a 3 percent drop in global information technology revenues, as reported by The Register, investment bank Goldman Sachs is piling on the woe it promulgated in an earlier report that CNET covered with a new report entitled "IT Spending Survey: Mapping 2009."

As detailed in the report, incumbent vendors are about to see their sacrosanct maintenance revenue streams get pillaged:

Where enterprise IT spending is likely to lag in 2009

(Credit: Goldman Sachs)

Accounting for more than 50 percent of revenues at vendors such as Oracle, this is going to be painful, indeed, though the report also calls out that some of the bigger brand names are likely to weather the downturn better than most.

Even so, my company, and others that I advise, are seeing a flight from expensive maintenance contracts to open-source alternatives. At least half of my pipeline is filled with existing customers looking to dump their maintenance contracts with incumbent vendors.

Why? Because a solid open-source product can easily cost 10 percent of a proprietary vendor's maintenance contract, while delivering equivalent or better functionality. While any change will likely necessitate some third-party consulting--the No. 1 target for the budget ax in 2009--the cost advantages of doing this can still be substantial.

That said, any benefits from new projects must be near-immediate:

In a recent discussion with enterprise CTOs, I asked why they don't contribute more code back to open-source projects. There were a variety of answers, but one of the biggest sticking points was a preference for avoiding their legal departments.

In an interesting twist, however, Martin Fowler points to a different way to engage in open-source development that is unlikely to cause angst among one's JD-ridden colleagues: intra-company open-source projects.

Think about it. A company like GE employs over 300,000 people, with wide-ranging subsidiaries and departments. A project built by GE Finance might have direct relevance to GE's NBC Universal unit, for example, and greater efficiency can be created by providing open-source development methodologies within large companies. Indeed, this is what Collabnet and other open-source development infrastructure companies have long promised large enterprises.

But it's not just about large enterprises, as Fowler suggests:

TechCrunch is reporting that Jive Software, an emerging collaboration leader, has cut one-third of its headcount. Sam Lawrence, Jive's chief marketing officer, has confirmed the news. Normally this wouldn't be inspiring news for Jive customers and prospects, but in this case I think it's actually a reason to be optimistic if you fall into one of these camps.

Jive is backed by Sequoia, the same firm that recently warned its portfolio companies to manage cash prudently through the downturn. Jive grew at a frenetic pace over the past year--this move is a way to return to prudent, more profitable growth. Jive has been profitable since its 2001 launch.

Jive, while not an open-source company, has dabbled in open source and makes good products. I'm glad to see the company managing its business to survive and thrive in the downturn. Had Jive made this announcement six months from today, it would probably portend bad news. But this strikes me as Jive getting its financial house in order in advance of potential problems.

The only open question for me is why Jive would can its vice president of Sales if things are going well. I've heard that Jive is doing well financially, but you don't fire your sales head when money is pouring in. Anyone have any insight into this?

I was fortunate to catch up Thursday with Stuart Cohen, CEO and founder of the Collaborative Software Initiative. Stuart used to run OSDL where he got to talk with people at large enterprises that have adopted open source, and learned quite a bit about enterprise interest in not only consuming open source, but also creating open source.

Stuart Cohen

(Credit: Collaborative Software Initiative)

To help foster both interests Stuart founded CSI in 2007. I asked him how things have progressed since CSI's founding:

Asay: Collaborative Software Initiative is going on 18 months now. How has the company evolved since you founded it in April 2007?

Cohen: I'm really proud to say that our original concept has been validated in multiple verticals with very different projects. Based on my early conversations with customers during my time as CEO of Open Source Development Labs, I saw an untapped opportunity to build communities in vertical markets to develop software at a fraction of the cost of traditional software models.

We believe, and again this has been validated over the last year, that communities lower cost, provide a "network effect" for companies adopting these applications and build sustainability for future growth of an application.

... Read more

The GNU General Public License (GPL), unlike Apache-style licensing, offers perhaps the best way to prevent a community from forking. It's therefore not surprising to see the Collaborative Software Initiative turning to the Affero GPL Version 3 to help foster and protect its budding TriSano community.

Eben Moglen, director of the Software Freedom Law Center and co-author of the AGPLv3, agrees:

By offering the code under the widely used AGPLv3 license, Collaborative Software Initiative gives the user community the assurance of knowing that the code can be modified, customized, and shared in a low-friction way to suit their very specific project requirements. AGPLv3 was written as a roadmap to foster the most open, transparent and collaborative open source and free software communities possible.

"Open" is in the eyes of the beholder--there is a longstanding debate between the GPL and BSD/Apache communities as to which is more open--but there's little debate that GPL offers a more robust way to provide incentives against forking a project. TriSano will be better for having all participants rowing in the same direction. AGPLv3 gives them this.

One question, though: why AGPLv3 instead of simply GPLv3? Is there an element of Web-based distribution here against which CSI is hoping to guard?