Is it time for SAP to try open source?
Despite strong earnings, SAP recently announced that it would cut 6.7 percent of its workforce, or 3,000 positions, according to CNET. While the company reported an 8 percent increase in year-over-year revenue, SAP sees a stalling economy blocking the road before it.
Why not give open source a try?
SAP has invested in a wide range of open-source companies, including MySQL, Red Hat, Alfresco (my company), JasperSoft, and others, but it has never ventured far into actual open-source development and distribution, its MaxDB work with MySQL and its contribution to Eclipse serving as the exceptions that prove the rule.
A few years ago, SAP went so far as to downplay open source's significance at the Open Source Business Conference in a keynote, talking up the need for everyone to jump on the SAP bandwagon and forget the open-source toy.
SAP could arguably use that "toy" right now. Forget source code: SAP needs a more efficient way to get its software in the hands of prospective buyers. Especially in a tight economy, it can't afford to hire an expensive sales force to pan for customer gold.
Its open-source competitors in software for enterprise resource planning may have a ways to go before offering stiff competition to the Germany-based giant, but CIO.com proclaims 2009 as the year of open-source ERP. SAP must be hoping that it's not right.
Adopting open source is not a matter of giving away source code for the love and praise of "community." It's a hard-headed capitalist tool for improving software quality and software distribution. SAP could use both, but especially the latter in this market.
So here's a challenge to SAP: by all means, keep investing in open-source companies, but please also start to invest in SAP as an open-source company. You might find that doing so is just the tonic required to boost sales.
Matt Asay brings a decade of in-the-trenches open-source business and legal experience to The Open Road, with an emphasis on emerging open-source business strategies and opportunities. Matt is vice president of business development at Alfresco, a company that develops open-source software for content management. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure. You can follow Matt on Twitter @mjasay. 
As an aside, I"d certainly welcome Alfresco being put to good use. Great product, great people.
- by pantologist January 29, 2009 12:28 PM PST
- Dennis is too kind.
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- by hymanroth January 29, 2009 3:07 PM PST
- Why can't you disagree without being offensive? The impact of your first first two points was actually neutralized by your last remarks. This isn't mySpace. Either debate properly or don't.
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(3 Comments)1st. SAP IS AND HAS ALWAYS BEEN an open source company. You buy the software, you can see, edit and modify the source code anyway you want. Unfortunately, that ability has been abused by system integrators and created an awful mess for customers. You could argue (quite effectively) that being open source actually CAUSED product quality to decrease rather than increase.
2nd. No CIO on the planet would download an ERP system for free on a website and goof around with it before spending a few million dollars on buying one. SAP gives away developer versions of just about all its Netweaver stack for free on its SDN community for the geeks to play with, just like every other tech company.
3rd. This is one of the dumbest posts in the history of journalism. You have made every one of your readers dumber for having read this and illustrate why you have no idea how the software industry works. Another bang up job from CNET.