Open source applications...magnets for open source infrastructure
Ian Howells, Alfresco's chief marketing officer, did some analysis of the company's customer and user community, and I found the results interesting. I've been hearing rumblings for some time that Windows increasingly serves as a great evaluation platform for open source, 
but most companies use Linux when they're serious and want to go into production. Ian's data confirmed this, and more. (Zmanda has published data that corroborates our findings.)
First of all, the Alfresco data shows that Windows is plays a healthy role in the open source ecosystem. (In the graph, Windows = green, and Linux = blue, in case you can't see it well.) We have plenty of companies going into production with open-source Alfresco sitting on top of closed-source Windows. From my work with SugarCRM, JasperSoft and others, I know the same holds true for them. I don't suspect that this is going to change anytime soon.
Windows plays a large role because it's the OS sitting on the most desktops. But when customers are serious about production, the majority favor Linux. Again, I think you'd find very similar results were you to talk with MuleSource, Funambol, SugarCRM, etc.
Second, the data shows an interesting skew toward Red Hat and Ubuntu. (In fact, and not represented here, in the months since Microsoft and Novell consummated their deal, Suse's deployments with Alfresco have been flat, while Red Hat's have doubled. It may just be an Alfresco thing, but I suspect not. I think the reason has much to do with point No. 3 below.)
Regardless, look at all that Ubuntu usage. Fascinating. Here's a new kid on the Linux block that has clearly struck a chord. (Granted, these Ubuntu numbers are for evaluation, not production. In production, the vast majority of our customers use RHEL.)
Third, if you look at the application servers, portals and databases that are being used with an open-source application like Alfresco, you see a surprising affinity for other open-source infrastructure/applications. In databases, MySQL (blue) and Postgres (brown) dwarf all but Oracle (red) in deployments. For application servers, Tomcat (blue) and JBoss (red) consume most deployments, while JBoss Portal and Liferay Portal (not shown) account for 83 percent of portals used with Alfresco (when a portal is used). This would be easily explained away if one could credibly dismiss these users.
But Alfresco's customers significantly skew toward the Global 2000 plus leading government and nonprofit organizations: H&R Block, MIT, Boise Cascade, Activision, Kaplan, European Commission, Raley's, NASA, Electronic Arts, US Federal Aviation Administration, several of the world's top financial services companies, etc.
It's possible that these organizations represent the lunatic fringe of the software-using world but, in fact, many of these would generally be considered late adopters or mainstream adopters.
I believe we're seeing a shift to a new enterprise IT platform that is based on MySQL, JBoss, and Linux (Red Hat and Ubuntu, principally). Part of this is simply a matter of price: why run cost-effective Alfresco or SugarCRM with a pricey database? Part of it has to do with philosophical alignment: if you're going open source with your application, why not have the entire stack open?
But part of it is simply pragmatic: open-source application companies are more likely to provide their software with other software that is as readily available as their own. If proprietary companies made it as easy to distribute and integrate their software as open-source companies do, I suspect we'd see more of it in evaluation and production with open-source applications. Until then, these vendors are ceding a growing market to their open-source peers.
Open-source applications will drive a hefty load of infrastructure purchases in the future. Proprietary vendors who hide their heads in the sand and try to avoid this trend or make it difficult for would-be open-source partners to work with them will find themselves falling behind.
UPDATED: Some interesting commentary on the data has cropped up on the web:
- Matthew Aslett highlights the trend of taking the Windows training wheels off to go live with Linux. He asks about Ubuntu: today, all of that is evaluation, and none of it paid use (to the best of my knowledge). But I think that will change over time....
- eWeek points out that the Novell-Microsoft deal isn't doing SUSE any favors. Quite the opposite.
- Glyn Moody notes that the UK is lagging, whatever Misys' recent decision may suggest to the contrary. Normally, technology that starts in the US heads to the UK next, for linguistic reasons, and then on to Germany. But in Alfresco's case, the UK is getting leapfrogged straight into France, Italy, and Spain.
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. 
Reuseable IP
A few weeks ago I taught a class for IBM and had some interesting discussions in the class. Actually two of my students in particular gave me food for thought and connected some missing dots for me. The first was a woman who was a lead architect for one of the largest professional services organization in the world. For the sake of simplicity I will call her the architect. The second was one an original employees that came out of a Silicon Valley startup that was purchased by IBM a few years ago. I will call him the entrepreneur. As always I look for the angles, and I started to talk to the woman architect about me possibly doing some on demand teaching to other professionals in her organization. She liked my ideas and gave me some contact names. However, she also offered me some advice. She said ? if you are going to try and sell them on this training you might want to tell them how you can help them with a hot topic they were all using called reusable IP. Hmmm! I have built a few professional services organizations and those two simple words kind of crystallized what I would call the holey grail of processional services.
Later in the class I struck up a conversation with the entrepreneur. We talked about what most ex-entrepreneurs always talk about ? we made fun of VC?s. Some where along the way I told him that when ever I spoke to VC?s it was as if I was speaking German and they were speaking Japanese. There was no ?Love-Connection?. I told him about a visit I had with an OSS ESM Nagios based startup I had last year out in San Francisco. I told him that the meeting went great at first. The founder loved my ideas, the architects loved me and the visit was going great. However, my last meeting was with the CEO (a VC plug-in). Needless to say it didn?t go well. When I told the entrepreneur who the company was he said - holy cow ? the CEO of that company is my best friend. At this point he was a little confused to what could have gone wrong. He had been sitting in my class all week and he was convinced I knew my stuff and it didn?t make sense knowing his friend ? the CEO. Then he asked me if I minded telling him what the idea was that I proposed. So I told him what I was selling was using their open source ESM product as a Trojan horse as entrée into the Big4. We would go after low hanging fruit via service offerings and integration projects and work to get the software sales on the back-end once we were in the door. This was all based on my long standing philosophy of the three R?s (references, revenue, repeatable-revenue). I also told the CEO that this is a new world. The old world of selling software is gone and the new world is one where its not clear the difference between services and software. ?? stop right there the entrepreneur said. That?s were you lost him because you offended the VC police. No one within 100 miles of Silicon Valley is an allowed to use that word. If any one in that valley is caught using the word ?services? the VC?s will come and lock em up. I tried to explain that the OSS (Nagios) ESM company I was meeting was currently selling services at a 3 to 1 ration (i.e., 15k per software deal with 30k add on services). Doesn?t matter they are in denial ? he said. They just can?t stand that word. Then I told the entrepreneur that I wasn?t talking about regular services, I was talking about repeatable services, in fact ?Reusable IP?. The entrepreneur then asked me - did you use those words during the meeting. I said no? Then, there you go ? he said ? that is where you lost the battle.
Where's the IP
A friend of mine recently asked me what IP means to me. I use the acronym a lot and I know it can mean a lot of different things. Instead of regurgitate wikiepedia let me give you a few snips of what I think of when I use the letters IP. A few years ago I was doing some Tivoli consulting for the Navy in Hawaii. The hotel I was staying at had a little Ukulele shop. Each afternoon when I came home from work I would walk past the shop and peek in the window. One day I stopped in and asked the shop keeper if he could show me a few chords on the ukulele. He hemmed and hawed and seemed annoyed. Then he told me he is not really a teacher and he really didn?t want to do it. Then I told him that if he showed me just a couple of chords I might buy one. Reluctantly he handed me a cheat sheet that had about 6 chords on it. I fumbled for a few minutes and then broke out playing and singing a killer rendition of ?Brown Eyed Girl? by Van Morrison. The shop keeper looked up in amazement and asked me if this was the first time I had ever played a ukulele before. I told him that yes it was the first time and that was a true statement. What I didn?t tell him is that I hade been playing the ukulele?s six string ancestor, the guitar, for over 30 years. That my friends is what I am talking about when I use the term IP.
I?ll give you another example. If you do a search on Google for resumes of people who can install Tivoli monitoring you will find hundreds of resumes. However, there are less than 30 who can actually make it work. It?s the same software why can?t those hundreds of consultants make it work. Young consultants that work for me are always amazed when they show me some new software program that is written in Python or Ruby I can scan it quickly and tell exactly what the program does and why. What they don?t realize is that I spent my first 10 years of my career coding assembler and the language is the least significant part of the program. One of my favorite authors is the Italian philosopher Umberto Eco (Name of the Rose, Foucault?s Pendulum). He writes all his novels in Italian however I have read all of his books in English and I have had no complaints. So when I look at the OSS ESM market and hear Nagios vs. ZenOSS or Groundwork vs. Hyperic what I look for is the IP around those products. What does the vendor?s service internal and external organizations look like? How much IP is there around the implementations using the vendor?s software? If it?s ZenOSS, Hyperic, GroundWork, Nagios, or Zabbix who cares
John Willis
johnmwillis.com
Sorry...
Thanks
John
- Well, the British thing can be easily explained.
- by odubtaig August 8, 2007 3:09 PM PDT
- Not many sharp business minds over here, it's why the french can somehow manage to sell substandard cars (Renault, Peugeot, Citroën) while all the British car brands are owned by American or German companies except for Rover which, after a spectacular collapse due to mismanagement, greed and plain old stupidity, is now owned by the Chinese.
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(3 Comments)Name the odd one out:
Playstation. Wii. XBox. Gizmondo.
I think we're starting to see a pattern here. Trends as a whole, films, toys, fashions, may transfer here quickly, but then they're usually backed by US companies who know what they're doing. For FOSS to transfer, the UK companies would have to know what they were doing and be reasonably competent but as usual they fall behind and are more resistant to change than a 100 year old Amish man.