In the battle for supremacy among the software industry's Big Four, Cisco may be placing the biggest bets and angling for the biggest returns. Some still think of Cisco as a networking hardware vendor, but hardware is simply Cisco's beachhead into others' turf, similar to how Microsoft (desktop), Oracle (database), and IBM (everything) are using core strengths to move into adjacent markets.
If anyone needed further confirmation of Cisco's software aspirations, its forays into Linux offer a strong hint.
In what might have looked like a publicity stunt around a $100,000 prize for Linux developers, Cisco's Linux development contest was actually a major clue as to just how serious it is about becoming a leading server vendor with a global development community--and soon.
Today, Cisco announced the winners of its "Think Inside the Box" contest. The three winning applications are very interesting, but the bigger story here is what Cisco's contest just demonstrated:
Most of Cisco's 7 million installed Integrated Services Routers (ISRs) are now servers, for all intents and purposes.
The contest proved that server-side Linux developers who know C/C++, Java, or Python can now write applications to Cisco routers with little or no knowledge of routers. (Remember: the finalists only had 90 days to write their applications).
That's a development community of millions, folks. Overnight.
Still think Cisco is a hardware company? By fostering a developer ecosystem around its core router family of products, Cisco just made its hardware solutions much more valuable to its customers (and increased the stickiness of its customer relationships), and turned its routers into a big target development platform for developers.
I wrote about Cisco's contest last June as Cisco's way of paying developers to stick a finger in the Microsoft eye with a $100,000 bounty for writing Linux-based applications for its AXP (Application Extension Platform).
I clearly underestimated Cisco's ambitions.
This is doubly clear when correlated with another Cisco announcement this week about its new and expanded Cisco Developer Network, which SearchNetworking covered.
Cisco is serious about software and fostering a global developer community. As I argued in my "Software's Big Four" blog, each of these companies is entering new markets from incumbent positions of strength, unlike HP and SAP (which both have big software businesses), which are largely sticking to existing businesses.
Millions of Cisco routers already sit in data centers and branch offices around the world. They consume less power than servers. They have a smaller footprint. They're more secure. And they enable a class of applications that Cisco calls "network-aware." Just slot in an AXP blade hosting an application.
Basically routers are much smarter now, and with the right applications can be used to take control of your phones at night to monitor for burglars; manage HVAC, water, and power in your office; deliver advertising in your retail store; and much, much more.
There are two things Cisco still lacks, however, in order to make an unimpeachable bid for developers. First, it needs to move off Broadcom chips for its ISRs and add x86 chips to the mix, something that I'm hearing rumblings may well be on the way.
Second, as impressive as Cisco's outreach to Linux developers has been, the company also needs to support Microsoft's .Net/Windows developers. It's too big a market to ignore.
If Cisco can deliver on x86 and to Microsoft developers--and I think it just might--Cisco will have opened its router (server) family to an even larger development community than the already large Linux market, further blurring the distinction between routers and general-purpose servers.
The result? A formidable software company that sprouted out of a dominant hardware company. How would Oracle, Microsoft, and IBM react?
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If you're part of the "cool kid" developer crowd, you're undoubtedly writing your new application with Ruby on Rails, and spend a lot of time talking about Git, Squeak, or Memcached.
But if you want a job, apparently you should get back to ancient technologies like Java and .Net, according to new data from IT employment company Dice.com, cited in Baseline magazine. In addition to those programming heavyweights, other enterprise bellwethers like Oracle, SharePoint, and SAP also make the cut.
On Java, Tom Silver, senior vice president at Dice.com, sees value in formal training, per Baseline's account:
Online developers with proficiency in Java, particularly with J2EE, can still find good prospects within the market. Experience is valued, but Silver suggests that Sun's Certified Java programmer (SCJP) offers a leg up on the competition.
Certification? That's about as Old World as you can find. And yet it seems to work.
Apparently, new-age Web technologies will get you a date, but old-school technologies are the best bet if you want a job.
And with TechServe Alliance finding 16,000 IT jobs lost in June 2009, and new Janco Associates data (via Baseline) reporting an overall IT salary decline of 0.19 percent, but a 0.22 percent increase in enterprise IT salaries, it may be time to double down on those "boring" old enterprise technologies.
Employment is pretty sexy, even if Java and .Net are not.
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These days, it's virtually impossible to avoid open-source software. If you're a Web company, don't even bother trying.
That's the message I got from a conversation Friday with Raju Vegesna, evangelist at Zoho, a leading competitor to Google Docs. According to Vegesna, the company--formerly known as AdventNet, now called Zoho Corp.--has been around for 13 years, and has always used free, but not necessarily open-source, software as part of its strategy. The company has released software under open-source licenses before, including the somewhat controversial vTiger project.
With 1.8 million users of Zoho.com, growing at roughly 100,000 new users per month, and profitability expected in 2009, Zoho's use of open-source software offers a glimpse into the development strategies of the next generation of software companies.
As Vegesna explains it, "In 2003 we were trying to determine whether to go open source or SaaS. We opted for both." Expect to see a lot more "both" software strategies going forward: open-source software inside with a cloud delivery strategy, and open APIs to give external developers access to that cloud.
Q. Tell me about how and where you use open source at Zoho.
Vegesna: We are completely open-source at the core of Zoho, from the operating system (CentOS) to the database (MySQL) to the application server (Tomcat) to Hadoop for scaling our systems.
Do you modify any of these projects and, if so, do you contribute back those modifications?
Vegesna: Yes, at times we modify open-source software to meet our needs, but often, like with the operating system, we don't modify the source code. We simply strip it down to the essential components that we need, thereby improving performance and security. But for other areas, we may modify a project like MySQL to improve scalability.
As for contributing back, it depends. If our changes help us but likely won't help the community, we won't contribute them back. But if it's code that would help the general community, like a security improvement, we contribute that back, unless it's something proprietary to our business. Whether the community accepts and incorporates it, however, is up to it.
Could Zoho.com exist if it were built with proprietary software?
Vegesna: Technically, we could do the same thing with proprietary software but the cost would be prohibitive. Imagine Google trying to run 600,000 servers on Windows. Could it do so technically? Probably. But it's doubtful that it could give so many different services away for free if built on pricey, proprietary software.
Without open source I can't imagine SaaS [software as a service] taking off. The economics simply wouldn't work.
Open source gives us flexibility so that we can add our own layers of business logic. For example, we use OpenOffice for document conversion. There are some conversions that OpenOffice doesn't support, however. Because it's open source, we can split the code to allow our proprietary software pick up the slack where OpenOffice can't handle transformations.
Most of our applications are built from the ground up by Zoho. Ninety-five percent of our employees are engineers. We use open source strategically but we need to be able to understand our code intimately, so writing it ourselves is important.
We use the best of open-source software, contribute back strategically, and write our own software where it makes sense.
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SourceForge, despite competition, remains the leading repository for open-source projects. Many of the world's best open-source projects--JBoss, MySQL, SugarCRM, and others--start there, and plenty never leave.
For these reasons and others, each year I look forward to the SourceForge.net Community Choice Awards, which allow the open-source community to vote on the industry's top projects. SourceForge has just announced that nominations are now open for the Sourceforge.net Community Choice Awards 2009.
While such direct democracy has yielded some odd choices in the past, the competition remains one of the best places to discover up-and-coming open-source projects.
This year, the SourceForge.net Community Choice Awards get a few new categories, as well as some old favorites:
- Best Project
- Best Project for the Enterprise
- Best Project for Gamers
- Best Tool or Utility for SysAdmins
- Best Visual Design
- Best Tool or Utility for Developers
- Best Commercial Open Source Project
- Best Project for Academia
- Best Project for Multimedia
- Best Project for Government
- Most Likely to Change the Way You Do Everything
- Best New Project
I really like the expansion to include commercial open-source projects as a specific category, and I think it's telling that there's now a category for government, which has seen such significant adoption in open source in the past few years, as well as academia. Open source is quickly branching out beyond its foundations in infrastructure software, and the awards categories reflect this.
Nominations will be accepted until May 29, and the 10 projects with the most nominations in each category will become finalists. The winners will be announced at a party held at the Agenda Lounge in San Jose, Calif., starting at 6 p.m. PDT on July 23 during the week of OSCON.
I'll be there. Will you? Regardless, nominate your favorite open-source projects now.
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The dam holding back U.S. federal adoption of open source just burst with the introduction of the Defense Department's Forge.mil.
Forge.mil is an open-source project repository built in the image of SourceForge.net, Federal Computer Week reported Friday.
Despite being based on SourceForge's technology, Forge.mil has one significant difference: security. As David Mihelcic, chief technology officer for the Defense Information Systems Agency, told Federal Computer Week, the Department of Defense's code repository has been "upgraded to meet DOD security requirements," with smart cards used to provide log-in credentials.
There are only three open-source projects hosted at Forge.mil so far, and it's initially restricted to the Defense Department's technology community, but I suspect this number will soon increase as various federal agencies discover it and ask to collaborate on code through it. It's also a new way for vendors to participate in Defense Department projects, as Mihelcic noted about one project, which is designed to automate server configuration:
"Our intern had to stand up 50 Linux machines in a lab and he said, 'Boy I don't want to do this by hand; why can't I use Bastille to do this for me?'" Mihelcic said. "He looked at Bastille and saw it couldn't do all the things he needed, so he started an open-source project. He got folks like Red Hat to jump in and participate."
All of the code is open for public view, though only those with the right Defense Department credentials can edit or contribute to the projects. As the public sees the code, however, it's almost certain to lead to individuals wanting to contribute to the code.
The Defense Department, which has been pushing hard to get involved in open source for some time as a consumer, is now involved as a developer. In just a few years, open source has gone from being "risky" to one of the best ways to mitigate risk.
Editor's note: The code is actually based on CollabNet's SourceForge Enterprise code, not the SourceForge.net code base. CollabNet enables Forge.mil.
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As Microsoft's Peter Galli recently noted, the open-source Web content management project DotNetNuke has moved to Microsoft's CodePlex, citing CodePlex's "reliable and dependable infrastructure, cleanest user experience, most advanced project administration tools, and highest commitment to future innovation" as its rationale.
This is the first move by a high-profile open-source project to Microsoft's open-source code hosting site. Is it a one-off example of a sell-out, or a harbinger of more movement to Microsoft's open-source site?
It's too soon to tell, but I suspect this move signals the open-source community's gradual thaw when it comes to Microsoft. Microsoft is by no means clear of suspicion, as a recent Boycott Novell post suggests, but its open-source group, at any rate, has welcomed the open-source community with open arms and open minds.
Watch this space. I think we'll see more movement of Microsoft-friendly open-source projects to CodePlex. Given that an increasing number of open-source projects fit this bill, that may well mean CodePlex is the next Google Code, and perhaps an eventual challenger to Sourceforge.
Sun Microsystems has spent years getting bludgeoned by commodity hardware and software. Now it's planning to apply those painful lessons to its competitors in the storage industry, as highlighted by The New York Times reporter Ashlee Vance:
In the early part of this decade, Sun learned all too well just how disruptive ("good enough" technology at a significant discount) can be. Customers moved away from products built on Sun's own custom microprocessors and software to cheaper servers that relied on Intel processors and the open-source Linux operating system. While larger customers still wanted Sun's high-end hardware for some tasks, the Intel-and-Linux combination could satisfy the majority of most customers' needs.
Software plays a large role in any discussion of this type, and again Sun thinks it has something that can rattle NetApp and EMC.
Sun spent years fighting this trend toward "good enough at a great price," but now it's wielding the weapon of open-source software and commodity hardware (as well as its not-so-commodity hardware). It seems to be working. The Register reports that Sun grew its market share in the external disk storage market faster than any other vendor in the second quarter of 2008 at 34.7 percent to NetApp's 22.9 percent growth.
The key for Sun will be to sustain this growth. It won't be an easy task, but customers should be cheering as Sun lowers the cost of storage and improves choice and flexibility through open source. NetApp may not like it, but then, Sun didn't like getting beaten up for its former proprietary intransigence, either. Sun learned its lesson. Will NetApp also learn?
Within hours of Nullriver releasing its NetShare application through Apple's iTunes Store, Apple apparently put the kabosh on the application, which allows users to turn the iPhone into a modem. Users can, of course, still use the application on a jailbroken iPhone, if they can find it. Nullriver doesn't have the application available for download from its website.
Why bother? Though it could be argued that this may be AT&T protecting bandwidth on its new 3G network, I've got to think the prohibition is coming from Apple, as it had the same policy for the original iPhone. Given how easy it is to set up phones-as-modems on AT&T's slower network, and AT&T's acceptance of the practice, why not the iPhone/iPhone 3G, too?
Regardless of the reason, this sort of effort to control is simply going to drive more people to jailbreak their phones and buy fewer applications directly from Apple. When you can get many applications for free outside Apple's App Store, why bother paying?
Sourceforge.net has announced its 2008 Community Choice finalists, and includes a wide range of projects that I'm seeing for the first time. Sure, there are old favorites like OpenOffice and Firebird, but when was the last time you used Sphinx (SQL full-text search engine), FreeMind (mind mapper), or Habari (next-generation blogging platform)?
Some of the finalists - or, rather where they were voted - are quite silly. Under the "Most Likely to Be the Next $1B Acquisition" category, only a small fraction of the candidates are actually corporations capable of being purchased for $1 billion. (Zenoss, Magento, and Talend welcome your $1 billion. :-)
Others are a little closer to the truth. Under "Most Likely to Change the World," Linux and Ubuntu both feature, though arguably they already have. OpenOffice also features there but, come on, if it hasn't changed the world by now, why should we expect it to do so tomorrow?
... Read moreMicrosoft has a clever Home Use Program that "provides a simple way for staff to work at home with the same Microsoft products they use at work." It's also a great way for Microsoft to spread its software and prevent would-be Mac or open-source users from straying from the Microsoft fold.
Speaking of which, Apple has a similar program, of which my company takes part. I can get Apple hardware and software at a discount, even when not buying it for work. To Apple (and Microsoft), it's a way to expand adoption at a lower cost of sale.
To these efforts, however, we should add a third "Home Use Program." It's called Sourceforge.net. At Sourceforge.net you can download popular open-source projects at work...for free. You can then head home to buy these exact same programs...for free!
It's the ultimate Home Use Program. Completely free. What a bargain!
