The best open-source projects have little problem with adoption. Their problem, increasingly, centers on monetization of their popularity. From Drupal to MySQL to Audacity, sometimes the best things in life truly are free...which can be a problem. The solution, however, may be cloud computing.
I've articulated this before, but theory met reality this past week with announcements from DimDim, an open-source Web conferencing provider, and Acquia, the focal point for Drupal support and value-adding services. Both have interesting new cloud strategies that promise to deliver customer value while funding the vendors' payroll.
DimDim, as TechCrunch reports, recently launched DimDim Webinar, a hosted webinar service targeting small and medium-size businesses (SMBs). The service "is accompanied by a couple of helpful resources that guide organizers through the necessary steps to monetize and analyze the performance of their webinars," making it easy to set up and track the value of the webinars. This is just the sort of offering my own company (an SMB) would find useful.
Acquia, for its part, isn't really targeting its new Drupal Hosting to the SMB market, instead focusing on helping companies "scale [their] site[s] to millions of page views, and more if necessary." While small and midsize businesses will undoubtedly also sign up, Acquia's service promises to be a great way to minimize the IT investment required to successfully deploy Drupal-based websites.
In both cases, DimDim and Acquia are improving upon their open-source code offerings...by making the code somewhat irrelevant.
Some, like Gartner, warn that cloud computing threatens to undermine the appeal of open source. But this is only a problem if open-source communities fail to offer cloud-computing options, as SugarCRM has, options that also include source code in case the buyer ever wants off the cloud.
Recent data from the United Kingdom suggests that cloud computing promises to be a winner for Microsoft alternatives like Google Apps. There's no reason that open-source companies can't also benefit from this shift. Microsoft has billions of dollars in profits tied to its 'desktop' dominance. Open source does not.
Open-source companies should be leading the shift to cloud computing. Some, like Red Hat, clearly are, with Red Hat actively seeking to become the platform for cloud computing, just as it's the dominant Linux platform for Linux server-based computing in the enterprise.
Cloud computing is the fulfillment of much of the marketing behind open-source software, promising to shift value to services and away from software. DimDim and Acquia are two examples of open-source companies that "get it" and will marry the best of cloud computing with open source.
They're among the first. They won't be the last.
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Drupal is a fantastic Web publishing platform that derives much of its value from a disparate community of contributors, as Xconomy recently wrote. With more than 4,000 contributed modules from over 3,000 active contributors (741 of which contribute to Drupal Core), Drupal has something for everyone, which is both its greatest asset and biggest liability.
The same holds true for Red Hat, which charges a premium for its Red Hat Enterprise Linux distribution to enterprises that want to tap into Linux but don't want the bother of rolling their own version of Linux from Kernel.org.
The problem, however, is that such a business model depends upon the complexity of the underlying platform. If that complexity goes away, does the business model?
The Drupal-focused company Acquia is thriving because deploying Drupal, what with its myriad of choices, can be complex. Ditto for Red Hat. There are thousands of packages that comprise Linux, making it worthwhile to pay a trusted guide like Red Hat.
I don't believe so, but that is certainly one way to read IDC data that shows unpaid Linux adoption is now outpacing commercial Linux adoption, which has the potential to disrupt Red Hat, Novell, Canonical, and other Linux vendors.
It's less an issue, however, for Acquia, which has been rolling out for-free software and services to augment Drupal, including enterprise-class search. Acquia's Drupal distribution teases the complexity out of Drupal, but it also extends beyond Drupal with enterprise-only features. It is therefore well-positioned to foster the Drupal community while simultaneously feeding its top and bottom lines.
For this reason, I believe Acquia's model has more staying power, though it has a long way to go before it generates Red Hat's nearly $1 billion in annual revenues. Acquia's model allows it to thrive even if Drupal becomes easy, and also affords the company greater latitude to enter new markets, like the application market, where product complexity is not as much of an issue.
Red Hat, on the other hand, must resolutely focus on core infrastructure, an area of the software stack that is naturally prone to such complexity, because of its adherence to its complexity-dependent business model.
Both models are generating impressive returns. But Acquia's open-source model seems to offer more potential in the long term than Red Hat's does.
Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.
Occasionally I get brilliant ideas about who should merge with whom in open source. OK, so it's very occasionally, but I think I'll start sharing them under a "mix and match" headline.
Forget fantasy football. It's time for "fantasy open source."
The first is OpenX, an open-source ad-server company that I've written about several times, and which I continue to believe offers a disruptive way to shake up the online advertising business, especially for smaller Web publishers. While Drupal is used by plenty of marquee brands like Intel and FedEx, it has a strong base of support within these smaller Web publishers.
While we're at it, why not also provide the e-commerce engine to turn ad-related interest into paying customers? Magento, which I've also covered several times, is a natural fit.
Yes, Magento, like Drupal and OpenX, has its share of big customers, including Germany's equivalent of REI, Globetrotter. But Magento already has a lot of traction within the mid-market segment that Drupal and OpenX also serve.
Disagree? Which companies (at least one of which must be open source) do you think should get together?
Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.
While the technology industry has been laying off large numbers of employees, the open-source software industry has been hiring, at least at the executive level.
In the past week, Acquia, Alfresco, Groundwork, and Black Duck have all added executive leadership:
- Acquia - Company founder Dries Buytaert announced Tom Erickson as Acquia's new CEO, replacing Jay Batson in that role. Batson will remain with the company in an as-yet undefined role. Erickson brings to Acquia a wealth of experience, including as CEO of Systinet, which he successfully sold to Mercury Interactive in 2006. Erickson is a great addition to the Acquia team.
- GroundWork - Peter Jackson (no, not that Peter Jackson) has taken the helm at open-source IT management company GroundWork. Jackson joins GroundWork from Intraware, where he had served as CEO, and prior to that was CEO of Dataflex and Granite Systems. Jackson took Intraware public and, all going well, will hope to repeat that feat at GroundWork.
- Alfresco - Bill Robinson, former senior vice president of sales at Witness Systems and vice president of North American sales at Business Objects before that, has joined Alfresco as vice president of the Americas. This one strikes close to home (I was running the Americas for Alfresco up until Friday), and makes me very, very happy, as I will get to focus on our top strategic partners and other key initiatives, and makes my quarter-ends much more pleasant. Just last quarter US sales recorded serious double-digit growth in the midst of a brutal economy, but the numbers are getting large enough that having Robinson helm Alfresco's primary sales geography makes a great deal of sense.
- Black Duck - While not an open-source company, Black Duck's fate is inextricably tied up in open source, and putting Red Hat's former senior vice president of worldwide marketing, Tim Yeaton, in as its new CEO is a major coup. I talked with Yeaton about the role and think he's perfect to help Black Duck recast its message so that it's not mistaken for an open-source FUD vendor.
There are some other executive appointments, but they're not yet public so I'll defer from pre-announcing them here. There are also others - like Greg Schott's appointment as CEO of MuleSource - that have already been covered on this blog.
It's good to see how dynamic open-source business remains, and that the open-source world is attracting the best and brightest of the proprietary software world.
Follow me on Twitter at mjasay.
Drupal has always been a great open-source Web content management system. Forrester called it one of the two open-source content management systems to consider. Its biggest deficiency was arguably a lack of enterprise-class support and polish to support the project.
On Tuesday, however, Acquia, the company behind Drupal, remedied this void, launching its commercially supported distribution of Drupal and a network service to provide updates and other services around the core Drupal distribution.
Acquia is taking a page out of Red Hat's playbook, boiling down the complexity of the deep and wide Drupal community. While I like the look of its Network service, it is the Acquia Drupal distribution that I think is most newsworthy for enterprises looking to adopt Drupal. Dries Buytaert, Drupal's co-founder, explains:
(We are) releasing Acquia Drupal today. Acquia Drupal (previously code-named Carbon) is our Drupal distribution that bundles some of the best, most essential Drupal modules for building social publishing sites. Acquia Drupal is available for free, and all our bug fixes and improvements go straight to the module maintainers on Drupal.org. Acquia Drupal defines the collection of modules that you can get technical support for.
In other words, there's still an open world of community-supported Drupal for those that value cash over time and other resources. But for those that wouldn't mind a shortcut to Drupal-based productivity, there's Acquia Drupal.
It will be interesting to see how well this service takes off, and how its community reacts. As OStatic notes, Acquia's biggest competition will be the Drupal community or, rather, the developers and system integrators who currently make a living providing Drupal-based support. The response so far, however, has been positive from the Drupal community, and I think this will continue.
I suspect Acquia will do just fine as it learns to walk the line between commercial and community. Drupal is an excellent open-source project, and Acquia is filled with similarly excellent people. The marriage of the two should be a boon to enterprises that have adopted or are considering adopting Drupal.
I was confused when Dave Rosenberg told me that he was leaving MuleSource to pursue a game startup. "But you are already the CEO of a startup," I remonstrated. Given his longstanding interest in video games, however, it was probably just a matter of time.
Of course, that was nothing next to my confusion when I kept reading about Digium-founder Mark Spencer hanging out with Marc Fleury, working on an open-source home automation project called OpenRemote. The OpenRemote blog suggests that Digium remains Spencer's primary home, but that he moonlights as the principal hardware designer for OpenRemote.
This morning Dries Buytaert of Drupal/Acquia fame confused me further by announcing Mollom, a "startup Benjamin Schrauwen and [Buytaert] began to help keep your website free of spam."
I asked Jeff Whatcott, vice president of Marketing for Acquia, the company that Dries co-founded, whether Dries was still fully engaged with Acquia, and he told me,
... Read moreAcquia has finally taken the wraps off its commercially supported Drupal distribution, and it looks like the wait was worth it. Drupal was already a great web content management publishing system, but Acquia's spin on it should make it even better:
The release is essentially a hardened distribution of Drupal, complemented with technical support and network service offerings. Code named Carbon for now, the package includes a select set of community contributed modules alongside the Drupal core. Acquia has taken the task of pre-testing, reviewing, and comparing all community contributed modules to offer a set of the most relevant and reliable contributions. Site administrators are notified of updates to Carbon modules through the network, code named Spokes. The system differentiates between feature, bug fix, and security updates, and informs users of compatibility issues or other dependencies amongst different modules.
I really like the idea behind Spokes. Drupal has a fantastic community, but some of the code it produces is not up to enterprise quality. Enter Acquia to make it clear what is worth using, and what is not. Complexity breeds opportunity.
What I'd like even more is for Acquia to notify the customer as to whether its own modifications to the Drupal distribution will work with an update, and what would be required to make it function if an update will break the modified distribution.
I think this is a great first step - boiling down the Drupal ocean to a comprehensible choice of add-ons - but given that modification is a fact of open-source life, enabling customers to color outside the lines and still be supported...that's the Holy Grail.
Disclosure: My company, Alfresco, competes with Acquia in web content management. I'm also a fan of Acquia. The two aren't necessarily contradictory.
It's a good day for those running more than one open-source application in-house, particularly if you're into Zimbra (email), SugarCRM (CRM), Loopfuse (marketing automation), or Acquia (Drupal-based content management company). I've long felt that open-source integration is best done in cases of mutual self-interest, and not by committee fiat.
First, Loopfuse-plus-Acquia/Drupal:
LoopFuse and Acquia today announced the availability of the LoopFuse OneView integration module for Drupal, enabling marketing organizations to seamlessly extend their LoopFuse marketing automation processes across their Drupal web sites. Taking advantage of LoopFuse's web analytics and campaign management capabilities, Drupal site owners can track activities and connect directly with customers who participate in their community-based web sites.
As an increasing array of companies use Drupal to build collaborative websites, the need to monetize those using marketing automation tools like Loopfuse also grows. This is a great way to get the most from your Drupal investment.
The second software integration is more salient to me, as my company is a Zimbra and SugarCRM customer. DataSync 0.5 Beta has just been released, promising to marry the two open-source products together for email archival:
... Read moreForrester Research just released a great report detailing the open-source web content management market. In it, Forrester analyst Stephen Powers highlights a shift to open source for managing websites:
As organizations embark on next-generation Web content management (WCM) initiatives, they want to avoid the mistakes made in earlier, more costly WCM projects. As a result, information and knowledge management professionals increasingly show an interest in open source WCM as a way of controlling software costs and increasing their access to product-specific expertise in the marketplace.
That's great: Enterprises should move to open-source web content management offerings. But which ones?
Out of the wide pool of open-source web content management projects (There are, quite literally, hundreds), Forrester says there are two to which CIOs and CTOs need to pay particular attention:
In answer to the question, "Why these two?" Forrester answers: Relevance. As Powers writes:
... Read moreThat's what I took away from CMSwatch's article by guest analyst Apoory Durga, who said of Drupal:
...[Thousands of third-party Drupal] modules could be your biggest problem...because many times, module upgrades do not keep pace with Drupal upgrades. Even though Drupal has released version 6.2, many of the more popular modules are still on 5.x...[which] modules...are necessary for building...social publishing applications.
I suppose this is a problem in a way, but what a great problem to have, especially if you're Acquia, the open-source company founded by Drupal's founder, Dries Buytaert. Acquia's business is precisely to take the guesswork out of deployment of the core Drupal system as well as these third-party modules, as the article suggests but perhaps doesn't emphasize enough.
It is, in other words, the very complexity of choice that Drupal offers which provides Acquia with such a rich commercial opportunity while staying true to its open-source ideals. Foster simplicity in the midst of complexity, and charge people for that service. It works for Red Hat. I assume it will work for Acquia, too.
