There are certain things that open-source and Software as a Service (SaaS) companies increasingly need, and which a new crop of vendors is rising to provide.
On the one hand, as JasperSoft's recent outsourcing of its forge software demonstrates, open-source companies need a place in which they can engage their community. (SaaS companies like Salesforce.com are increasingly doing the same thing, e.g., AppExchange.)
But subscription-based vendors also need subscription management tools (e.g., OCS), as well as "networks" to deliver updates, add-ons, and more, such as Bitrock is providing.
We're at the early, formative stages of this "enablement" market, but it's starting to feel like it could be offer real value in the midst of a gold rush. Much as the vendors of pickaxes and shovels reaped hefty rewards from the Forty-Niners so, too, could the Hyperics, Bitrocks, etc. of the world stand to clean up as the world moves to open source and SaaS models, even if only in part.
Why? Because these services enable add-on, proprietary value. In an open world, having a differentiated product to sell alongside the completely open version matters a great deal, as Savio consistently argues. There's a time and season for it - phases of open-source growth - but it's going to come.
When it does, the enablers may well make as much or more than those they enable.
You may never have heard of BitRock, the company that has traditionally competed with OpenLogic, SpikeSource, and SourceLabs in the "open-source stacks" business but has seen much more success with its excellent installers, which upwards of 60 percent of commercial open-source projects use including SugarCRM, JasperSoft, Ringside Networks, and more. The name may be unfamiliar to you, but not for long.
Why? Because BitRock is about to claim the center of the open-source world's attention, as Stephe Walli, an advisor to BitRock, pointed out two months ago following the Open Source Business Conference. It's called the Network, you're likely to be buying into one very soon, if you haven't already.
As open-source companies seek ways to monetize their code, a common theme has emerged: Networks. Red Hat has Red Hat Network. JBoss developed the JBoss Operations Network (recently graduating to 2.0 status). MySQL has its Monitor. And so on.
The problem with this approach is twofold: 1) It forces vendors to reinvent the Network wheel over and over again and 2) It leaves both vendors and customers isolated within one vendors Network offering. BitRock resolves this by providing a common infrastructure upon which the open-source vendor community can build, as Stephe notes:
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