The Open Road

Gartner has had a rocky relationship with open source in the past, but recent research suggests that its views on open source have evolved. It's therefore time for the open-source world's views on Gartner to evolve, too.

Gartner hasn't historically been much of a friend to open source. While Forrester, Redmonk, the 451 Group, IDC, and other analyst firms long ago began recording the rise of open source within enterprise computing, Gartner seemed to side with the proprietary vendors in steadfastly arguing that open source's impact was negligible.

This resulted in some suggesting that Gartner's research was simply a reflection of which companies paid it the most money (and recently netted the analyst firm a lawsuit).

I made similar accusations myself.

Gartner responded to such attacks, defending the integrity of its research. Yet its blind spot to open source seemed to persist.

Not anymore. Whatever the reason for the erstwhile overlooking of open source, Gartner analysts' current views on open source have changed, in some cases dramatically.

It used to be that open-source companies and projects never made it into Gartner's Magic Quadrant (MQ), which have tremendous power for, if somewhat limited utility to, enterprise buyers.

Now, you'll find that Gartner lists Drupal ("Drupal is in the Visionaries quadrant because of its use of the open source model to drive adoption and popularity, while providing enterprise services via organizations such as Acquia"), Liferay, and MindTouch in its newest "Social Software in the Workplace" MQ, while Alfresco, MySQL, JasperSoft, Pentaho, and others are listed in a variety of other MQs. (Disclosure: I work for Alfresco and am an adviser to MindTouch and JasperSoft.)

Gartner also recognizes the broad adoption of open source in the enterprise and how open source is affecting even proprietary software vendors.

This isn't to suggest that Gartner finally "gets it" because it's writing favorably about open source. In fact, some of Gartner's best, most interesting analysis is available for free on the blogs section of its Web site, not all of which is positive about open source.

It is, however, balanced and often quite insightful, particularly the work of Gartner analyst Brian Prentice.

Given all this, it's time for open sorcerers to stop using Gartner as a straw man for poor analysis on open source. This isn't helpful and, increasingly, it's not remotely accurate.

The logic of open source is increasingly clear to a growing number of businesses. Ironically, however, that logic generally dovetails with a recognition of how to marry open source with a proprietary revenue driver.

Once you figure out the scarce good for which customers will pay, open sourcing everything else becomes a no-brainer.

Google, Red Hat, and a wide variety of other businesses have all discovered this. So has Nokia, as Glyn Moody writes:

...Once (Sebastian Nyström, vice president of application and service frameworks in Nokia's Devices unit) laid out the logic of moving to open source, there was very little resistance within the company to doing so. I think that's significant; it means that, just as the GNU GPL has been tested in various courts and found valid, so the logic behind open source--that openness allows software to spread further, and improve quicker, for the mutual benefit of all--is also increasingly accepted by hard-headed business people: it's become self-evident that it's a better way.

Sort of. What's becoming self-evident is that open source is a fantastic way to drive community value, which funnels prospective customers into purchasing proprietary value born of scarcity. Whether Google AdWords or Red Hat Network, it's the same phenomenon.

In other words, it's not that businesses have bought into the ideological allure of freedom. It's that freedom can more efficiently create a large base of prospective customers for something else.

Moody cites IBM as an example of a company that has seen the light on the benefits of open source. Indeed it has. Open source enables IBM to sell billions...in proprietary hardware, not to mention the billions in proprietary software sold on the back of open-source software, as IBM's Savio Rodrigues articulates:

In the WebSphere division, we contribute to countless open source projects, including the Apache HTTPD, Dojo Toolkit, and Eclipse Equinox projects. We then utilize code from these projects with IBM enhancements inside of WebSphere Application Server. This strategy allows us to do more with less.

Indeed, I'd argue that such open-source software commitments are easier when a company has a clear proprietary strategy to justify and monetize them.

That's why it's easy for Web 2.0 companies to shovel money into open-source development communities: open source channels more customers of their (closed) cloud offerings.

It's also why we see more vendors turn to investing in (e.g., IBM in Apache) or founding (e.g., IBM in Eclipse) open-source communities, rather than controlling their own, self-branded projects, a trend highlighted on Thursday by The 451 Group's Matt Aslett. Vendors that have proprietary selling points elsewhere don't need to control open-source code.

Cynical? No. Businesses aren't charitable organizations.

Even Google. Even MySQL. Even Red Hat. Most people tend to forget how irate "the community" became when Red Hat introduced Red Hat Advanced Server and stopped supporting its consumer customers. Red Hat was forgetting "the people" to serve "the Man."

Years later, Red Hat is considered the paragon of open-source virtue. And well it should be: Red Hat is particularly good at balancing the hard-headed realism of profits with the idealism of open-source software.

As more companies discover the strategic, pragmatic advantages of open source, we'll see even more of it. As Gartner's Brian Prentice correctly argues, "While the romantic open source narrative is failing, Open Source continues to get stronger."

For many of us, open source's allure has always been about William James pragmatism, not Richard Stallman idealism. Yes, you need the idealism to keep pragmatism honest, but without the "logic" of money (and IBM's initial $1 billion commitment to Linux), open source would never have become the global phenomenon that it is today.

A large percentage of IT projects fail, and one big reason is the nature of the traditional software acquisition process. Buyers typically purchase software based on faith (demoware), with acceptance periods built into contracts to provide escape clauses if the software doesn't work as advertised. Open-source software, however, with its "try-before-you-buy" option, provides a better way to increase the odds of a successful IT project, while simultaneously lowering costs.

Enterprise software is hard, and made doubly so when million-dollar decisions must be made about software that has not been tried beyond a sales engineer's slideshow. It's therefore not surprising that Gartner Research Vice President Tony Bell recently suggested that "more than 50 percent of large Enterprise Content Management (ECM) projects fail if less than six months are spent on vendor choice and planning."

The real surprise is that any such projects succeed. Faith is great in religion, but it's a poor policy for enterprise software projects.

Now consider the open-source alternative. Sales cycles for open-source companies routinely average 60 to 90 days, versus the six to nine months (or longer) that proprietary software sales cycles last.

The process for open-source companies is so fast because the prospects start using the software long before they contacted the vendor. On average, I'd put this pre-evaluation duration at three to six months.

In traditional software sales cycles, you have to invent prospects' interest, nurture it along, and then close the deal, all without the customer really getting to experience the software. This can result in very expensive failures.

In open-source sales cycles, you don't really interact with a prospective customer until she has experienced the software for herself and wants something more, like a support subscription.

This is a tremendously powerful side effect of open source.

No, not all open-source software will be right for a given enterprise's requirements. But given the transparency of open-source software, would-be buyers should know well before they write a check and, worst case, they can stop paying their subscriptions if project priorities change or the software stops fitting their needs.

Perhaps it's a sign of an upward shift in the economy, or perhaps it was simply an inevitable conclusion, but open-source adoption is increasingly a matter of flexibility and innovation, not price. While some early adopters have long advocated open source as a means to more flexible IT, it's only now that the general marketplace is awaking to the possibilities.

It's not surprising that enterprise IT would be looking to lighten its software cost burden. Proprietary software vendors derive an ever-growing chunk of their revenue from software maintenance fees, a "boondoggle" for vendors, according to CMS Watch, which fattens vendor coffers while providing minimal value to customers.

Not that it's easy to avoid them. For example, SearchSAP.com records the difficult gyrations enterprises must undergo to escape SAP's maintenance charges, leading some to give up on cutting their direct SAP costs and instead focus on trading for lower-cost operating systems, databases, etc.

Open source offers an exit to this charade, resetting pricing to more manageable levels, as Dave Rosenberg writes and as Gartner now posits (after years of suggesting otherwise), but also refocusing software's value proposition. As noted above, and as highlighted by CapGemini's CTO, open source has become a central means for enabling "frequent change and flexibility [as well as sharing and openness as] a core competency for success."

The idea is to use open source as a base layer upon which applications and other end-user facing value can be built. Open source, in this way, can make enterprise IT significantly more effective.

Open source is not always the right solution. Sometimes it will be too basic and other times too complex (just like proprietary software).

It doesn't have to be a perfect fit to be useful, however. Just as the "good enough" revolution is transforming consumer technology, so, too, is it changing the way enterprises think about IT. Wired's description of the impact of "good enough" on the consumer market says much about open source:

The world has sped up, become more connected and a whole lot busier. As a result, what consumers want from the products and services they buy is fundamentally changing. We now favor flexibility over high fidelity, convenience over features, quick and dirty over slow and polished. Having it here and now is more important than having it perfect. These changes run so deep and wide, they're actually altering what we mean when we describe a product as "high-quality."

And it's happening everywhere. As more sectors connect to the digital world, from medicine to the military, they too are seeing the rise of Good Enough tools like the Flip. Suddenly what seemed perfect is anything but, and products that appear mediocre at first glance are often the perfect fit.

The good news is that this trend is ideally suited to the times. As the worst recession in 75 years rolls on, it's the light and nimble products that are having all the impact.

Like open source. Again, not all open-source products fit this description. OpenOffice, for example, is hardly "light and nimble." That said, even big projects like OpenOffice can be stripped down to their piece parts and made useful. You'll find OpenOffice components in a range of public-facing Web services (document storage/conversion sites, for example).

That's the power of open source. Enterprise IT can transform it into all sorts of things. And as more commercial open-source software firms license their technology under more permissible licenses to foster adoption--JBoss is a recent example--enterprise IT will increasingly be handed free code of advantageous licensing, exceptional quality, and professional polish, this last element something that has at times eluded community-led open-source efforts.

It's a good time to be in enterprise IT. The economy is perking up and the world is waking up to the benefits of open source. Open source is a great way to save money, but it's more than a price tag. It's also a key way to improve IT flexibility.

Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.

Open source means different things to different people. It can be a software development methodology, a distribution technique, or a marketing gimmick. Could it also be a way to minimize patent infringement damages?

Brian Prentice, a research vice president with Gartner's Emerging Trends and Technologies Group, speculates that it just might be. Google has been actively developing open-source alternatives to leading proprietary products, like Google Wave to compete with Microsoft Outlook and SharePoint. As Prentice indicates, Google has also been publicly advocating passage of the Patent Reform Act of 2009, which might have a lot to do with its open-source strategy.

Here's why.

The proposed legislation alters the way damages are calculated in infringement suits to be "calculated as the price of licensing a 'similar non-infringing substitute in the relative market.'" Now if that alternative is a free, open-source piece of software, then damages drop to zero, as Prentice notes:

Does that mean that free open source products can now be considered substitutes in a relative market? I've been trying to play the scenarios out in my head. If Google Wave, hypothetically, infringes a patent that IBM holds and they're found guilty of doing so, could they simply claim that the relative market value is zero because there are existing free OSS mail and IM solutions? Once Google Wave is shipping, can other organizations infringe on patents Microsoft holds relative to Exchange comfortable in the knowledge that Wave creates a zero dollar relative market value for collaboration?

This is incredibly insightful on Prentice's part, and amazingly shrewd if, in fact, Google is playing this game. It takes open-source advocacy to an entirely new, Sun T'zu-esque plane.

Martin Fink of Hewlett-Packard first started talking about the value of using open source to commoditize a competitor's core offering through open source back in his 2002 book "The Business and Economics of Open Source." But Prentice's idea takes Fink's argument and runs with it...at Usain Bolt speeds.

If true, The Register's question--"Is Google spending $106.5m to open source a codec?"--calls up a different response than the author of that article gives. Maybe $106 million is cheap compared to the cost of getting hit with video compression patent suits (from Microsoft, Apple, and others), if Google open source's On2's video compression codecs.

Google contributes to open source for a variety of reasons, not the least reason being that it recognizes open source is an efficient way to create community around its products. But perhaps Google has this more subtle, and sophisticated, reason as well?

Brilliant.

Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.

Given the momentum behind open source, and how it has grown through the economic downturn, it's not surprising that more and more vendors are getting involved to commercialize open-source projects. What is perhaps surprising, however, is how early in the open-source project lifecycle that commercialization is emerging, as Gartner indicates in a December 2008 report ("Predicts 2009: The Evolving Open-Source Software Model").

Gartner suggests that by 2012, "50% of direct commercial revenue attributed to open-source products or services will come from projects under a single vendor's patronage." What this means, however, is open to interpretation.

Here's Gartner's:

Driven by expanding mainstream IT adoption, open-source usage profiles are shifting to more-conservative, risk-versus-reward dynamics. As a result, new adopters now place an increasing premium on commercial support channels to establish service-level agreements on par with closed-source alternatives.

In response to commercial open-source demand, many new projects are being commercialized early in their maturity phases--often by a dot-com startup, and before a broad community "network effect" is firmly established. These projects are often under the patronage (if not authoritative control) of a single vendor that employs nearly (if not entirely) all key code contributors.

While Gartner suggests that this trend will lead to cost parity with proprietary solutions 50 percent of the time, the facts don't bear out this assertion. For example, Forrester finds that 87 percent of enterprises surveyed reduced costs through open source.

In part, this is due to commercial open-source vendors charging dramatically less than their proprietary peers. We can pass on sales and marketing cost savings in the form of maintenance savings.

It would be nice to discount this cost savings as transitory--a near-term phenomenon that dissipates once vendors control open-source projects--or related to community-based open source. But Forrester's Jeffrey Hammond, supported by IT executives from Virgin Mobile and San Francisco International Airport, argued at OSCON in July that open source, commercial or community-based, saves money in deployment costs, acquisition costs, and ongoing maintenance costs (if any).

Pixie dust comes and goes
Still, Gartner has a point. It's true that there are trade-offs that come with commercialization of open-source projects. Some of the magic pixie dust arguably evaporates when a company is behind a project.

But other "magic pixie dust" appears. Polish. Documentation. Enterprise acceptance. And more.

Was Linux hurt by Red Hat's involvement? Hardly. Linux has thrived in tandem with Red Hat's prominent role in developing the Linux kernel.

For those that think community-based support is the way to go, consider CentOS, a clone of Red Hat Enteprrise Linux. CentOS recently had its leader go AWOL. While the situation was eventually resolved, a serious vendor like Red Hat mitigates the vagaries of community whims, like Red Hat's Alan Cox deciding to stop working on tty development.

But it's not just Linux. Is Drupal adversely affected by Acquia? Lucene/Solr by Lucid Imagination? MySQL by MySQL? Jasper Reports by JasperSoft? And so on.

In every case, I'd argue that the projects have been significantly blessed by vendor involvement, not cursed. There are downsides to company involvement, but those are primarily the vendor's issues, not the customer's.

Regardless, Gartner is right to highlight the significant benefits of open source that transcend price tags.

Adopters will continue to receive benefits from open-source solutions, but these benefits will be increasingly realized by advantages in investment protection, innovation and technology alignments, rather than by simple cost savings alone.

Forrester, too, called this out at OSCON, articulating that while many companies adopt open source to save money, and do, they discover a myriad of other benefits along the way. Increased flexibility, higher quality, and more.

For example, the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration argues that "Being able to look at source code is a huge benefit, instead of just getting a black-box executable we can't even look at....[I]t's always nice to be able to modify something on our own. We count on [open-source vendor] Progress to do the heavy lifting, but we do keep our own options open." The FAA depends on Progress, without being dependent on Progress, and gets a great deal of benefit from both the open-source software and the open-source vendor.

I'll buy that. Frankly, whether it ultimately costs me more or less is somewhat immaterial. I don't buy Macs because they're cheaper. I buy them because they're better. In like manner, I buy open-source products because they are often much better, in several ways, than proprietary alternatives. Not always, but often enough that if you're not at least considering open-source alternatives, you're missing out.

Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.

For years, the analyst community has largely ignored open source or, worse, has actively advised against it. While there are exceptions--Forrester, The 451 Group, Redmonk--the general mood in the analyst community seems to be one of steadfast denial of open-source's impact on computing.

Ignoring open source is a bit like denying gravity, however, and even open-source agnostics like IDC and Gartner are now stating the obvious:

Open source is having a massive impact on enterprise computing, and it's becoming big business.

IDC, for example, significantly revised upward its estimate of the market size for open-source solutions, now projecting a 22.4 percent compound annual growth rate (CAGR) to hit $8.1 billion by 2013. The firm suggests that the revision is due to the surprising growth of open source through the economic downturn. It's unclear why this should have been a surprise, especially given that it was already calling out Linux as a big winner in the recession but...we'll take it.

Gartner, for its part, started warming up to open source in 2008 when its conversations with chief information officers revealed 85 percent enterprise penetration. In 2007 the closest it came to recognizing open source's impact was to suggest that open-source solutions would cannibalize proprietary software products.

But now it has done the unthinkable: it has actually included an open-source vendor (GroundWork) in its Magic Quadrant, and in a positive way.

Granted, Gartner has included open source before (e.g., Liferay has featured in two Magic Quadrants), but it has also ignored obvious candidates, as it did in the business intelligence market.

This is positive movement from Gartner and reflects a new pragmatism. I consider Forrester a leading indicator--at least, among the big analyst firms--of where technology is going, and its open-source predictions bear this out. Gartner and IDC tend to be lagging indicators of technology adoption.

The good news? For open source, leading and lagging indicators now say the same thing: "Open source is having a major impact on computing and will continue to shake up the industry."

Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.

The market is clearly racing toward a bottom when we start looking to Monty Python for business advice and the most lucid (if profane) analysis of Google's announced open-source operating system, Chrome OS, comes from Fake Steve Jobs.

However fast we may be "racing," however, we're not there yet.

At least, not according to a survey of 200 IT executives by Computer Economics, which finds:

• About 49 percent of the IT executives surveyed plan to make further budget cuts in 2009.
• Almost 50 percent will spend less than what is allocated in their IT operational budget.

Not good, right? Well, it gets worse...

Forrester and Gartner are duking it out to see who can be gloomiest in their assessment of 2009 IT spending, as Baseline reports. Gartner sees global IT spending dropping 6 percent from 2008, while Forrester one-ups Gartner with a projected 10.6 percent decline. (Forrester had earlier projected a 3 percent dip for 2009.)

Actually, the economy being as rotten as it is, some companies are going against the economic grain by offering compelling open-source alternatives to traditional, proprietary software, as reported Wednesday. And it's intriguing to watch companies like Lockheed Martin get into open source as a way to shift costs and improve development of their software.

Yes, there are still open-source holdouts like Orange UK which has allegedly banned Firefox and anything more modern than Internet Explorer 6 from its call centers. The company is still accepting smoke signals as a form of communication, so we're trying to get the message through that open source can drive down costs and improve productivity.

That's OK. According to Forrester analyst Jeffrey Hammond, open source is "infiltrating the enterprise" on a grand scale now. What starts out as an interest in penny pinching turns into something much more, he says.

So, while I'm not cheering for ever-gloomier forecasts of IT spending, I will admit that I like the result: more open-source adoption.

Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.

It used to be so easy to be a proprietary-software vendor.

That is, until the open-source neighbors moved in. As noted in a Gartner analysis from late last year, proprietary software is on the wane within enterprises while open source is gaining:

That's not the sort of chart that Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer likes to wake up to, but it's a message to which CIOs are increasingly warming.

The reason? Well, cost is the primary driver for open-source consideration, as a recent Forrester report suggests, but what is most significant is the overwhelmingly positive experience CIOs are having with open source, as this same Forrester report suggests.

Consider the following responses to the question, "How has open-source software met your organization's expectations in the following areas?":

• Reduced costs...87 percent (met or exceeded expectations).
• Improved quality...92 percent.
• Eased integration and customization...86 percent.
• Quickened the pace of innovation...82 percent.
• Improved support...84 percent.
• Standards compliance...91 percent.
• Decreased time to market...82 percent.

These are numbers that money can't buy. In fact, the open-source world is giving them away...literally.

Open-source software isn't perfect, and its quality varies widely, just as in the proprietary-software world. But unlike proprietary software, open source actively de-risks the IT purchasing decision by enabling you to try before you buy, buy on subscription (i.e., no long-term commitment), and pay a lot less for equal or greater value.

Small wonder, then, that CIOs are voting with their wallets, buying into open source while cutting investments in proprietary software.

Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.