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.
(Credit:
FC Barcelona)
FC Barcelona, arguably the world's best football (soccer) team (after Arsenal, anyway), toured Microsoft's Redmond campus on Tuesday during its trip to play an exhibition game against the Seattle Sounders.
It's perhaps not surprising that the football giant, known for its style and verve, would refuse to be caught on film using Microsoft's products, as reported by TechFlash.
Actually, that's not quite the way it played out. As Microsoft spokesman Lou Gellos told TechFlash, FC Barcelona was simply worried about "creating the impression that they endorsed [Project Natal]," Microsoft's super-cool motion-activated game controller that targets Nintendo's Wii. That said, TechFlash did sneak a shot of the team playing with Microsoft's Surface product.
However, it's also the case that FC Barcelona runs a fair amount of open source. Last time I checked two years ago, during a trip to the Camp Nou (when Openbravo CEO Manel Sarasa got me into the president's box), FC Barcelona was running OpenCMS for its Web site and a range of other open-source software for content management and other needs.
Perhaps FC Barcelona would have happily done a photo op with the Linux penguin, but just couldn't bear to affiliate with Clippy?
I'm just kidding, obviously, but I still think Microsoft is a better fit for Chelsea: overwhelming monetary muscle with little style to show for it. Barcelona is more like Apple, with open-source applications (Adium, Handbrake, etc.) running on OS X to marry substance with style.
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It was bound to happen. With the U.S. government promising truckloads of cash to overhaul the U.S. health care system, while simultaneously making positive noises around open source, it was just a matter of time before someone connected the dots.
That someone appears to be Joanne Rohde, former executive vice president of worldwide operations at Red Hat, who has launched the Axial Project, a stealth-mode start-up that aims to "combin[e] the principles of Open Standards and Open Source...to connect all the parties in the Health ecosystem safely and securely."
It's a big task, but then, that's precisely what open source is good for tackling.
Indeed, as I've written before, the U.S. health care system, with its myriad of providers, insurers, etc. is ripe for open source. Open source isn't a panacea, but it has proved itself adept at resolving precisely this sort of complexity, with Linux and the various Apache projects as just two examples.
I've been talking with Rohde for at least a year now--most recently meeting for breakfast in Raleigh in April--and have enjoyed seeing her ideas germinate and flower. The company has gone through various guises (and names: as late as April, Rohde was calling the company EHRmail), and is now growing to meet the challenges ahead of it.
Axial has been quietly assembling a team of seasoned veterans from Rohde's Red Hat and UBS past, including Michael Yuan and John Casey, but most recently Matt Mattox, Red Hat's director of ISV alliances, who announced via e-mail his move to Axial:
(Credit:
Matt Asay)
Axial has not yet raised venture funding, but planned to raise its seed money through alternative avenues, at least as of my April conversation with Rohde. Given the company's mission--to build an integration tool kit around a message broker for health IT companies, universities, and corporations that allows sending and receiving of data across existing infrastructures--coupled with its open-source approach and roster of seasoned executives, I'm guessing funding won't be an issue.
The real issue is whether even open source is powerful enough to fix the U.S. health care system. Good luck to Mattox, Rohde, and the Axial Project team as you seek to answer that question in the affirmative.
Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.
Years ago I proclaimed open source would never be relevant in the application market. Now I work for an open-source applications company.
Lesson? It's generally not a good idea to underestimate open source's potency.
To wit, here are three "Who would have thought open source could do that?" announcements that recently hit my RSS reader:
- NovusEdge is demoing open-source energy management for "massive commercial buildings." OpenRemote does open-source home automation, but this suggests the idea can take on a different scale.
- Human resource professionals spend time and money tracking job applicants. Well, now they can save their money by using open-source applicant-tracking applications. People used to say open source could only commodify broad application markets. I don't think this qualifies....
- Or how about applying open-source principles to other markets? I'm an advisor to the Open Source Teaching Project, which lowers barriers to quality education by "open sourcing" course curricula and delivering it online.
- While not new, it's also impressive to see proprietary software vendors investing in open source. Five years ago, would you have expected Citrix to invest in open-source router company Vyatta's $10 million Series C round of financing? Yes, it's an attack on Cisco by Citrix, and so driven by healthy self-interest, as The VAR Guy writes, but that's the point: the world is discovering plenty of self-interest in open source.
I'm sure open source is not good for something. I'm equally sure that deficiency won't last. It never does.
What are some of the more interesting applications you've seen for open source?
Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.
I spent some time talking with an Accenture veteran this morning, and came away with an intriguing idea: enable open-source projects to provide corporate benefits like health insurance to their developers so that they can ditch their day jobs to focus on their open-source passion.
If you've ever started a small business, you know that getting "enterprise-grade" benefits like health insurance is very difficult. At Alfresco, for example, we ultimately joined a PEO (Professional Employer Organization) called Trinet [PDF], which aggregates many smaller companies to negotiate insurance plans with companies like Blue Cross Blue Shield that would normally not consider providing small companies insurance.
Yes, individuals can get insurance, but it tends to be very expensive to go it alone.
In the recession there will be an increasing number of people that lose their jobs, but there will also be a rising number of enterprises that need to maintain legacy systems, build new ones, and otherwise drive innovation and productivity while cutting costs. As more companies turn to open source for this benefit, why couldn't open-source projects "employ" more of their developers to provide basic corporate benefits like health insurance?
Developers would pay into the project a nominal fee/commission on services rendered to cover the project's cost of administrative overhead. But the developer would take care of financial arrangements with the end-customer. The project would simply be an administrator of benefits like health insurance and would be responsible for maintaining the brand.
This would enable more developers to have flexibility, benefits, and an organization to help improve their personal brands. It would also lead to better open-source software. It would enable a Maven developer, for example, to spend even more time working on Maven without going hungry.
Ultimately, a consulting organization like Accenture really is nothing more than an aggregation of personal brands, one that serves as a pseudo-guarantee of quality to a customer. When General Mills hires Accenture, it's doing so to ensure a steady, predictable stream of quality services.
Open-source projects can provide this Accenture-like benefit, as well. What am I missing? Is this a bad idea or does it have potential?
Microsoft blames add-ons for its Internet Explorer security woes, according to InternetNews, yet in separate news from TechCrunch Mozilla's Firefox just hit its one billionth add-on and yet delivers better security, according to several studies.
Is Microsoft out of line?
Probably not. Microsoft is almost certainly right to pin some blame on add-on functionality to the browser as a security vulnerability. But given that add-ons are a fact of life now, what is Microsoft doing to protect its IE users against malware attacks?
Plenty, and in perhaps in the most important place: the update service. Both IE and Firefox include automatic update services, but researchers for the Honeypot Project discovered that Firefox's mechanism may actually be more effective:
We suspect that attacking Firefox is a more difficult task as it uses an automated and "immediate" update mechanism. Since Firefox is a standalone application that is not as integrated with the operating system as Internet Explorer, we suspect that users are more likely to have this update mechanism turned on. Firefox is truly a moving target. The success of an attack on a user of Internet Explorer 6 SP2 is likely to be higher than on a Firefox user, and therefore attackers target Internet Explorer 6 SP2.
The Honeypot research was done in 2007, however, on older versions of both IE and Firefox and, as Sean Michael Kerner writes in InternetNews, the game may have moved on, and neither Firefox nor IE may be fully ready to "play":
... Read moreBack in early 2007 Red Hat let slip that it was planning to release its Red Hat Network code as an open-source project. In June of 2008, Red Hat officially announced that Red Hat Network Satellite would be open sourced.
Last week, Red Hat posted an update on the project, now called Project Spacewalk.
In the nine weeks or so since the debut of Spacewalk, we've been blown away by the level of interest, the contributions, and the excitement generated by the project...
- spacewalk-list@redhat.com : currently has over 250 members...
- spacewalk-devel-list@redhat.com: currently has about 120 members...
- The first patch from inside Red Hat came within three days of the opening of the mailing list.
- The first patch from the community came within eight days.
I've suggested before that the company that owns the heart of open-source monetization would be sitting on a massive opportunity. Yes, there are alternative ways to monetize open source (e.g., Google's advertising model), but for many years to come vendors will make money by distributing software, not merely advertising around that software.
As such, a community effort around a network service, such as Red Hat's Project Spacewalk, is hugely important. It's important because it provides Red Hat a way to corral the growing commercial open-source ecosystem.
To achieve this more effectively, however, Red Hat needs to reach out to the commercial open-source ecosystem and evangelize the benefits of building on Project Spacewalk, rather than creating silo'd "Red Hat Network-esque" offerings. To date, Red Hat seems to have taken an "If we build it, they might come" approach to Spacewalk. It needs to be a bit more proactive.
Just a few short years ago, there was one open-source hosting service worth considering: Sourceforge.net. It was by no means perfect (Alfresco's analytics, for example, have been down for over a month on Sourceforge, with no apparent urgency to fix the problem), but it was good enough, free, and everyone else used it.
Today, there are multiple options, including Google Code, Microsoft CodePlex, CodeHaus, GitHub, and, interestingly, Canonical's Launchpad.
Yes, Launchpad. Launchpad is the brainchild of Mark Shuttleworth's Ubuntu team, but it has aspirations beyond hosting the Ubuntu code, aspirations that recently attracted MySQL to move its code over to the Launchpad service.
I don't recall Launchpad starting with this third-party code hosting premise in mind, but it certainly has gone there fast. OStatic has an excellent write-up on its new features, and whether they're compelling enough to put your open-source project there.
For a new project, it's definitely an interesting choice. But the larger question is whether an established project - especially commercial projects - gets adequate value from any hosting service to justify hosting with a prefabricated hosting service. SugarCRM moved from Sourceforge to hosting its own project, and other companies have done the same. (My own company is in the process of exploring options.)
Why host your own project? Why take on that cost?
... Read moreRed Hat has been talking about open sourcing its Network for well over a year. Today, it finally did it.
However, code by itself is only moderately interesting. What we need now is a thriving community around "Project Spacewalk," as Red Hat calls the Network project.
Why? Well, because in some ways the commercial open-source community increasingly fragments as it matures financially. What is the first thing that MySQL and JBoss did to add value to their support subscriptions? Build networks. What, presumably, will be the first things that other open-source companies do? Build networks.
What is the result? A swamp of incompatible service-delivery networks.
Now consider the power for Red Hat if its Spacewalk actually served as a gathering point - an integration point - for the commercial open-source community? Powerful.
... Read moreCIO.com cites a Dynamic Markets survey of 800 IT managers, reporting that 62 percent of IT projects fail to meet their schedules. Other data:
- 49 percent suffered budget overruns
- 47 percent had higher-than-expected maintenance costs, and
- 41 percent failed to deliver the expected business value and ROI
This wouldn't be so bad, CIO.com notes, if it weren't for the fact that the numbers haven't appreciably improved over the past decade. In some cases, they've gotten worse.
Why? Why do 25 percent of all IT projects get canceled before completion? CIO.com cites two reasons:
... Read more
