The Open Road

InternetNews.com's Andy Patrizio pens an excellent analysis of why EMC, the storage giant, just might gobble up Sun, the former Unix king. While there are potential conflicts to such a match, the synergies might well outweigh them.

Patrizio walks through a range of benefits EMC could derive from Sun's hardware prowess (tape storage to complement EMC's expertise in NAS and SAN, enhanced server throughput performance. ZFS, etc.), as well as its software line-up (Java, RSA security, database replication, etc.). The list is long and the potential benefits would be huge.

But it's actually in the very thing that Patrizio describes as a potential deal-killer - open source - that EMC could derive the biggest benefit. Patrizio warns:

There is one big snag to this EMC/Sun theory. EMC has displayed no interest in the open source movement, while Sun has embraced it in a big way. This could prove a no-win situation if EMC picks up Sun and open source advocates demand that it open source other products -- especially if GPL-licensed (define) products start mixing with EMC software. If EMC balks, it could wreck the goodwill Sun has built over the last few years. Then again, goodwill doesn't pay the bills.

True enough, but Sun's struggles derive from fighting open source (e.g., Linux kicking Unix out of data centers), not its embrace of open source. In areas like its Open Storage strategy, Sun has been doing very well.

What does EMC need that every vendor on the planet needs? Customers. But customers in the current environment and, indeed, well before it, are exceedingly expensive to acquire. A friend at Oracle tells me that his company routinely spends $1 million to win a $1 million license deal in order to capture the ongoing maintenance revenue stream.

One of the primary benefits of open source, contrarily, is that it drops the cost of customer acquisition to nearly $0.00. Sun's explicit strategy with open source is to use high-volume downloads of Java, MySQL, and other open-source projects to drive sales of its hardware and services. Sun's software, in other words, does the heavy lifting of lead acquisition while its hardware and solutions businesses do the heavy lifting on lead conversion.

Wouldn't EMC need the same thing? And, arguably, EMC would be in a better position to convert open-source leads into paid customers because it has more closed complements to sell to such leads.

Open source, in other words, may be one of the primary reasons for EMC to acquire Sun, not avoid it.

SugarCRM announced a new Cloud Connectors program on Monday that opens the leading open-source CRM solution to cloud services like LinkedIn.

SugarCRM also got a bit more social, with a new Social Feeds feature that provides alerts and status updates found in Web services like Facebook.

It's a great way of opening up the SugarCRM system beyond mere source code, as PC World reports:

If you're logging into third-party sites "while you're on the phone with someone, you're going to be hemming and hawing and you're not going to have it at your fingertips," [director of product marketing Martin Schneider] said. "The idea is to drive adoption and keep people in one space, but also give them unfettered access to bringing content into the CRM system."

Windows, which SugarCRM is calling "Cloud Views," will pop up with relevant information, such as which of a user's LinkedIn connections work at a certain company. Users can also import this information into SugarCRM.

I find myself using LinkedIn, as well as SugarCRM, all the time in the context of my work managing U.S. and Latin America sales for Alfresco. Having both in the same place or, rather, having data from LinkedIn tied into my CRM system, makes a lot of sense and should help me to save time.

This is the next level of "source" integration. What was once purely about source code is now equally a matter of open, mobile data. While SugarCRM's Cloud Connectors feature doesn't break ground that others like Salesforce.com haven't already covered, the combination of open source and open data is a potent combination for enterprises looking to expand CRM efficiency while reducing CRM lock-in.

Disclosure: I am an adviser to and customer of SugarCRM.

It's a rough market, and likely to get worse before it gets better. For those (developers or otherwise) who think they may need to be finding new employment soon, I'd highly recommend that you sign up for the Open Source Group on LinkedIn. New jobs are constantly being listed. Here are a few from today:

Open Source Jobs on LinkedIn

(Credit: LinkedIn)

The group provides other useful information and services, but given the criticality of employment, it may be the first thing that catches your eye.

TechCrunch reports that LinkedIn just upgraded its people search, but fails to mention the technology behind the upgrade: Lucene, the open-source search project. Nor is LinkedIn alone: MySpace has also used Lucene to revamp its search functionality, as Ars Technica reported earlier in June.

Indeed, borrowing from open source is now standard operating procedure for Web companies. What is interesting in the use of Lucene is how the Web is branching beyond the familiar LAMP stack to build in technologies like Lucene, Yahoo!'s User Interface Library, and other open-source components.

Arguably, the Web could not exist without open-source software, which is why I continue to believe it's critical that we find ways to encourage open-source contributions in a Web world that isn't bound by Open Source 1.0's licensing. It's therefore unfortunate that the Web lacks the "Software 1.0"'s licensing restrictions.

Perhaps the market will sort all this out, with Google and others seeing a strategic interest in open-source contributions, despite a lack of compulsion from open-source licensing. Perhaps. I guess we'll just have to wait and see.

Based on a nudge from Luke Kanies, I installed the TripIt application for LinkedIn. Others have been prodding me to use TripIt for at least a year, but this is the first time it made sense.

In one view, I could see my network activity, but right next to it is an upcoming trip to New York and people that I might want to reach out to while there, like my cousin.

What a perfect complement.

Names have been smudged to protect the innocent.

This is what Dopplr should have been, but it requires me to recreate my schedule (and network) just for it. I tried it for a few weeks and then gave up.

I use LinkedIn exclusively to recruit for Alfresco. I've also started to use it to track Tweets about Alfresco. With the addition of TripIt (you guessed it!), I'm going to start using LinkedIn to help remind me of customers, partners, and prospects I should be seeing when I travel.

LinkedIn does social networking right. It gives me relevant information, doesn't pretend that everyone I've ever thought of (and many that I haven't) are my "friends," and generally treats me like an adult. With the addition of applications like TripIt, it just became even better.

Now, it just needs a repository for storing the blogs and other communications that it will no doubt shortly integrate. I know of one....

One of the problems with social networking sites is that they tend to be ugly. Not just a little bit ugly. Seriously ugly.

MySpace has upgraded its UI, but it's still noisy, long (you have to scroll way down on some pages to get where you want to go), and cluttered. Facebook? It looks like a dingy and, like MySpace, is overly noisy (It's also shockingly slow. I've been trying to change my account settings and it keeps hanging on me). Not only that, but my home page on Facebook doesn't seem to want to let me cut out all the noise - no matter how much I tell it that I don't want to hear about so-and-so "friend"ing so-and-so, it keeps telling me.

Only LinkedIn seems to respect me as a grown-up. It lets me filter out noise and presents everything in an inviting UI.

The other thing I like about LinkedIn is that it doesn't try to be my one-stop shop for social activities. I use it for one thing: Professional networking (and recruiting as a fortunate off-shoot of that). I would never dream of paying Facebook or MySpace to blare fake friend activities to me, but I gladly paid LinkedIn $500 to help me recruit a few people to my company each year.

I suspect the noisy design of Facebook and MySpace has more to do with wild attempts to be relevant to more and more people (so that they'll visit the site and get hit by advertising). I prefer LinkedIn's more direct, conservative approach. I visit it when I need it, and I pay for that "need." Form follows function.

One of the frustrating things about an open-source business is you don't generally know who is using your software. The paid customers you know, of course, but generally this represents a small fraction of the total user base.

In Alfresco's case, roughly 30,000 people download our software each month. Of those, maybe 4,000 to 6,000 register for documentation or give us their contact information in some other way.

Larry Augustin gave an excellent presentation [PDF] on this recently at OSBC. He talked about how to engineer a product to maximize conversions from downloads to dollars.

Today I found a new way. LinkedIn. What do I mean? And is this only something for open-source vendors?

I use LinkedIn quite a bit. I've found that it serves a very effective purpose (something that can't always be said for more chatty social-networking sites like MySpace): recruiting. I've done all my Alfresco recruiting through LinkedIn, and have ended up with excellent employees and no recruiter fees. Zippo.

Now LinkedIn in opening up its platform to outside developers, in an effort to compete with Facebook. The timing couldn't be more opportune, as LinkedIn offers something that the other social-networking sites don't: a place for professionals to get work done, rather than throw poo at each others' "walls," as the New York Times reports:

The move is one of several LinkedIn is making, including launching a beta version of a redesigned home page, to keep its less flashy but more business-minded contacts network site vibrant alongside rivals MySpace and Facebook. LinkedIn said it wants to be a hub for business information.

... Read more

It's not open source, of course, but I find the gathering momentum toward opening up APIs in Web 2.0 applications to be an interesting spin on the "offline" open source world. First it was Facebook, and now it's LinkedIn. In the web world, it's not source code that gets opened (though these properties could do this and, in my mind, should), but rather APIs.

As to why companies are opening up the web, it has nothing to do with charity. It's actually very similar to the offline software world where you can put a lot of pressure on your closed competitors by opening up the value they want closed. Glyn Moody captures this well:

[O]nce somebody in a space starts opening up, its competitors simply have no choice but to follow if they want to keep the developers with them.

I don't view this as the end of LinkedIn's "open source" road, but rather the beginning. There is much more to gain by opening up than by closing off one's value.