The Open Road

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.

(Credit: Forrester)

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.

Gartner Magic Quadrant for IT Event Correlation and Analysis

(Credit: Gartner)

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.

What with all the talk about companies buying their way into Gartner's Magic Quadrants (viz, the more cash you offer, the better the magic), most recently with accusations flying about Wipro buying its way onto a Magic Quadrant, I was pleased to see a comic take on the infamous (but powerful) Magic Quadrants posted by Valley of the Geeks publisher and Sun Microsystems executive Zack Urlocker:

(Credit: Valley of the Geeks)

Gartner, of course, provides an explanation of how it builds its Magic Quadrants, which it says helps provide "visual snapshots of a market's direction, maturity, and participants." The hitch? You have to pay to read it. Nice.

A few months ago Sam Lawrence of Jive Software spent some time grading Forrester and Gartner as analysts. His verdict? Neither does a fantastic job, but Forrester is much better at servicing a small but growing vendor like Jive.

My own experience with analysts is mixed. Analysts tend to be great at predicting the past, but far less adept at predicting the future, which is actually what customers expect from them. If you look at such things as Gartner's Magic Quadrant, it is great at showing where the industry was, rather than where it's going.

The problem is that analysts like Gartner get their information from the vendors that subsidize their research, as well as from CIOs. Neither is a good indicator of where the market is going.

As Billy Marshall classically wrote, the CIO tends to be the "last to know" about new IT initiatives. As for the vendors, the only ones with enough cash to subsidize research are the same ones that have a vested interest in protecting existing cash cows. In other words, the past.

Analysts, then, are a lagging indicator of success. They tell an enterprise buyer from whom she should have purchased software and hardware a few years ago, not where she should invest IT dollars tomorrow. As an example, despite the massive influx of open-source vendors in the enterprise, Gartner persists in believing that open source is years away from making a dent in the enterprise, and you'll rarely find an open-source vendor in a Gartner Magic Quadrant. Here's a recent Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence. No open source need apply.

Putting open source aside, some analyst research is so egregiously off that it's almost comical.

I had to laugh when I read this New York Times piece discussing the iPhone's readiness for the enterprise. Apparently someone at Gartner has now (sort of) blessed the iPhone as "enterprise ready."

Meanwhile, many of us have been using it for months or a year already in the enterprise, and finding it "enterprise ready" without someone else's official blessing.

It's the same with open source. Periodically an analyst, in true politician style, tries to get out in front of the open-source momentum to tell us that (Get ready for this) more and more enterprises are using open source, and that it's now enterprise ready. Or, even better, they tell us that no one is yet using open source which, of course, can't be true because, well, we are.

All of which leads me to suggest the single best determinant of enterprise readiness for technology: When you decide to use it, and it works.

If it works, you don't need anyone else to tell you that it works. This is open source: You can try the code out for yourself. Unless you're a mindless sheep, you also don't need some analyst to tell you that "everyone else is doing it," a phrase that teenagers find compelling but which should be less so to you if you have working code in front of you.

It's like that Martin Short skit on synchronized swimming from Saturday Night Live: "Hey! You! I know you. I know you." You don't have to follow the swarm, unless it happens to be moving in a direction that your own experience with a product suggests is a good direction.

Just use it. It works. You don't have to ask permission from the analysts. Like the CIO, they're often the last to know.

France may not have shown up for the Euro 2008 soccer finals, but it continues to demonstrate the most adoption of open-source software, according to a recent report from Forrester Research ("Open Source Adoption: Notes From The Field").

In France, 24 percent of the enterprises surveyed by Forrester are currently using open-source software, with another 15 percent either piloting it or planning to start a pilot within the next year. (I'll wager that the other 61 percent are using open source but simply don't know it).

The United States? It's at 17 percent adoption, with another 11 percent in near-term pilots. Canada is tied with the States, while Germany, along with France, leads.

International Adoption of Open Source

(Credit: Forrester Research)

As noted in the comments to an earlier post, these low numbers suggest that Forrester is talking to the wrong people within enterprises. I'm confident in suggesting that at least 90 percent of these same companies that Forrester surveyed are actively using open source--but the CIO simply doesn't know it.

Forrester just released a new survey, one that begs the question: Who paid for this rubbish?

I generally like Forrester's work, but this survey flies in the face of every piece of research on open source that I've seen in the last five years...including research from Forrester. Also, as the research itself finds, often its survey respondents are using open source even when they don't know it: Nearly half of those surveyed by Forrester who are using open-source frameworks (e.g., Spring) still claim they are not using open source.

Forrester's newest research finds:

• Seventy percent of decision-makers responded that they don't have interest or have no plans to adopt open-source software;
• Only 23 percent of respondents said expanding their use of open-source software was a priority;
• Security is the main concern around adopting open-source software. Eighty-eight percent of respondents said it was an important or very important concern.

Amazing how open source's greatest strengths are now being used against it. Security? I'm not suggesting that open source is perfect here, but it's one of the primary reasons that people are dumping proprietary software for open source. This is a classic Microsoft spin, and directly contradicts Forrester's own, earlier research that open source offers security advantages, not disadvantages.

Fortunately, if CIOs care to spend even a nanosecond checking Forrester's claims about tepid adoption of open source, there is a wide array of contradictory evidence, including from Forrester:

• Earlier this year, Gartner's Mark Driver noted the following: "By 2012, 80 percent or more of all commercial software will include elements of open-source technology."

... Read more

Sometimes our beloved analysts get things dead-on...and sometimes their predictions as to where IT trends will take us are very, very off.

In an excellent article, ZDNet traces the non-demise of Windows and UNIX that analysts predicted, the continued dominance of Microsoft on the desktop (which was supposed to have been supplanted by open-source alternatives by now), and generally blisters our inability to predict the future with regard to open source. It's everywhere, yes, but without the expected dominance that was to come with ominpresence.

One thing it has brought us, however, and that is a significant shift in how all companies engage open source:

...[Apache, Firefox, and Samba] are token victories that mainly offer new options for home users and small businesses. No other open-source application has enjoyed anywhere near the massive commercial success of Linux through its creation of an entire services and support ecosystem.

Instead, they have served as game-changers - motivators to encourage for-profit vendors like IBM and Microsoft to up their game and offer extra value in their respective products.

... Read more

Sam Lawrence, Jive's chief marketing officer, has issued a report card for two analyst firms with which Jive works. Net net? Forrester is pretty engaged with its clients (and non-clients), and Gartner, apparently, is not.

I've talked about analysts on this blog before, and don't want to spend more cycles denigrating their work. Like Sam, I've found Forrester to be particularly good. Forrester has actively talked with Alfresco despite the fact that we're not clients.

Perhaps Forrester recognizes that there's more to a market than the incumbents (though, as Sam found, no analysts with which we've worked have been all that interested in actually talking to our customers). After all, we're often the ones exerting a big influence but don't want to spend money on buying our way onto an analyst's report.