Open source has seen a flurry of executive appointments in the past few weeks, but no open-source company can top GroundWork for the level of CEO turnover in the past two years. In 2007, Ranga Rangachari helmed GroundWork. By 2008, company co-founder Dave Lilly had replaced Rangachari.
In early 2009, GroundWork slotted Lilly into the COO role, replacing him as CEO with Peter Jackson. Jackson was recently CEO of Intraware, a company he grew to $100 million in sales and eventually sold in January 2009, and seems a competent chief to lead the company.
Even so...three years, three CEOs. Worried a bit by all this change, I reached out to Jackson to get his perspective on GroundWork's business and its open-source opportunity.
GroundWork CEO Peter Jackson
(Credit: Groundwork)You come from a Web 2.0 background. What brought you to GroundWork?
What's nice about Web 2.0 technologies is that they're really focused on creating controlled communities. The original Web development efforts didn't do a good job regulating users on what they can and can't do. Applying that thinking to open source allows producers and users to share in safe and open areas. This includes blogs, entitlement-based distribution, shared testing and QA, questions to groups, uploading training videos, etc.
In GroundWork's case, we need to appeal to both the open-source community and to IT-reliant enterprises. This combination of Web 2.0 community building, while understanding and meeting the demands of enterprise customers, is a great chance for me to bring my experience in both areas to the company.
You took Intraware public. Do you think GroundWork and other open-source companies will have the same opportunity?
... Read moreI see open source radically changing the software market in the next 24 months. Customers of traditional enterprise products and services have way overpaid for years. As companies analyze their capital expenditures more deeply, they suddenly find huge value gaps between their historical IT management purchases and open-source alternatives.
With this in mind, if the stock market recovers in a couple of years, there should be many IPOs in this sector.
Chris Keene, CEO of ActiveGrid, has an interesting take on the open-source CEO that I hadn't really considered before, but which I think has some validity: open-source CEOs tend to reflect the dynamics of open source, namely they are collaborative and somewhat (somewhat, mind you!) humble.
Open source CEOs don't see every other CEO/company as an enemy in their zero-sum strategy to take over the known software universe. They bring a community-minded approach not just to their technical work but also to their business activities.
You can't take this too far - there are jerks in open source just as there are in the proprietary software world. But I do think there's something to Chris' contention (ironic diction intended). The people I know in the open-source world are fiercely competitive...without being fierce. They are intent on winning without being obnoxious.
All of which makes open source - project or company - an enjoyable place to work.
Perhaps the most competitive market for commercial open source is the IT management space, where open source vendors must compete with the "Big Four" of enterprise IT management, but also with the "Little Four" of open source enterprise IT management (Hyperic, Zenoss, Groundwork, and OpenNMS).
Today, in our fourteenth installment of the Open Source CEO Series we're talking with Bill Karpovich, CEO and Co-founder of Zenoss. Each of these so-called Little Four compete in very different ways, and hence it's no surprise that their respective CEOs draw different conclusions about how to compete.
Name, position, and company of executive
... Read more
Bill Karpovich, CEO and Co-founder, Zenoss.
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