I loved this post from CIO.com, reviewing an AMR Research report on the similarities between the big ERP vendors (SAP, Oracle, etc.) and Detroit's rusted Big Three: Chrysler, Ford, and GM. Money quote?
"Executives from one of the best-known ERP vendors recently talked to us about their 2009 product plans and strategy," writes Richardson. "At the end of the call, I expressed my astonishment that there were no plans to offer any part of their company's product line as software as a service."
As Richardson expected, the vendor's executives first response was to emphasize the advantages from an integrated suite versus a hybrid on-premises or on-demand strategy. "This quickly segued into a discussion of the challenges in making money with software as a service," he adds. "While I continue to agree with them on SaaS economics, they are missing the larger picture."
That larger picture, Richardson contends, is this: SaaS is for real.
I'm guessing that this same vendor would argue that there's no money in open source, either, and so pooh-pooh open source...to its eventual detriment. It's no longer a question if there's money in SaaS or open source to the extent of the go-go days of the 1990s.
Rather, the question is how to compete with vendors and communities that are sucking money out of the market through SaaS and open source. Eventually, SaaS and open source will create much larger markets as lower costs and lower risk will pave the way for increased adoption. But for the near term, incumbent vendors that refuse to compete on the economic terms set by subscription-based models are in for one heck of a ride...down.
I mentioned the other day that I've been hearing about scads of new open-source projects, commercial and otherwise, but I had not yet heard of OpenClinica, which TMCnet profiles today.
Since its debut in 2005, OpenClinica [developed by Akaza Research] has quickly become the most popular open source clinical trials software in the world. Akaza Research previously announced that it had experienced 2,000 OpenClinica downloads as of August 2006. Today's announcement represents a growth of 700 percent since that time....Akaza Research takes the position that its professional open source approach is key to helping to facilitate widespread adoption.
A total of 16,000 downloads would not normally qualify as "widespread," but then, OpenClinica doesn't exactly have widespread appeal, given its focus on clinical drug trials. This isn't to denigrate its utility, as the pharmaceutical companies allegedly using it may find tremendous value in an open-source solution for clinical trials.
For me, the real question is what benefits beyond free distribution Akaza is mining from its OpenClinica project. The project (hosted on Sourceforge) apparently receives few updates, with limited activity around the project, at least on Sourceforge. Is there more to the project than initially meets the eye?
While Google is storming into the mobile market with its open-source Android platform, Research In Motion has declared that open-sourcing its own software would be "a pretty big leap," as reported in EE Times:
"We do have an open-source management team that is investigating this," said Cassidy Gentle, a senior RIM software developer. "I would expect some of our Eclipse or Mobile Tools for Java could be made available on an open-source basis, but as for our APIs or other software--that's a pretty big leap," Gentle said.
It's perhaps not surprising that RIM would stick to its proprietary guns while they're still firing, but it is news that the company has an open-source management team. What does it do?
Meanwhile, other executives, including CNET blogger Dave Rosenberg, see open source playing a key role in the mobile market. Part of the reason lies in the ready-made community: every developer has a phone and, as is demonstrated by Funambol's success in mobile, many are willing to participate:
- Active Funambol installations growing more than 50 percent year-over-year, and downloads have grown 30 percent since the start of 2008 alone;
- Three million downloads, with huge uptake in China after translating the Funambol Forge into Chinese;
- 1,500 new developers registered in the last month alone
Funambol has been accelerating its community efforts with a cool new localization program called Lion Sniper. It's a way to make Funambol's mobile-sync software even more relevant for disparate geographies.
RIM, of course, has only a few models, and Apple has even fewer. Do these companies need open source to power their businesses? Perhaps not. But most of the world doesn't use a BlackBerry or iPhone, which leaves plenty of room for Google, Funambol, and others to make mobile fertile ground for open source.
Joel West, professor at San Jose State University College of Business, and Siobhán O'Mahony, professor at UC Davis Graduate School of Management, have produced some insightful research over the years. However, I particularly like a new academic study the two recently released: "The Role of Participation Architecture in Growing Sponsored Open Source Communities." It studies why developers contribute to certain open-source projects and don't contribute to others.
The key? If you want outside participation, you need to deliver more than mere transparency: Developers need to be able to change the direction of the project to make it worthwhile to stick around. (For a quick example of how too much control can stifle a community, take a look at Sun and OpenOffice.)
This is not surprising, but the research is helpful in detailing why this is so, and how firms cope with it. While most open-source projects attract little to no outside developer interest, corporate-sponsored open-source projects start with an implicit handicap by demanding control of the destinies of their projects:
By comparing the participation architectures that resulted from sponsors' design decisions, we identified two types of openness: transparency and accessibility ["Accessibility allows external participants to directly influence the direction of the community to meet their specific wants and needs"].
While transparency offered potential contributors the ability to follow and understand a community's production efforts, accessibility determined the degree to which external contributors could influence that production. In designing a community, sponsors were more likely to offer transparency than they were to offer accessibility to external community members.
... Read more
(Credit:
O'Reilly Media, Bernard Golden, and Sourceforge.net)
According to new research released today by Bernard Golden (Navica) and O'Reilly Research, there are at least six reasons compelling the rapid rise of open source. Agility and scale, reduced vendor lock-in, quality and security, cost, sovereignty (i.e., Local, not necessarily US-based development), and innovation. No wonder Sourceforge downloads continue to rise.
In one particular area, however, open source shines, in my opinion: The ability to reduce lock-in to a particular vendor. The report suggests:
There is little potential price competition for incumbent vendors: Because locked-in vendors have little fear of being replaced, they are in a position to extract expensive maintenance and upgrade fees, bleeding ever-shrinking IT budgets of precious dollars. For example, Oracle just announced price increases of 20% for its database software (accompanied by increases in ongoing maintenance fees as well), secure in the knowledge that very few enterprises are in a position to resist the increase due to the difficulty of replacing the products.
Whatever the price associated with getting into a relationship with Oracle, Microsoft, SAP, IBM, HP, etc., few enterprise buyers seem to reflect on just how expensive it will be to disengage from that relationship due to lock-in to proprietary technology. Things that may be good for buyers (like SaaS) can be safely avoided by the vendor that owns its customers.
... Read more
IBM Research is running a pilot program to gauge the interest in and feasibility of moving its employees from PCs to Macs. So far, the response appears to be an enthusiastic, "Yes, please! Is this PC recyclable, or should I just dump it out back?"
Why is IBM doing this? An internal document gives several reasons:
- Alternative to Microsoft Windows (IBM, like many enterprises, is concerned about being locked into Microsoft)
- Less prone to security issues
- Widely used in the academic world, with which (IBM) Research has close ties
- Many new hires are more comfortable with the Mac and lately asking for it
- Growing Mac community in (IBM) Research and within IBM that finds the development environment on Mac more convenient
- Growing acceptance of the Mac as a consumer and business-oriented client platform
- Strategy includes significant investments in achieving the Mac platform parity (IBM needs to support multiple platforms, and a policy of using those platforms internally makes support for them easier)
Of the still-small number of participants, 82 percent declared that the Mac offers a "better or best experience," compared to their ThinkPad-running Windows, and 86 percent asked to keep their Mac rather than be manacled to Windows. IBM employs 300,000-plus people. That's a lot of Macs, if it expands the pilot.
Imagine that.
CIO.com raises an important issue about the integrity of research being done by industry analysts. Namely, if a sponsor pays for the research, do they get favorable treatment in that research?
But do you ever wonder about the research's integrity? Do you care enough to go to the next page of that document or website and see just who was so interested in this topic or trend that they shelled out big bucks to enable this research project to take place?
The answer is, "No." Most people don't check. They see the headline, look at the pretty charts, and forget about the fine print.
Analysts, to a person, will scream "No!" they're not biased by the money. But it's human nature to be influenced by a paycheck. Very few people/analysts have the clout of Walt Mossberg to be able to nakedly diss a product or company.
... Read moreDave Rosenberg once wrote that the winner in a given open-source category (ERP, CRM, etc.) takes all. There's no room for second place. The first mover to get critical mass tends to horde the community and media resources.
I didn't believe Dave at the time, but after looking through the data from Alfresco's Open Source Barometer survey, I'm becoming more and more convinced.
The Barometer now comprises a data set of 35,000 enterprises, a significant percentage of which hail from the Global 2000. In the case of open-source databases, these enterprises are overwhelmingly voting for MySQL, as Ian Howells writes:
... Read moreSometimes it's all in how you ask the question. As Dan Farber at ZDNet reports, Forrester asked a wide range of enterprises how much they plan to spend on Web 2.0 technologies (plumbing), and then asked essentially the same question but focused on what that plumbing can create - social collaboration - and found that purchasing interest was much higher:
(Credit:
Forrester Research 2008)
Collaboration is increasingly a big business. Just ask Microsoft which minted $1 billion on Sharepoint in 2007, making Sharepoint Microsoft's fastest-growing product (measured in terms of revenue) ever.
... Read moreThough Research in Motion continues to keep the BlackBerry a frustratingly closed platform (with precious few applications--my biggest complaint about an otherwise great device/service), it is upgrading its software to add some interesting new features, the Wall Street Journal reports:
With the aim of making mobile e-mailing more like e-mailing from a desktop computer, RIM said BlackBerry users will soon be able to edit documents directly from the handheld device and to view messages in their original formatting...[RIM] also said the changes will enable users to retrieve e-mail messages that aren't stored on the device and to check the availability of a colleague before sending a meeting request.
To wait so long...for so little. At this pace, Apple's iPhone will leapfrog the BlackBerry. Already, I've noticed scads of new iPhones being used in corporate settings. But for the lack of a keyboard, I'd be on an iPhone, too.
RIM makes great hardware and decent software. It needs to recognize, however, that it's not the center of all original thinking. Once it came up with its idea and implemented it, it hasn't done much in the way of innovation.
... Read more
