Sometimes "free" is not so free.
I recently discovered this when a large, global system integrator (SI) deployed Alfresco Labs, our free and unsupported product, for a large client in Europe. The SI wasn't a partner of ours, and as the client soon learned when its deployment stumbled, the SI wasn't capable of providing enterprise-class support on the product. Yes, it knew the product well enough to deploy it and get paid over $50 million for its trouble, but when the deployment hit a glitch, guess to whom the SI came crawling for help?
It's not just my company. I know of another global SI that has deployed well over 100 Mule ESB instances, without buying support through MuleSource for its clients for a single one of them. If something goes wrong with those installations, the enterprise clients are going to end up paying a premium for the SI to figure out how to resolve the problems on the client's dime, never mind potential indemnification issues.
Not all SIs act like this, at least not all the time. My own company works closely with Satyam, SAIC, Booz Allen Hamilton, and others, and Accenture sells supported instances of the Spring Framework, but this is the exception to the rule for the large SIs, many of which seem happy to deploy open-source software for their clients without buying support or production-grade versions of the software.
Such SIs seem to believe that life has started raining free lunches.
This is a myopic way to do business, as the large SI in my initial example found: in that example, spending $50,000 (in the midst of a $50 million project) would have saved the SI the embarrassment and cost of trying to support a product that experience proved it didn't know nearly as well as it thought it did. The SI risked the success of a $50 million project to boost its margins by $50,000, only to find that one problem with the software ended up costing it and the client far more than $50,000.
If you're an enterprise looking for a strong SI on a project, here are a few things to consider:
... Read moreWhat do you do when you're trying to unseat an incumbent in your market? You could try competing with the same tools as your competitors, or you could try to disrupt them with open source.
For Siemens, the latter course makes more sense:
Siemens' outsourcing unit is snapping up some of South Africa's brightest open source minds as it readies to offer large-scale open source services to clients. Going, as it does, head-to-head with the likes of IBM and T-Systems, the company is hoping its open source strategy will find a new niche in an already highly-competitive market.
Here in the United States, I've seen rumblings of similar movements within the largest system integrators. Open source gives them a way to offer superior software and service at a lower price.
It's just a matter of time before IBM et al. will have to respond in kind as they see software margins erode. It's one thing to deprecate an open-source solution when it comes from mom-and-pop open-source shop X. It's quite another when it's being delivered by Siemens, Booz Allen Hamilton, Accenture, etc.
I stumbled across this news from Openbravo this morning, and thought it indicative of the type of contribution typical to commercial open-source projects. Egyptian accounting for Openbravo's open-source ERP platform. No way that a proprietary software company is going to write that, not until every other aspect of the product is already complete.
For organic open-source communities, bug fixes, code contributions, etc. can be expected, though not to the levels commonly expected. It turns out that all (or nearly all) communities are small, even for projects like Linux and Apache. Some, like Drupal, break this mold, but they are the exception, not the rule.
For most projects, including commercial open-source projects, localization and some bug reporting constitute the primary contributions from the community.
... Read moreIn an open-source business, a vendor's biggest competition often derives from a freely available, "community" version of its product. By extension, an open-source vendor's biggest competition comes from the systems integrators that provide implementation services around that vendor's community software.
Crippling this competition--so tempting on the surface--tends to cripple all the benefits that come from it, including facilitated adoption of the software, and lower sales and marketing costs.
The question, then, is how to foster unfettered adoption of one's open-source software while still preventing would-be partners from undermining one's own ability to profit from the software.
Over the past two and a half years, my company, Alfresco, has struggled with this tension and has, I believe, come up with some winning strategies and policies. I share them here, in case they're helpful to you in your own efforts to build an open-source business.
... Read moreCMS Watch has an interesting article that asks whether systems integrators are the neutral parties that they sometimes make themselves out to be. According to a US federal government suit against Accenture, the answer is "No."
As CMS Watch notes:
[T]he U.S. Department of Justice is suing Accenture for allegedly receiving kickback-like payments from technology suppliers it recommended and/or implemented at DOJ. The alleged fraud was a collusion with big-name IT suppliers (e.g., HP, Sun) and smaller vendors (e.g., Vignette) to defraud the Government.
... Read more
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