As mentioned in a previous post, I attended last week the Open Source Business Conference, organized by InfoWorld in San Francisco.

This conference, dedicated to the commercial aspects of open source rather than to a technical angle (this year’s theme was “Putting Open Source to Work”, has produced real food for thought.

• Thought #1: the conference audience is evolving. It used to be mostly attended by investors and lawyers. This year 40% of attendees came from IT departments in large enterprises, including many CEOs and CIOs. This change proves that open source is becoming more and more entrenched in enterprises. After being a niche phenomenon for specialists, open source is democratized and offers to enterprises a preferred alternative with well suited enterprise offerings, affordable and reliable. As a side note this also explains the high interest from traditional players such as Sun Microsystems, Oracle, Microsoft or Citrix who are reinforcing their positions on this market, through acquisitions or partnerships.
• Thought #2: Is open source merely a way to increase revenue for traditional players?
  Sun’s taking over MySQL, Citrix acquiring XenSource, Novell dealing with Microsoft… next to well established players with proprietary business models and some degree of openness (more in some cases than in others…) is there room for 100% open source players? In the past, quoting Rob Bearden, a serial entrepreneur (JBoss, OpenSpan), Anthony Ha said on VentureBeat, that Open Source companies used to play in established markets and were basing their differentiation on cost reduction and innovation. However a new generation of open source players is emerging. Rather than attacking mature markets, they identify new issues and get first mover advantage. According to Rob Bearden: “Among other things, moving into a fresh market means you can start making money earlier, because you’re adding value sooner. Then your ability to monetize is not only earlier, but longer.”
  This is an interesting angle. Which however does not concern Talend, which even though it is part of the so-called “first generation” is growing at full steam! Being part of the first or second generation is not so important, the most important part being to innovate and offer to the market new functions.
  To answer this thought #2: of course, 100% open source players play, and will continue to play, an important role. As proven by the success of Talend and many of its partners, such as JasperSoft, SugarCRM, SpagoBI, etc.
• Thought #3: The adventure is only starting. Since the “open source” term was crafted in 1984, a lot happened. And, to quote Matt Asay: “We are still in commercial open source’s infancy”. Like him, I am certain that the majority of business models or deployment modes will keep evolving with time, not under the pressure from vendors but from users!

Nothing is ever etched in stone. Who would have believed one year ago that Sun would invest $1 billion in an open source database? Keeping abreast of the market (for example at OSBC) is very useful. But it’s even more important to listen carefully to clients and to determine how to help them best.

Bertrand

Microsoft’s recent interoperability announcement made lots of noise. Dominic Sartorio, the Open Solutions Alliance commented on this announcement on the OSA blog.

The announcement is focused on Windows Vista and the .NET Framework, Windows Server 2008, SQL Server 2008, Office 2007, Exchange Server 2007, and Office SharePoint Server 2007, as well as future versions of these products. In their press release, Microsoft expresses its wish to “ensure open connections, promote data portability, enhance support for industry standards, and foster more open engagement with customers and the industry, including open source communities”.

The day after the announcement, technical specifications techniques of these products were available online and can now be accessed: Microsoft released to developers and integrators over 30,000 pages of documentation that will help them with interoperability, while ensuring them that they won’t be sued if they implement these protocols.

Even though some (such as the European Commission) have voiced concerns that Microsoft has made similar commitments in the past, this announcement is good news for enterprises, and of course for the OSA that acts daily to solve interoperability issues. As Dominic said, the management at Microsoft has heard the more and more frequent demands from users who deploy open source solutions and need them to interoperate with Microsoft’s technologies.

It is also worth noting that this announcement occurs after the European Court of Justice has imposed a stiff penalty on Microsoft for having abused its dominant position, related to all of its software suite. And that even though the information is now freely available, users will need to pay royalties to Microsoft to deploy solutions using this documentation. The road is still long, before we reach true interoperability, as we define it in the open source world. Sharing information is good, allowing its free use is even better!

For more information, I recommend the Port 25 blog, that explains Microsoft’s open source and interop strategies and comments on related news. Of special interest is this piece by Sam Ramji where he explains how open source influenced the development of Windows Server 2008 and shows how their development methods have evolved.

Bertrand