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