I’ve been thinking about Monday’s post on IBM’s “Open Collaboration Client Solution” and what it means to enterprise customers. And while I think it’s darn hard to figure out what IBM is actually offering from that release, it occurred to me that I may have been looking at the word “open” in the wrong way.

“Open,” to an enterprise customer, has more to do with interoperability between existing and anticipated applications than with open source specifically. This “light dawns over Marblehead” realization came from seeing a reference to the Open Solutions Alliance (OSA) customer forum results. This survey of CIOs and business execs from over 100 firms confirms that interoperability between open source applications and also between open source and proprietary solutions is an overriding concern for firms considering open source implementations. To quote from the OSA announcement:

“These findings represent a clear opportunity for the OSA to out-Microsoft
Microsoft by offering a fully interoperable suite of business tools,” said Dominic
Sartorio, OSA president. “If we can help our members’ solutions work well
together it makes it easier for our channel partners to sell open-source software
and it will translate into more revenue for vendors and even more options for
customers.”

Interoperability is a challenge among both large and small organizations. Key
issues with small organizations include single sign-on and authorization, data
integration and synchronization, UI and portal integration, and content
management integration. In addition to these, larger enterprises also raised
business process integration, production management, and legacy/proprietary
integration as key issues.

OSA executive director Dominic Sartorio, in an interview with IT Business Edge, described the IT customer’s concern with interoperability this way:

“It made the difference between them buying a solution or not. If you have to do a lot of interoperability work on your own or hire contractors to do it, that adds to the cost of ownership profile of the product. … So this is real. There’s a lot of unmet opportunity out there because we haven’t collectively done a good enough job. “

Sartorio also described how customers said “the bigger proprietary vendors like Microsoft or Oracle” were better able to handle the interoperability challenge, but at a higher cost, vendor lock-in and reduced innovation.

So maybe IBM - and other firms like Optaros– really do have an “open” opportunity here to straddle the gap between giant proprietary software companies and the much smaller open source application vendors. This helps explain Sun’s big bet with the MySQL acquisition and other recent deals. We’ll have to see just how open these big companies can be given their legacy of closed business practices and fierce competition from both sides of the issue.

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

This entry was posted by Ryck on Wednesday, January 23rd, 2008 at 8:00 pm and is filed under Community, Enterprise open source, Open Source projects. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.