During the Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston, I interviewed Bob Bickel (Ringside Networks), John Newton (Alfresco), and Jeff Whatcott (Acquia) about the relationships between open source, innovation, and enterprise 2.0.

First, Bob Bickel, currently CEO at Ringside Networks:

Second, John Newton, currently CTO and Chairman at Alfresco:

Finally, Jeff Whatcott of Acquia (commercial enterprise supporting the Drupal project):

As all three interviews amply demonstrate, open source is driving innovation in the Enterprise 2.0 space as in the Web 2.0 space.

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Stephen Powers of Forrester Research recently released a report identifying Alfresco and Drupal as the two open source content management platforms to which enterprises should pay the most attention. Specifically, the report claims that “enterprises interested in open source should keep an eye on two offerings — Alfresco Software and Drupal.” (Also check out Matt Asay’s coverage of the report for CNet).

I couldn’t agree more - though I wish the report had come out a few weeks ago. It would have made for a good introduction to the panel on Open Source Platforms which I moderated at the Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston. The panelists were:

(more…)

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At the recent DrupalCon 2008 in Boston, Dries gave usual “State of Drupal” keynote:

After a quick mention of the work the community did on Drupal 6, Dries focused mostly on what is coming in Drupal 7 and what he sees as the important work to be done. This included showing video from the recent University of Minnesota Libraries usability testing. It’s great to see the lead on a significant open source project highlighting the importance of usability, especially as the community grows.

Additionally, Dries highlighted test coverage, and made the argument that the “code freeze” portion of the development cycle for Drupal 7 could be much shorter if broader test coverage were provided. Having a good automated test framework contributes greatly to the ease of development and debugging for new module authors, existing module maintainers, and the implementers of sites based on Drupal.

Finally, Dries also described longer term planning about the use of Drupal in places where HTML is not the assumed or even primary output: social networking frameworks and the semantic web. This resonates with much of the discussion in other open source communities (DiSo, for example) and reinforces the critical role open source plays in innovation on the web.

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Was it pressure from the EU, a ploy to encourage ISO adoption of MS-friendly document formats or maybe, just maybe, the “disruption” created by enterprise adoption of open source? Whatever the reasons, Microsoft today announced it is:

“implementing four new interoperability principles and corresponding actions across its high-volume business products: (1) ensuring open connections; (2) promoting data portability; (3) enhancing support for industry standards; and (4) fostering more open engagement with customers and the industry, including open source communities.”

The products include:

“Windows Vista (including the .NET Framework), Windows Server 2008, SQL Server 2008, Office 2007, Exchange Server 2007, and Office SharePoint Server 2007, and future versions of all these products.”

As Microsoft CTO Ray Ozzie put it in the press release: “By increasing the openness of our products, we will provide developers additional opportunity to innovate and deliver value for customers.”

According to Matt Aslett of The 451 Group, what it really means is this:

“It’s an acknowledgment that in today’s world, many more flowers bloom when platform companies make their APIs completely open for developers to write to, a la Google and MSFT’s recent investee, Facebook. This is yet another thing Google has taught the largest software company in the world. It appears on the face of it that Microsoft now intends to live by the merit of its products, rather than rely on lock-in.”

Of course, it could also be just a “Good Steve Day,” according to ZDNet’s Open Source blog:

“Is this an honest change of policy, or is this just a bow to political pressure, pressure which lobbying and campaign contributions might some day remove?”

Speaking for myself, I tend to agree with Jay Lyman at The 451 Group, who calls this “Open source disruption realized“:

“This is just another case of companies coming around to market realities. Look at it like the Internet. Did the Internet suffer when Microsoft finally came around and began supporting and focusing on really working with it? Hardly. The companies that have already focused on the enterprise potential and opportunities for open source software retain their lead. They may have to work harder to maintain it, but that is a good thing, both for users and for open source.”

Is a more open Microsoft a good thing? Is it an open door to better interoperability or an open jaw to swallow open source competitors? Post your comments below?

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Maybe you should pay attention to the man behind that curtain — the curtain with all those “Gs” and “Os” on it.

If you think obscure techie blogs might be the canary in the coal mine for spotting the biggest, neatest and next-est idea to reshape the world, you might want to keep an eye on “Open Source at Google.”

Launched with typical Google low-key non-fanfare a week or so ago, recent posts include:

• Project Hosting Just Keeps on Growing Look out SourceForge. Google reports hosting over 80K open source projects in just 18 months.
• Google Sponsors Freedom Training Task Force This post thanks Google for contributing to the Free Software Foundation in support of their efforts to explain how free software licensing works. Talk about doing no evil!
• Announcing the Grand Prize Winners for the Google Highly Open Participation Contest Learn who won Google’s “experiment” (contest?) to see how many secondary school students would contribute to open source development projects. More than 350 participated on ten different projects. Check out the graphs in the post.

While I don’t expect a Google blogger to inadvertently reveal Google’s secret search sauce, this blog bears watching, if only because they keep trying new things over at the Googleplex. Why? Because they can.

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Jonathan Schwartz, Sun’s newly buzz-making CEO thanks to the company’s $1B US acquisition of MySQL last month, gave the keynote at this week’s SugarCRM conference. In his keynote, as reported by InfoWorld, Schwartz identified a key reason why his company scooped up the widely-used open source database firm: distribution.

“What was attractive was how profound their distribution was,” Schwartz said. MySQL offers access to about 11 million deployments around the world, and Sun began to see MySQL delivering real value, innovation, and choice, he said. MySQL sells services and support for its database.

If you’ve been wondering about all those other open source acquisitions, wonder no more. The value is in the distros.

Paying less than $100 US for each deployment — make that ‘prospective paying customer who is already using the product’ — Sun has access to millions of potential customers for Sun services, other software products and hardware. That’s not a bad price for a solid customer lead in a business where the long-term value of any enterprise customer is measured in six or seven figures, and it ignores the very real value of MySQL’s current annual service and support revenue (estimated at $100M US) and harder-to-quantify value of its intellectual property.

So maybe we’ve got an algorithm for an open source project valuation. For example, Yahoo’s acquisition of Zimbra last September cost big Y $350M US. According to a Wall Street Journal story on Zimbra in November 2006, they had some four million users. Allowing for some shrinkage, that’s quite close to the $100 per deployment for MySQL.

But for all you FOSS project leaders out there who are running to check your download and registration numbers, keep in mind MySQL and Zimbra had “commercial” versions and paying customers prior to the big buyout. So don’t count on pocketing a Franklin for every download just yet. Still, a community can dream, can’t it?

Got some other ideas for valuing an open source project? Post your ideas and comments below.

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The OpenID Foundation today announced Google, IBM, Microsoft, VeriSign and Yahoo! had signed on as the open source identity project’s first corporate board members. If you were concerned about the all those mammoth tech firms weighing in on the spec, the foundation’s announcement says:

“Today’s announcement marks a milestone in the maturity and impact that the OpenID community has had. While the OpenID Foundation serves a stewardship role around the community’s intellectual property, the Foundation’s board itself does not make any decisions about the specifications the community is collaboratively building.

The release goes on to say:

At the beginning of 2006, there were fewer than 20-million OpenID enabled URLs and less than 500 websites where they could be used. Today there are over a quarter of a billion OpenIDs and well over 10,000 websites to accept them. OpenID has grown to be implemented by major open source projects such as Drupal, cornerstone Web 2.0 services such as those by 37signals and Six Apart, as well as a mix of large companies including as Apple, Google, and Yahoo!.”

Even non-tech sites like CNN/Money were picking up the news today. Having Google, Microsoft and Yahoo! all the same story that’s NOT about the Micro-Hoo buyout is probably a good thing.

But while there may be a lot of OpenIDs out there, I’m not sure I’m holding one, nor am I sure any of the sites I visit make use of OpenID. Do you — or sites you frequent — use OpenID? And are any enterprise companies using OpenID as a way to authenticate their users behind the firewall? I’d like to hear about it. Please post your comments below.

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Alex Fletcher’s post “Meeting the needs of the unpaid on the road to gaining customers” raises a very interesting point for enterprise users of open source applications: What is the right level of support for the OSS needed in my organization?

Fletcher mentions this article on choosing commercial support to make the point that too often, support for open source is seen as an either/or option: free, as in do-it-yourself; or commercial, as in subscribe to our program and pay moderate to serious fees.

But he thinks there’s lots of room in the middle for support organizations to help the “unpaid” — or low-paying — enterprise user. This is both a customer-development strategy and a new business opportunity. Citing “building internal competencies” as a key reason many organizations choose an enterprise open source solution in the first place, Fletcher suggests:

Oddly enough, the intersection between employing open source and building self-sufficient competency is where support providers should examine how they can evolve into a more relevant entity. Perhaps instead of attempting to become the sole source for upgrades, vulnerability assessment and/or migration, support providers should seek to offer a wider array of flexible support (and licensing) options for those who choose to go it alone?

How about it? Would a pay-as-you-go approach to open source support appeal to your organization? Has your firm already purchased a support contract? Or does paying for open source support run against the whole rationale for using open source? Post your responses and comments below.

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Today’s Wall Street Journal has a great story on HP’s efforts to shrink the size and cost of their IT infrastucture. “Taming Technology Sprawl” (subscription required) details some of the issues the tech giant faced trying to slim down a tech infrastructure swollen by multiple acquisitions and overlapping IT staffs.

“Since July 2005, the Palo Alto, Calif., firm has been in a project to cut the number of computer programs it uses by more than half, and reduce the number of its data centers — where large computers run programs that support H-P’s businesses — to six from 85.”

The cost is significant. “H-P spent $4.2 billion — about 5% of 2005 revenue — to maintain its IT systems” and aims to drop that to 2% of revenue and shed half of the 19,000 person staff.

A key problem? Too many software programs.

“Abour eight months after launching the overhaul in mid-2005, H-P’s new Chief Information Officer Randy Mott unexpectedly hit a hurdle. According to a February 2006 survey, H-P employees depended on about 6,000 computer programs — nearly double what Mr. Mott had expected. By then, he was months into the project and had allocated money and staff based on earlier assumptions. “I was blindsided,” says Mr. Mott, who formerly worked at Dell Inc. and Wal-Mart Stores Inc.”

The story goes on to describe other issues, including how CIO Mott had to battle VPs who were loath to give up their departmental computing resources. But I kept thinking about how difficult it is to really keep track of what software programs are in use within an organization, and how many of those might be open-source or otherwise untraceable through conventional license tracking. Then I spotted a mention of Matt Asay’s News.com blog item on the story behind HP’s FOSSology open-source tools. Asay quotes HP’s Christine Marino, VP of Linux and open source, on the creation of an open source tool for open source governance.

Free and open-source software is everywhere. It’s not just Linux (not that Linux is just one thing, anyway). At HP we’ve been using free and open-source software throughout our company for years as a consumer and contributor of free and open-source software.

Many years ago we realized that we needed some processes around our adoption of open source. We were very clear that we wanted to take advantage of FOSS (free and open-source software) but also that we needed to manage our use of it. Our processes have grown and evolved over the years, and we’ve written software to assist with these processes.

About 18 months ago during our open-source customer councils we talked about the tools that we had built internally and there was almost a rush to the doors, with our customers clamoring for these kinds of tools to help them manage their open-source adoption. So, really, it was our customers asking for our assistance in managing their open-source software that was the impetus for our open-sourcing our framework today.

Martino goes on to say that HP considered creating a proprietary product but chose to stay with open source tools because “there’s no one-size-fits-all approach to FOSS governance.” She does not mention CIO Mott, but I can well believe FOSS tracking tools got a big boost internally when the IT cost reduction project arrived.

All of this makes me wonder if there are open source tools for managing both FOSS and proprietary software governance? Does open source have a role to play in IT mangement of both types? Post your comments on this issue below.

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Highlights from late last week include:

• Is your CMS grown-up and nimble? Open Source Content Management - mature and agile for today’s needs (Optaros.com)
• Do you think BillG knows? Microsoft: We’re Open (Source) For Business (internetnews.com)
• Don’t step in the Mooshup: WSO2 open source mashup builder leverages JavaScript (InformationWeek)
• Say it ain’t so: The freewheeling days of open source are numbered (InfoWorld Daily)
• What’s all the FOSS? HP Launches Open Source Governance Initiative (ChannelWeb)

My pick for the enterprise open source item of last week takes a little setup. On Thursday, Microsoft beat forecasts for fiscal 2008 Q@ results, reporting $16.37B in revenues against analyst consensus estimates of $15.95B — beating the estimate by $420M, or 2.6%.

Let’s consider what that $420M estimate error mean in the open source world. For example, here are recent quarterly revenues from open source activities at three publicly-traded companies:

Red Hat (RHT) $135M 11/30/07
Novell (NOVL) $22M 10/31/07 Per CNet
IBM (IBM) $135M 12/31/07 Estimated from InfoWorld’s “Has Open Source Sold Out?”

That’s $392M of open source revenue from three major software vendors– still less that the analyst’s margin of error for Microsoft’s revenues in the same period. It’s a comparison that would give any financially-oriented software exec something to think about.

We all know MSFT is huge — really huge. And open source revenues are still small — really small. That might seem intimidating to some, but to me, it means enterprise open source has a lot of room to grow without taking on Microsoft directly. That’s probably good news for everyone.

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