The US DOD just published a memo on how to deal with Open Source software. And they make a good point that Open Source software should looked at the same ways as any other software. But is this really possible? Do governmental and commercial organizations really create the ground for a fair comparison?

Most organizations look for software by submitting RFIs and RFPs. While commercial proprietary software companies (and to some extent commercial open source players) can hope for the license and subscription money to cover the costs for filling out RFIs/RPFs a true Open Source community doesn’t have this possibility. And Open Source projects like Lucene, Plone, Drupal or Ruby don’t have sales people and marketing to deal with RFIs/RPFs or to make sure they actually receive them. In some cases services players (i.e. Acquia, Lucid, Wyona, etc.) may jump in and fight for the business, but in many cases there’s nobody. That’s why many purchasing officers think there’s for example no alternative to Microsoft Office.

So here’s what I think needs to be done. If an organization really wants to find the best option then they hire a consulting/integration company with the right skill set to substitute the commercial organization between the buyer and the software as such. The results of their work can be compared with the answers of the commercial software providers. What is important though is to look at all the costs involved with a software acquisition. Also the costs that usually are not looked at, like support/maintenance costs, replacement cost, etc.

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Actuate published its 2009 Open Source Survey. What is interesting is the adoption rate in specific countries. Here’s what Actuate’s press release summarizes:

• China reveals high adoption rates with a large majority of those surveyed (80.3%) using open source software. In all regions surveyed the main perceived benefit of open source software is no license costs. However access to source code was uniquely given a 72.6% rating by Chinese respondents.
• In North America two-fifths of respondents are already using open source (41.0%) with close to one-tenth of respondents either in the process of adopting or planning to adopt.  The proportion of respondents who feel that the benefits of open source software outweigh the inhibitors (56.8%) is nearly seven times higher than the proportion that disagree (8.4%). These results are even more positive than in the previous survey.
• Europe continues to capitalise on its early recognition of open source software’s potential, in particular France where over two thirds (67.0%) of the respondents already use open source software and Germany where the proportion using open source software has increased this year to 60.6%.  This contrasts with the UK at 42.1% adoption

What should this be telling us?

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 Many enterprises have two main application technologies settled in their IT landscape. Everything what has to do with office, client infrastructure and local productivity is typically Microsoft. Everything that has to do with enterprise resource planning (ERP) is supported by SAP (or maybe Oracle). Both technology vendors (Microsoft and SAP) are strong market players and leaders in their markets. But both players also try to enlarge their footprint, be it by adding applications or infrastructure elements. There’s no total overlap of the capabilities yet, but Microsoft has been adding more and more ERP/CRM/Workflow/… type functionality over time and SAP has been extending its portal stack. Many companies are concerned by this duopoly type of situation in their IT and are looking for additional vendors and technology platforms. Open Source can be an excellent choice here. Open Source is typically integration friendly, so connects well to SAP and Microsoft products. With Open Source you can better decide what pieces you want to use and what not, so the overlap with already existing applications can be minimized. And with Open Source you only pay what you use, if you pay at all. More and more companies are recognizing these advantages and have started to implement Open Source technologies and products and to build the needed skill base to cope with it. And, it’s not totally unthinkable to actually reduce the footprint Microsoft and SAP are having in the enterprise, by moving functionality into the Open Source stack.

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 Many people have wondered whether running a company using Open Source software is possible. The answer is “yes we can”. Does it make sense though? Well, it depends.

There are good alternatives for almost every important commercial software available today. Are they able to beat the commercial proprietary software? Maybe yes, maybe no. Are they good enough? Most of the time, yes. But of course it depends on the actual requirements.

Let’s take an example that is often discussed. Can you replace SAP with Open Source software? For some companies this is possible. If only finance and HR is used from SAP there may be a good alternative in Open Source. If the company is small in comparison one of the Open Source solutions may do the job. But there’s no Open Source package that can compete with the depth of functionality offered by the whole SAP product range. Many companies don’t need this depth though, even if they don’t know. They might have a more cost efficient solution by taking different technologies for finance, HR and operation/planning type topics. It may even mean to develop some of the software and doing some of the integration needed. What can a company win, when going the ERP assembly route? Freedom, self-management, independence, control, efficiency, etc. It’s worthwhile to think about this before following the competition and just picking SAP because it’s the “standard”.

So, while it takes guts and good long term thinking to make a choice against industry leading packages like SAP, other areas are much easier to pick an Open Source alternative. It’s a nobrainer to select an Open Source CMS technology or to develop using Eclipse. So, the recommendation is, to look at the alternatives before making rapid decisions against Open Source.

And, to come back to the initial question. Yes, the Open Source software only supported/enabled company is possible, but few exist and commercial proprietary can make sense when it does what is needed.

For further ideas look at the table below.

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The last three months showed again a lot of user activity on EOS Directory. Many thousands of project pages views indicate what concerns and interests the EOS Directory users most. And the winner is … Pentaho with quite a significant lead! Pentaho made approximately 4.1% of all the project page views, followed by Alfresco that seems to be able to catch up with KnowledgeTree soon. vtiger CRM made forth over the last 3 months with significant lead to rival  SugarCRM that only came in 15th.

Sixteen projects of the top 25  are business applications, ECM the most dominant. This clearly supports the trend that Enterprises more and more consider Open Source business applications as components of their IT landscapes.

The top 25 represent roughly 26% of all the project page views, the top 4 10%. While there are clear leaders on the top the distribution after rank 25 is quite flat.

So compared to earlier rankings the changes are not substantial, but the interest in good open source business applications, namely in the ECM, BI and CRM/ERP segment, is still going to increase.

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As every year InfoWorld announced the winner of the Bossies, the “Best of Open Source Awards” 2009. Looking at the results there were few surprises, many of the winners were at the top already last years. Read the article in full detail here.

For our readers here two relevant “best lists”:

Best of Open Source Enterprise Software

• Compiere
• DimDim
• Drupal
• Intalio BPM
• Jaspersoft BI suite
• Magento
• OpenBravo
• Pentaho BI Suite
• Piwik
• SugarCRM
• Wordpress

Hall of Fame - top 10 Open Source technologies

1. Linux kernel
2. GNU utilities and compilers
3. Ubuntu
4. BSD (3x)
5. Samba
6. MySQL
7. Bind
8. SendMail
9. OpenSSH and OpenSSL
10. Apache (web server)

It’s good to see that all of the above technologies also are listed on EOS Directory. And looking into the details shows that there’s no real difference in opinion neither.

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We are having tough times. Very few days pass without new messages of layoffs, budget cuts and mediocre results. We are in a deep crisis and the recession makes survival a priority. Typically enterprises tend to slow down in these times, projects get canceled, mandatory replacements get delays as far as possible, innovation becomes second priority. CEOs and CIOs seem to behave a bit like lemmings and all follow the same patterns. As if there wasn’t an alternative!

This is the time to be bold. When the fight for business and customers is as tight as today, then innovative (web) applications and creative use of data and information can make the difference! And Open Source (and partially SaaS or cloud computing) allows to do this without doubling the budget. Actually, Open Source offers the opportunity to build great platforms and solutions with the staff that is on board already today, so little or no extra investments are needed. And, Open Source products and technologies have never been as mature and easy to consume as today. This is the perfect moment to enlarge the Open Source footprint in your enterprise! What about rolling out a purpose adapted CRM solution (e.g. SugarCRM)  for a smaller business unit? What about building a fancy portal (e.g. Liferay) for a specific customer segment that is under-served today? What about introducing business intelligence (e.g. Pentaho, Jaspersoft) and applying it on data not analyzed today? What about deploying an easy to use enterprise wide search feature (e.g. Lucene, Nutch, Solr) easing the knowledge intensive tasks of sales people and making them more efficient? And so on.

Why hesitate? There are two kinds of decisions, reversible and non-reversible ones. Applying Open Source technologies to solving business issues are certainly examples of the first kind!

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In a new report from the Linux Foundation a lot of data is published showing who actually helps to move forward the Linux Kernel. Interesting to see that the largest share (21.1%) of contributions comes from independents. Second largest contributor is RedHat (with 12%), followed by IBM (6.3%), Novell (6.1%), Intel (6.0%) and many others. What this report shows again is the important support of Open Source by large hardware and software companies. Many of these of course have vested interests, but that’s okay. Important is a well structured governance process that assures that the final deliverable actually fulfills the need of many and not of a few. The report is certainly a worthwile read.

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People discussing the benefits of Open Source typically mention cost, vendor dependencies or flexibility. But one of the key advantages is also that Open Source allows for fast innovation at low cost. Let’s take an example: You want to devevelop a new browser, one with very specific features and maybe tailored for a specific type of application. Well you don’t need to start from scratch, you can re-use  and assemble a whole range of components that will speed up the development of your new browser and even make it more stable earlier. Even complex new applications can be developed in the matter of months instead of years. This accelerates innovation, allows for more trials and market tests, facilitates the usage of variants and alternatives and parallel technology implementations. And this is not just good for new young companies, it’s also great for grown up Enterprises. It’s just a question of doing it.

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With SpringSource taken over by VMWare one more “Open Source Pure Play” disappears. We have seen it with MySQL, the range of open source providers acquired by Oracle and many others. It seems to be tough for Open Source vendors to survive independently. Or, it seems to be a very natural exit for a VC backed Open Source company to be acquired by a traditional commercial software company. The buyer typically gets a good and valuable new skill set, priviledged access to technology and additional market reach. But what does the Open Source company win, except receiving pockets of money?

From the Enterprise’s perspective many of these acquisitions are good news, as most often this means that the Open Source vendor will follow more traditional ways of doing business than before, and therefore is easier to consume for an Enterprise. This is of course only valid, if the technology survives and continues to florish.

We’ll keep an eye on these (acquired) companies and how they develop under the new owners.

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