In all “silence” both Knowledgetree and Pentaho have gone beyond 20′000 project page views on EOS Directory, Alfresco will soon be following too. It’s probably not by accident that the interest in Open Source Document Management and Business Intelligence is that high.
It will be interesting to see how quickly they can reach the 30′000.
Many people have asked the question whether an Enterprise operated only using Open Source software is possible. Well, today, certainly this is possible and many of these companies do exist. It’s not really the question whether the right Open Source software exists, it’s more the question whether the decision makers and users are ready to adapt to it. Of course, changing from MS Excel to OpenOffice Calc takes time and doesn’t happen effortless. And this is enough for many people to decide to not do it. Same with ERP or CRM. As we know Open Source ERP or CRP is not on the same functional and scalability level as SAP or Oracle/Siebel. But do companies really need that level of perfection? Couldn’t complexity be reduced by focusing on smaller units and creating intelligent interfaces for consolidation and reporting instead of trying to model all the complexity in one tool? Most applications areas offer a lot of software choice, including Open Source alternatives. Focusing on Open Source asks often for braver decisions and more know how allocated internally. This is often difficult to justify in front of the top management, the board or even the shareholders. But, interestingly, even government often hasn’t the guts to move ahead with Open Source and it’s mostly because of the unwillingness to adapt!
Talking to Enterprises and Organizations across the world it becomes quite clear that Open Source is understood by most of them. They see the advantages, but also the shortcomings. And they are willing to to take decisions and to use Open Source in their enterprise architecture! Even large and conservative organizations are using Linux and JBoss application servers, MySQL databases or Joomla! or Drupal content management systems. Often new technologies are taken in when new business use cases asked for new solutions. In these cases it usually is possible/easy to calculate the financial benefits and to judge the risks. Very different is the situation when a migration is needed to use a new Open Source technology. Migrations are often difficult, expensive and even risky. No wonder, that rarely a technology switch can be financially justified when it implies a significant migration, regardless how much cheaper the new technology may be. Migrating to Open Source is pretty similar to what you have experienced in the past with proprietary technologies. The only difference may be that you can analyze the new (Open Source) technology with more ease and you may actually be able to use part of the new code for easing the migration yourself. And the secret on how to cheaply and easily migrate from A to B is well kept.
Looking back on the Open Source year 2009 there are some clear trends and patterns that can be highlighted:
Governmental push and push back
We have seen US administration pushing Open Source in health care and we observed the Swiss government preferring Microsoft without even looking at (Open Source) alternatives.
Rise of new Open Source services players
Lucid Imagination has been formed around Lucene, Acquia continues to grow on the basis of Drupal. Thousands of new services players have been created around the world, some with, many without VC backing. Most of them are happy with their healthy pipelines despite the financial crisis and the recession.
Consolidation within Open Source has continued
Terracotta has acquired EHcache, SpringSource taken over multiple companies, many smaller niche technologies got eaten up. A lot of what is happening is not even transparent.
Commercial vendors have continued to acquire Open Source companies
There is a big appetite for Open Source in commercial companies, i.e. VMWare bought SpringSource, Oracle is taking over Sun (partially an Open Source vendor), to just name two well visible acquisitions.
The jury is still out on whether Open Source companies actually can make big money
Recent management changes, for example at SugarCRM, indicate that the climate is getting hotter even within the companies widely seen as successful. But outside of RedHat and a few companies that got cquired for good money, there’s still no proof that all that VC money will pay off. Which doesn’t mean that many of these companies are not making money. And, while the business case may not add up for the VCs, it certainly does for the Open Source user/buyer. According to most surveys they are happy with the cost savings and the won flexibility thanks to Open Source.
Open Source Business Applications continue to increase in importance
Pentaho just took the lead on EOS Directory, Open Source Business Intelligence is seen as a hot niche by Gartner, Open Source ECM and CRM are able to beat established commercial technologies. The number of reference cases is growing rapidly. But not just large enterprises are selecting Open Source, also the SME world is more and more convinced that Open Source is an alternative to established but often inflexible and expensive commercial offerings.
Linux has continued to increase its presence
Linux wins the consumer hearts through mobile phones and netbooks and continues to run on victory lane on the server side.
The battle on the client is won piece by piece
According to Statcounter Firefox 3.5 has a bigger market share than Internet Explorer 7. OpenOffice.org continues to grow, Chrome OS and Android are becoming real contenders together with Ubuntu to make endusers switch.
Open Source events are suffering from decreasing interest
Be it ApacheCon or many other Open Source focused conference, the interest of both the community as well as the enterprise buyer has decreased. This may have caused partially by lack of budget but mostly because of the growing experience and adoption of Open Source technologies.
Open Source projects continue to bring innovation to the IT landscape
Google presented Wave, Chrome OS, new ideas for better browsing rather come from Mozilla than Microsoft, Alfresco has been quicker in adopting CMIS than most commercial players, cross category integration is implemented faster within Open Source projects than outside.
Did we miss something? Don’t hesitate to add to the list!
It was to be expected, after weeks and weeks of catching up with the previous most popular project/product on EOS Directory KnowledgeTree, Pentaho finally took the lead today. Business Intelligence is one of the hottest categories in the Open Source business solution space. Even Gartner acknowledged that this is an attractive niche. With Open Source Business Intelligence also smaller companies or less well funded departments can implement their own analytics solutions. So it’s not really a suprrise that Pentaho finally became the most popular business solution on EOS Directory. But let’s see what the coming weeks bring as Alfresco has been catching up as well over the last months.
The 451 Group just has published their new CAOS report and the (free) results of a recent survey as well. The survey conveys a lot of good messages:
So that’s really good news and should motivate all the ones that are still questioning whether using open source is a good thing.
Do people actually need something like EOS Directory? This is a question I ask myself from time to time when I look at all the work in front of and behind me. Well, even the most recent surveys reveal that identifying and selecting Open Source technologies is still a major challenge. And looking at something like SourceForge doesn’t make the job easier. Enterprise people are used to work with short lists, and this is exactly what EOS Directory tries to offer: a selection of enterprise ready Open Source technologies in a number of software categories. And as long as I meet so many people who tell me that they found the (Open Source) technology they were looking for thanks to an entry in EOS Directory, as long we will continue to update and improve it. There’s no real alternative and the things missing in EOS Directory can be amended (and will over the coming months).
When talking about consumers/end users and about Open Source most of the debate is on whether these user groups will eventually accept Linux on the desktop and OpenOffice.org as a replacement of the software they are using today (mostly MS Office). But in reality millions of consumers and end users are already using Open Source operating systems and software on their devices! One third of all the netbooks are equipped with Linux, the Android phones are selling like hot cake, and even the Mac and iPhone users have mostly Open Source foundations below their shiny Apple user interfaces. With Google Chrome OS yet another weapon enters the battle. And at the end of the day, consumers don’t really care, as long as the software is supporting their needs and look cool!
Many people have compared leading commercial proprietary software offerings such as SAP, Siebel or Filenet with Open Source alternatives (such as OpenBravo, SugarCRM or Alfresco). The conclusion often was that the Open Source option can’t compete on features and breadth. But the fact is that in many cases enterprises don’t need this scope in reality. I have seen so many companies implementing large scale commercial package solutions such as Siebel resulting in a pretty basic application with fairly little functionality. Independently of the outcome though the costs for these projects were high. IT decision makes often underestimate the cost coming with the complexity of a widely configurable and adaptable package solution. In these projects you not only configure what you need, but also a lot what you actually don’t need, just to make the solution work. Given this problem in many situations an enterprise would be better consulted to use a narrower (Open Source) technology and spend a bit of money to adapt and customize it. I can guarantee that the overall costs still will be way lower than the “big” solution. I have often observed companies being tempted to by a “Rolls-Royce” because it was offered at a “Volkswagen” price point, not because it was needed. It looks like a low risk decision. But it isn’t. Maybe in the end it is the right thing to do, but at least an attempt should be made to model and quantify an alternate solution (using Open Source). It may cost you a few dollars or a bit of time, but your arguments later will be that much stronger whenever the decision is challenged. And I am sure, in many situations, “less is more” when all the complexity, maintenance and support cost is fairly factored in.
There have been many discussions about the benefits of Open Source - the usually mentioned cost reductions and reduced dependencies, or the positive impact on development and implementation speed (as just mentioned in a blog post by Jan Lyman from 451 Group). A key question though is who actually has really profited from the fact that since roughly 10 years with have viable Open Source technologies that can be used as components or as replacement of commercial software. In my eyes it’s three groups that benefited the most:
Commerical Open Source companies are not (yet) on this list, as in my eyes only a few have been really successful (yet) and the amount of money they are making is certainly neglectable in comparison with what Google or IBM are pocketing.
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