Following the 2006 holiday season, Wonderbox knew they needed to upgrade their e-commerce and CRM capabilities to handle rapid business growth. Their solution was to engage Optaros who, using the Optaros Assembly Methodology (OptAM), delivered a targeted solution using mature open source software like SugarCRM, Mule, OSCommerce and Jasper Reports, built on a LAMP platform.

Speaking about Optaros, Wonderbox CEO Bertile Burel said: “Seeing the full solution in prototype so early on in the process is highly valuable and [Optaros] open source expertise saved us money on re-platforming.” The project “enables us to scale our business, increase sales and improve partner and customer relationships,” she added.

The results? Within a six-month development timetable the Wonderbox site was redone to provide more than ten times the reach for the 2007 holidays as compared to the prior year’s holiday period. In this case, open means “open for business” too.

Read the case study. (PDF)

The new version adds Outlook 2007 compatibility, additional support for devices including “BlackBerry Enterprise Server, J2ME-enabled handsets such as the Motorola RAZR, and a new version of ZCS for mobile web browsers.” Plus Zimlets for Yahoo! services. To quote from the release announcement:

“New Zimlets in ZCS 5.0 leverage Yahoo! properties, including Flickr, Yahoo! Local, Yahoo! Finance, and Yahoo! Search. Later this year, Zimbra’s innovative technologies will be incorporated into properties including Yahoo! Mail and Calendar.”

Other enhancements include built-in IM, a shareable Zimbra Briefcase for email attachments and Zimbra Desktop, an AJAX-powered mode for online or offline access of IMAP and POP3 email servers. For a more in-depth look at ZCS 5.0 and some nifty screen shots, check out this item on Mashable.com.

The deal has open source implications too, such as: what becomes of Zimbra? Some opinions:

• Yahoo! buy would give Microsoft ownership of open source e-mail, projects, code. Ugh. (ZDNet Open Source)
• Microsoft and open source: Welcome to the Borg? (Open Road)
• Microsoft’s open-source strategy: A picture is worth a thousand words (All About Microsoft)
• Microsoft/Yahoo Combo Equals Bad News for Web 2.0, Open Source (Intelligent Enterprise)
• MS-Yow!, not MS-Yahoo! for Open Source (open…)
• YahooSoft Bid Shakes The Start-Ups (Forbes.com)
• Yahoo-Microsoft: Corporate Culture Problem Squared (portfolio.com)

We’ll blog more on the current open source M&A boom next week. But what’s your take? Do you think consolidation among open source projects helps or hinders adoption by enterprise open source users? Post your comments below.

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.

• LoopFuse OneView 3.0 Announced (LoopFuse)
• JBoss alumni launch open-source startup (ComputerWorld)
• Can LoopFuse crack the open source conversion conundrum? (451 CAOS Theory)
• “Stealth mode” Loopfuse to be unveiled (Open Road)
• Open sourcing marketing: Loopfuse goes live (Open Sources 17 Apr 07)

“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.

• 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.

“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.

“IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced that it will offer an integrated Open Collaboration Client Solution with support for Ubuntu, a Linux-based operating system from Canonical Ltd. that is especially popular for desktops, laptops and thin clients.

Showing strong momentum around its IBM Lotus Notes 8 and IBM Lotus Symphony-based Open Collaboration Client Solution, IBM also announced a new agreement working with Red Hat targeting small and medium-sized enterprises, and momentum in the Open Collaboration Client Solution powered by SUSE Linux Enterprise from Novell that was announced in August 2007.”

Later in the release comes this zinger:

“IBM’s Open Collaboration Client Solution is … personal computing software that is based on open standards, providing businesses with a cost-effective and security-rich alternative to Microsoft desktops.”

Ouch! Those of us who remember those simple green character-mode command-line days (and the great keyboards that came with them — where are they now?) might be excused for uttering a snicker or two at the thought of IBM attacking Microsoft for being closed and proprietary. But times change, and as noted in Friday’s post, IBM has adopted open source underpinnings for many of its key products. Two additional thoughts:

• Just how open is the “Open Collaboration Client Solution?” The release only mentions open source once, referring to the “open source Eclipse Rich Client Platform” on which Lotus Expeditor is based, Expeditor being the application framework for this solution, as near as I can tell from the release. “Open standards” is used three times, without referring to any specific standard, tool or application. Not counting these four uses, the word “open” appears 22 more times in the release. The Open Collaboration Client Solution components list begins with IBM Lotus Notes. The last time I checked Notes was not an especially open or even standards-based application. The point here is that simply throwing the word “open” at prospective customers does not an open solution make. It would be a shame if the old IBM tradition of marketing FUD suddenly took on a new “open” look.

• The other comment is that in Friday’s post, I gave credit to IBM for knowing how to market open source. And they do — just not in this press release, which was a model of marketing obfustication. I guess I’ll have to wait to download the whole OCCS to see what it really can do. And that will probably happen when IBM decides to bring back those great keyboards in the name of open standards. Don’t hold your breath.