Open Source Solutions

Recently, Clarise and I attended the Churchill Club Executive Roundtable "The Open Source Effect". The panelists were

• Andy Astor, CEO, EnterpriseDB Corporation
• Stuart Cohen, CEO, Open Source Development Labs (OSDL)
• Marc Fleury, Senior Vice President and General Manager, Red Hat, JBoss Division
• Rich Green, Executive Vice President, Software, Sun Microsystems
• Kim Polese, CEO, SpikeSource

It was the best panel I've attended, primarily because of the moderator, Sarah Lacy of BusinessWeek. She asked great questions, knew her subjects, kept the panelists going, and made the discussion very lively.

The Churchill Club podcasts its events, through ZDNet, but, if history serves as a guide, it will be several months before the MP3 file is posted.

The overall impression that I got from the discussion, is that Open Source is still waiting to happen in terms of real penetration into IT shops. Linux, especially Red Hat, and the Apache web server, are pretty much there. JBoss application server has a strong market share. Databases are likely the next infrastructure area that will open up to open source [for example, MySQL, has certain niche penetration]. Applications are still a long way from acceptance, and much of the penetration of open source into an IT shop is still by stealth. The CIOs are awakening to the fact that they have open source solutions as the underlying software for some of their infrastructure and some of their projects, but many haven't made a deliberate move towards open source solutions, and many don't have an open source strategy as yet.

Actually, a comment by David Roux, who spoke at a recent OracAlumni event, really struck home during the Churchill Club roundtable. David said that open source is simply the realization that savvy customers don't pay the large software licensing fees anyway, with 80% discounts being readily available, with 90% discounts being negotiated. David may be right, one can see this in the ever increasing percentage of revenue coming from services at IBM, Oracle, Sun and other enterprise software OEMs. From this, I would conclude that, with the barrier to entry for new enterprise software being so high [enormous cost of change over for the customer, or costs for development for a proprietary model OEM] the only new database and application software companies that have a chance to succeed, may need to use open source licensing and explore business models based on those licenses.

An interesting point of discussion centered around where the market for open source really segmented. Is it the large organization or the small and medium enterprise (SME)? Will it ever take hold in the US, as it has in other countries? One comment by Stuart was that this [open source] stuff is just too hard for the SME. But a counter by Kim, was that the VARs trusted by the SME really make the decision. The ability to implement open source solutions is the service that is most sought.

Andy and Marc had many, very interesting opinions. I think that you'll need the podcast to really do them justice, though. So, keep checking the Churchill Club list of podcasts to see when it gets posted.

Hosting of open source solutions for SME never came up, nor did open source BI specifically. The microphone never came my way, so I wasn't able to ask those questions. We did get to speak with Andy afterwards. He's very engaging, and was very supportive of our interest in OSBI and EnterpriseDB. We hope to have a podcast focusing on EnterpriseDB by the end of this summer. Stay tuned.