Is Open Source the next enterprise software giant?
Guy Nirpaz commented on my post about Oracle’s potential BEA acquisition…
…stating that he believed that OSS should be on my list of the big 4 (IBM, Oracle, SAP and Microsoft) if you consider middleware in particular. I would agree that middleware is certainly an area which OSS is playing an increasingly important role.
However, OSS does not necessarily represent the increase in choice you might expect as in many cases the big players either dominate or can dominate if they choose to (the investment in OSS by big players is excellently covered in a Harvard Business School working paper referred to here). In those cases, there is a potential risk that the OSS becomes positioned as the entry level offering with the pay-per-license version containing the features required for serious use or used to reduce the level of choice available by putting pressure on smaller vendors.
For smaller backers of middleware OSS, historically it has proven difficult to create a sustainable and scalable business model. However, I believe that is a market maturity issue rather than an underlying weakness in OSS approach. Already, we are seeing the emergence of some interesting business strategies which seem capable of sustaining a growing business. If one or more of these work out, then OSS enterprise middleware players may emerge (or existing vendors successfully transition to Open Source business) which will challenge the hegemony of the big 4.
Ronan
Open Source and risk
The focus of debate on Open Source is too often focused on “its free” and sometimes overstated claims about software quality.
As everybody knows, the cost and risk associated with bringing anything into an enterprise go far beyond the license costs. For OSS, a big problem is that by its nature it can bypass the controls imposed by procurement and the legal departments. This can lead to a range of potential risks from IP infringement to plain old version control. Of almost equal importance to the actual risk is the fact that the risk associated with OSS can be invisible (as the OSS use will often not be tracked as licensed software would be) and therefore undermine the whole of IT risk management.
This article covers one approach to dealing with issue: specialist software to analyse the Open Source software. There are of course more straight forward alternatives: Any vendor supplying OSS as part of a licensed product should be held to account to provide support and ‘handle’ the risk issues. For ‘pure’ OSS, there are plenty of commercial organisations who will provide a degree of quality assurance and service guarantees around projects. It may take away from the “Its free and I won’t need to talk to legal and prodcurement” but do we really want staff bringing software straight from the web into deployment?
Ronan
The onward march of Linux falters – any lessons for OSS SOA?
Linux may be reaching a natural plateau with regards to corporate adoption as a UBS survey reported that 90% of CIOs not currently using Linux will not make the leap in 2007 (this is up slightly from 87% in 2006) according to a UBS survey reported on here and here.
In effect this means that those who are open to Linux are already using it and the hold-offs are mostly not about to change their minds any time soon. This should not be regarded as some sort of ‘peak Linux’ type event as organisations already using Linux in some places will continue to extend their usage of the OS. The report also reinforces the point that Linux is mostly replacing Unix rather than taking market share from Microsoft which is sometimes characterised as the target of Linux. All of which really means that Linux is coming to the edge of its natural market – UNIX shops which can easily switch – and will struggle to break into organisations which are traditionally Microsoft only. This does not mean that Linux is not wildly successful and making a lot of money for companies selling services around it.
Turning to OSS and Service Oriented Architectures, are there any lessons to be learnt? At one level the Linux story bears very little relationship to SOA based projects – Linux was about the commoditisation of very mature specifications and technologies while software associated with SOA is comparatively immature (when compared to Linux/UNIX) and lacking in any specifications in many cases. Also, with Linux the old established industry giants now rule (IBM et al with the exception of Red Hat as a new giant). In contrast, OSS SOA is still mostly the preserve of startups (such as Mule Source , Bostech and Sopera, as well as some integration specialists (IONA) and … Sun and Red Hat.
As I said above, Linux may be plateauing but at a huge scale. Inevitably, OSS SOA will also reach its natural extent but the risk is that it may reach it before the service providers can achieve viable scale because right now the market for OSS SOA is large enterprises with java skilled developers who are willing to even consider the risk of replacing closed source integration products. This is a finite market with a lot of incumbent solutions. Moreover, this is a very tough market for any new solution: evaluation processes are becoming more and more extended and even if selected the project may well be dumped as IT budget continue to be stretched. [One could argue that the same challenges face the 'closed source' vendors but in their case they are able to extract more revenue from a small pool of customers and remain financially viable.]
Am I therefore saying that OSS suppliers are doomed in SOA? Not at all – I believe that there is an opportunity for these businesses to succeed (and become the RedHat of integration perhaps?) but it will be a tough going. In particular, it is a lot harder than suggested by most coverage of OSS which focuses on huge download rates and arguments such “Its free, developers love it, everybody will use it” and ignoring the real world issues around adopting any enterprise integration technology (which are mostly not related to the license fees).
Of course the OSS suppliers already know this and are developing different strategies to address the problem. For instance, Mule Source is particularly focused on promoting community based development of additional components such as application adapters and transports – thereby deeping their engagement with customers and making it easier for customers to get a ‘complete’ integration solution – and has recently launched MuleForge to support this effort. IONA has been buying OSS expertise and has relaunched its OSS efforts (now called Fuse) deliberately focusing on the most popular Apache SOA-related projects with the obvious benefits of existing customer base and large pool of developers. RedHat is also acquiring technology to provide strong data management capabilities by open sourcing MetaMatrix which is currently closed source. Other suppliers have different ways to crack this nut but whether any of these strategies will succeed or fail is of course more complex than can be easily covered in a blog entry of reasonable length – however we will be addressing the area in upcoming Lustratus papers.
Ronan
Posted in Bostech, enterprise service bus, esb, Imported, IONA, Mule, Open Source, Red Hat, SOA, Sopera, Vendor newsRed Hat: The last ESB start-up?
As part of my work prior to updating of “Best of breed ESB” paper, I was recently briefed by Red Hat about their current ESB and SOA related projects which will become a supported ‘product’ called JBOSS Enterprise SOA Platform towards the end of the year.
This puts them rather late in the game when compared to both open source and closed source offerings. Combined with the focus of the briefing on functionality over value, it felt very much like I was talking to the last ESB start-up to appear.
As a characterisation this should not be taken a wholly negative: For a company the size of Red Hat with its strong JBoss application server franchise, it would not have been surprising if they had simply done a me-too ESB to match that available from other stack vendors. Instead they are putting together a much more interesting set of capabilities but lack some others that will required for most serious enterprise use. On the positive, they seem to have a good grasp on the importance of data within SOA including both their MetaMatrix acquisition– once it has been open sourced – and pipeline based transformation (allowing complex manipulation of messages in-flight often required within deployed SOAs). Counter-balancing this, there is still much to do around service life-cycle and in particular how to support service reuse. I won’t attempt to go into much more detail at this time until the report is completed.
Ronan
Be fair to OSS – lay off the sauce
Open source software has come on by leaps and bounds over the last ten years or so.
There are more and more examples of credible OSS (Open Source Software) solutions available today, including well-known brands such as Firefox and LINUX. However, OSS seems to me to face a major enemy – itself.
The problem is that, deep down, the OSS community can sometimes see itself as a bastion of freedom against the evil commercial ISVs – certainly some of the more vocal supporters of OSS are guilty of making more and more outlandish claims about their own projects, really pouring on the sauce. Some of this is to be expected, of course, but there comes a point when fanatical over-statement of the facts can so offend credibility that prospective OSS users are turned away.
I was reminded of this problem by a recent article by Dennis Byron, writing for ebizQ. While I found the article both interesting and informative, the section on enterprise service buses (ESBs) illustrated my point. In the article, Dennis states
ESBs are especially interesting because they may turn out to be the first category of software code that was OSS from the get go.” And later, “The OSS movement in turn blocked those early non-OSS ESB market leaders before they could gain a lot of traction.
The ‘early non-OSS ESBs’ phrase refers to companies such as Progress, Cape Clear and Fiorano, according to the article. This is the type of hyperbole that in my view causes the OSS movement to weaken its own credibility. The implication is that OSS has ruled the ESB market from the start, apart from some minor incursions by early ESB vendors such as those listed.
Now, I will agree that OSS ESBs are maturing nicely – the Mule OSS ESB, for example, already lists a substantial number of production implementations on its website. I think that as time goes on, these OSS offerings will become more and more competitive to the commercial offerings. However, to state that ESBs were ‘OSS from the get go’ is just ridiculous. For the first three years of the ESB market’s life, the only serious usage was with commercial offerings. While it may be true that some of the early players failed to gain much traction, there are now commercial ESBs available from all the major vendors such as IBM, Oracle, SUN and BEA, and some of these are performing strongly in the market.
I believe the OSS cause is best served by a more realistic assessment, without all the sauce. We are now at a stage where OSS ESBs are a viable choice alongside commercial offerings. There are references for successful usage of OSS ESBs, and the future appears to be bright – for example, OSS solutions with a supportive community could result in pools of less common adapters being available to satisfy a wide range of needs, something less likely to happen in a commercial world. But to state that commercial ESBs never made it, and OSS ESBs ruled the roost from the start, is in my opinion a wild exaggeration.
To be fair to Dennis, later in the article, while discussing message-oriented middleware and the impact of OSS offerings here, he states
But it will be well into the period 2011-2020 before commodity MOMs/ESBs significantly displace IBM MQSeries and like products.
This comes across as more realistic, and hence makes a far more credible claim. MOM (Message-Oriented Middleware) products like MQSeries are much more extensively deployed that ESBs, with many thousands of users, and therefore even if there were attractive OSS alternatives (and this is definitely arguable today) it would take some years for any significant displacement to happen.
Steve
Open Source = Community = Japanese documentation
As the OSS movement grows. companies are spending more time thinking about open source and whether it might be an option for use in their solutions.
I have always believed that the holy grail for open source is to achieve an active community, contributing and assisting the growth. In this way, requirements can be met that a commercial offering might struggle to satisfy in an acceptable timeframe.
This was brought home to me when I came across a contribution to MuleForge, the community repository for the Mule open source SOA offering. I noticed that someone had contributed Japanese documentation for the Mule ESB. This is a perfect example of my point – even the largest vendors struggle to deliver such things as multi-language documentation. at least until quite late. The issue is justifying and prioritising the necessary resource based on the relatively small market potential addressed by some developments.
But when a community is leveraged, it can contribute many things, even if they are only going to be of interest to a small number of people. So here, one assumes a Japanese user has picked up Mule and decided to write some documentation, presumably for internal use. This has then been contributed to MuleForge, and the result is anyone can benefit from it immediately.
If the power of a worldwide community can truly be unleashed, OSS becomes a highly attractive candidate for product selection shortlists.
Steve
One user’s experiences with Linux
I attended a very interesting presentation from the CIO of a large retail firm, the other day, about his experiences with Linux, and particularly Linux running on an IBM mainframe (z/Linux).
This company has been involved with Linux for around 3 years, and I picked up a number of key points.
Basically, the company has been moving some workloads from Intel-based Microsoft servers to the z/Linux environment. One of the first points I picked up was the improved utilization of resources, with corresponding cost savings. Instead of heaving a bank of servers each running at 10% or so utilization, the workloads all ran on the mainframe. This avoids a lot of wasted capacity. What was also extremely interesting was that the company ran the two systems side by side for four months to validate the solution was working correctly, and whereas the server-based system had a number of unplanned outages and failures, the Linux system was 100% reliable.
Another salient point was that in each store, IT support for the store’s needs are provided by a local Linux server. This has the byproduct in the new environment of providing a fail-over environment in z/Linux on the mainframe – because the two operating system environments are the same, it is relatively easy to do this.
An important observation from the CIO was that Linux is definitely not free. However, this company has found a number of major benefits in cost terms:
- S/W license costs (eg system software) are reduced
- One resource provides support (vs 1 per 12 servers in old environment)
- Capital expenditure is reduced (better utilization, as discussed)
In addition to these cost benefits, the CIO is able to respond to new demands more quickly because a new server request is satisfied by a logical reconfiguration on the mainframe rather than having to get approval for and purchase a new server.
The summary was that the big hitters for this particular company were TCO (total cost of ownership) reduction and availability improvements. However, one final point is worth mentioning. The CIO pointed out that the company is not expecting Linux to supplant Windows. It is true that Open Office is being trialled in some places, but his expectation is that there is a place for both environments.
Steve
OSS – A Cynic’s Guide
Open Source seems to be gathering steam in the market – but so far the one thing missing seems to have been a balancing view to all the evangelists.
I was delighted to read Ronan’s Lustratus Insight, ’10 Rules for adopting Enterprise OSS – A Cynic’s Guide’. For enterprise use in particular, this paper does a good job of sounding some of the necessary counter-balances to the army of fanatics driving OSS forward.
One rule that seems so obvious, but struck a chord for me, was
Rule 6: Ensure that any customer reference has sufficient distance from the project, otherwise be aware you are not dealing with an impartial reference.
I have talked to customers who swear blind that their enterprise open source usage has been a wonderful experience, but now I think about it these were often companies or individuals closely involved with the OSS project and hence somewhat biased!
One other observation – Ronan takes care to point out this is not a critique of all OSS usage. His focus is very much from the enterprise software point of view.
Steve
Sun claims “100 million copies of Open Office out there” – how many are virtual shelf ware?
I have just read…
…a rather startling claim ( from Simon Phipps of Sun that they have ‘shipped’ 70 million copies of OpenOffice.org with another 30 million copies coming from other sources – with the clear implication that 100m copies is in some way equivalent to a number of users approaching 100m. Taken at its simplest level, 100m users puts them at 20% of the office productivity suite business (as Microsoft claims 400 million users). Given that Microsoft got $11b in revenue from Office in 2005, does this mean that OpenOffice.org is taking away a whopping $1b+ of revenue from Microsoft- assuming that 50% of the OpenOffice users would have bought Microsoft Office otherwise.
Should Microsoft be quaking in its boots? While I have certainly heard good reports from some about Open Office, this seems to be a great example of how Open Source marketing can bend the normal rules of the software industry to the point where it is hard to figure out what the real story is. When Mr Phipps says that there are 100,000,000 copies of Open Office “out there”, he almost certainly means that 100,000,000 copies were downloaded or shipped on CDs. This is like a software company sticking an evaluation copy on the front of Dr Dobbs or BYTE and then claiming every reader as a customer. What matters of course is the number of actual sites using the product (and hence actually “investing” in it). It would therefore be reasonable to suggest that the actual market is a very small fraction of this and I would suspect that Sun has its own estimate of the actual market which it is choosing not to disclose for its own commercial reasons.
While it may be an easy shot to take at Sun and OpenOffice, the same problem pervades so much of the Open Source landscape. 10,000 downloads doesn’t mean anything if 9,990 were by students! To be serious for a moment, when evaluating Open Source for enterprise use you need to be very aware that the same rules do not apply as apply for vendor controlled software: For instance, reference sites may not carry the same weight as they are sometimes too close to the project and hence have their own intellectual pride and even careers are closely tied up in its success. In the worst case, what you thought was a reference site is closer to a sales pitch as the independent customer is in fact the primary author and sponsor of the project!
Before anybody takes from this that I am in any way anti-Open Source, I am not. However, any Open Source project from Open Office down does need to be evaluated using a different set of rules from traditional pay-for software.
Ronan