As you might have seen in the news today, we decided to contribute a big chunk of our code base — our content repository, Nuxeo Core — to the Eclipse Foundation as a new project under the Eclipse RT umbrella: Eclipse Enterprise Content Repository. It’s a big step for Nuxeo, we’ve been preparing this for a few months already.

After 4 years of active development, Nuxeo Core is one of the most advanced content repositories on the market — if not the most advanced. It offers a wide range of services: content model definition (content types), mixins (dynamic schemas), storage abstraction, query, flexible access control, native de-duplication, format conversion, CMIS bindings and much more! And all of this is bundled as a set of OSGi bundles and highly optimized and tuned to scale well for large volumes (hundreds of million of objects in a single repository), but also run lean, making it easy to embed in existing apps, small or large.

Code-wise, it’s a large piece of software, yet very modular – designed around services and extension points, like the Eclipse architecture pattern. For those who like counting lines, we’re somewhere around 100K SLOC of Java code, in ~20 components, refined over the years.

Technically, it’s packaged and architected as a set OSGi bundles running on various Java container like Equinox, Virgo, Tomcat, JBoss (thanks to Nuxeo Runtime awesomeness) and integrated with the PDE for development. Everything is extensible through extension points. Really nice software!

Why Contribute? Why at Eclipse?

You might wonder why the move. After all, the software is already open source (LGPL) and follows a fully open development model.

We’ve got one main driver: innovation.

Nuxeo Core is a powerful content repository – it’s very extensible and versatile and can be used for a wide range of applications. By setting it free, we’d like to encourage the community to join and innovate in a vendor-neutral environment. We think Nuxeo Core (soon-to-be Eclipse ECR) has the potential to change the market in the same way Eclipse IDE did for the IDE market. It can ignite innovation in the content management space. We don’t know how it will morph, but we’re eager to watch it.

Eclipse has broad reach and a large developer community, trusted and respected by most thanks to the framework and process in place. We think it’s the right home for our little Core to grow big!

Why Now?

The content management space is changing and commoditization is setting in, led by SharePoint, vendor consolidation and more recently the <CMIS standard>.

We believe that the differentiation lies in the services we provide to our customers, not in low-level software components. That’s why we have developed offerings like Nuxeo Studio, Nuxeo Marketplace and the whole Nuxeo Connect package – a subscription offering for maintenance, support, and customization of content management applications.  From this perspective, it makes no sense to keep low-level components such as a the content repository and all related low-level services for one vendor only. And besides that, content repository technology is not yet well understood in the industry. This technology is a good fit for a surprisingly wide range of software projects, and it could be a great help for many developers and architects if knowledge about content repository technology was more widespread.

We’ve been thinking about contributing the Core for some time, but were waiting for the right moment. A convergence of milestones makes this the right time:

1. The software has had time to mature. It is proven, robust, and deployed in thousands of shops around the world.

2. We have the bandwidth to do the work required to contribute the code and ignite the project.

3. CMIS is taking off, OSGi is hot – and the Core is compliant with both.

We believe it’s time to put more emphasis on content repositories as a technology. I believe that it’s great software and could be part of the developer toolbox, alongside traditional ORM. And for this aspect, credit should go to Apache Jackrabbit from our friends at Day. They have paved the way, even if we have a different take on how a repository should work. And we think for many use cases the Nuxeo Core approach is a better approach, especially when your content is not inherently hierarchical, which is usually the case for document management, enterprise content management, case management and digital asset management.

So here we are – Nuxeo Core is going to Eclipse, and we hope it’s the start of a long story that will make a real difference and impact the market in a very positive way.

What’s a Content Repository? Why should you care?

Nuxeo Core is a Content Repository and that might not be clear for you. So here is my own definition.  A Content Repository, in the content management world, is the database where the content is stored. It basically gives you a high-level API and a set of services to easily store, query, retrieve and process content objects in a way that makes it easy to manipulate and match your domain model.

In this case, content is pretty much anything that: has a data schema (fixed or dynamic), needs access control, can live in a hierarchy, can be versioned, and can be rendered. That’s all.

Why use a content repository? Because if you start from scratch using a pure ORM or bare SQL when building an application to interact with business content, there is a very good chance that you’re going to rewrite the features we’ve developed, refined and optimized over last few years. And that’s the whole point of a content repository – it enables you to model, manage and interact with this content. That’s why you should care and use it!

You might have noticed that I haven’t mentioned “files”. That’s intentional, because that’s not the key part of the software. Of course, you can add BLOBs to any content object and we manage them well, doing low-level de-duplication and transactional integration. But a content repository is NOT just a file system. It’s much more than that. If you’re just looking to manage files, use a file system. If you’re looking to manage content, that can include files, then a content repository is the way to go! And we think Nuxeo Core is pretty powerful for this purpose.

Interested? Come on in – it’s open!

This technology is already fully open, so don’t hesitate to come by, say hi and start hacking if you like:

• Read & Comment the project proposal at Eclipse.org

• Explore the code

• Learn how we architect the content management platform

• Learn about the content store architecture & infrastructure

• Try the software

• And… help us find a better nickname than ECR!

It’s going to be an interesting journey,

EB.

About 1 week ago we held the first edition of Nuxeo World, our international conference. More than 140 participants from 8 different countries got together at the charming Théatre des Variétés, a century-old theater in the heart of the city. Regardless of some quirks inherent to any “debut”, we got a tremendous feedback from participants and I’m really pleased by this.

Plus we got a great professional stage and a beautiful room! A “Steve Jobs moment” for each presenter guaranteed. Will definitely reuse the venue, and there is room for a lot more attendees next year.

I was pleased to see our customers and partners engage with our tech teams. Our developers loved it (even if some were a bit skeptical at first). I’m sure the exchange will continue after the event and ignite new innovations. I know our dev teams have already planned some customer visits to better plan the work ahead and synch with external contributors. Yes, work happens outside the company when practicing open source! I love when our developers directly engage with our customers’ teams. I hoped it would happen and pleased it did. No doubts it will inspire more innovation over the months ahead.

I’ve also been positively impressed by the level of talks from all presenters, especially since few of us are used to present on a stage half the size of a basketball field.

We got great content to expose many aspect of our company and offering a unique insight about what we’ve done, how we do things, what’s keeping us busy and what’s next. I highly recommend to check out the slide decks and react on the content. We talked about the roadmap for 2011, (stunning) performances, agile, mobility, market trends, digital assets, case management, more OSGi, semantic technologies, CMIS, Nuxeo Studio, and much more…

I’m very grateful to our customers and partners that took the time to come and show their achievements, I know it’s an important time investment and we value it highly. Damien Metzler from Leroy Merlin presented an impressive deployment of a large scale collaborative content portal for its 25000+ employees in 100+ stores. Plus, Damien talked how his team became the largest external contributor to the platform’s code base. Before that, Thomas Choppy from our partner Smile presented an innovative collaborative portal for students of France’s most famous business school. I’m really fond of these stories, where motivated teams innovate and make a difference in their organization. And it’s also two examples where collaboration drives better business.

I was honored to open the event with the keynote speech. Hope I was up to the task. We are growing and getting market share everyday serving more and more customers. We’re here to make a different in the market. Focusing on creating more and more powerful technology to let our our customer innovate managing their content, unleashing collaboration, creating a better work environment.

I’m including the video of the talk here

as well as the slide deck if you don’t have the time to listen.

So, the event was a success and will have a positive impact on our business and our community. I believe we’ve stayed clear of the usual self-congratulating BS and tried to remain transparent and open at all times (yes, the roadmap started with what we’ve achieved and what we’ve missed, apparently it’s not a common vendor practice to do this honest appraisal…).

If you’d like to know more, check out:

• Nuxeo World 2010 – slide decks (on slideshare)
• Nuxeo World 2010 – photo sets (flickr)

I’m looking forward to the 2011 edition. We might double it with a US-based event to make it easier for our North and South American friends.

I hope to see you there next year!

I spent last week-end in NYC with my wife and we got back to Aldea for dinner. This place is becoming our favorite restaurant in NYC. The food is creative yet not too sophisticated (as in you get to actually taste and feel the ingredients) and really good. The wine list small but enticing.

We had a reservation for 9:30pm but got there 30min early. Our table wasn’t available but we were offered to sit at the “chef’s counter” where you are dining literally in front of the kitchen, fully open. So we sat there ordered and inevitably started to look at the kitchen’s work…

At some point I surprised myself thinking: they have a perfect flow and are working so seamlessly together. It was really impressive and we spent a part of the dinner looking at them and trying to understand how they worked. Looked a lot like what we want to achieve in software development teams: fast flow, great collaboration, minimum waste due to unnecessary communication…

1. Signal-based communication: very few oral communication, which seemed weird at fist (and not like I imagined) yet meal are prepared and ready to be served in no time. They are using small signals. Orders comes in from the dining room, are stacked up and each cook take a task in the pool of orders (haven’t determined the processing order). Of course there is some specialization (cold, hot, cooked, uncooked, etc.) but they just take the order and do it.

2. Focus on done: low level of “work-in-progress”. When a cook start working on a meal, they work only on it until it’s finished. Finished as in ready to be served or passed to the next stage. And when a meal is ready to be served, it wait for the others on the same order and leave. Same here, few orders in WiP stage at the same time.

3. Don’t let tasks stack up: When tasks start to stack up somewhere, somebody comes to help. I noticed 1-2 cooks plus the chef able to change from one part of the kitchen to another to help completing orders when they started to stack up (i.e.: too many oyster to open for the lady in charge -> help came to open oysters faster).

4. Continuous testing: of course, no chance to miss a delivery here. They all go live . So you can see them check (at least visually) really often what they are doing (and start again if not good — which doesn’t seem to happen a lot)

So of course I might be totally wrong and I know nothing about how restaurant kitchens work. Plus there is a lot of obvious differences with software development, but those similarities amused me and comforted my thinking that the core principle of Agile in general and Kanban specifically “Focus on the flow” can be applied to pretty much any team work.

I haven’t asked but I’m pretty sure they also do Continuous Improvement to reach and maintain this stage of efficiency!

We have some experiment running to apply Kanban principle to other team than software dev teams. I’ll share the learnings, but I am pretty positive on the outcome.

If you have any experience to share on this topic, I would be happy to learn about them.

I’m very excited and proud to present the new big thing for the ECM market! We’ve been working on this plan for the last few months and now it’s ready for our community to preview. We believe it can change things in the content management market and drive a whole new innovation stream from developers!

We are releasing, as preview, Nuxeo Marketplace & the Nuxeo Admin Center. As part of our Nuxeo Connect subscription program, the Marketplace is a new way to distribute plug-ins and apps on our ECM platform and packaged products. The Admin Center is a new administration console, featuring a great software update dashboard to install and manage upgrades, patches and new features, streamlining the management of a Nuxeo application.

Nuxeo Marketplace provides a completely new experience to install new features (packages) and customization/configurations in a Nuxeo application. Leveraging our platform’s architecture and extension model, the Marketplace offers a way to package those plugins and distribute them easily to enhance our products (Nuxeo EP, Nuxeo DM, Nuxeo DAM, or Nuxeo Case Management Framework).

The key point? It is not just another app marketplace! Most app markets today require a complete download, install, test cycle. We’ve made this easy for Nuxeo customers. We have focused on the experience, integrating it throughout the Nuxeo Connect services, allowing installation of new apps or plug-ins directly from your application.

We are delivering a completely integrated environment for our customers to browse, install and try new features, download Nuxeo Studio templates, etc. Installing new features and deploying a customization literally takes seconds and doesn’t even require a restart in most cases! THAT is innovation in ECM when most of our competing friends still take weeks to install and test new features… let alone create the customization…

More than just a new product, more than another new service, it’s the logical fusion of our products and services to make your job easier.

Want to join the preview and help shape the direction of Nuxeo Marketplace? Watch the sneak peak video and try it by yourself!

Key benefits

For developers, a way better to serve your users:

• browse and install new features from the Marketplace into your Nuxeo product
• easily upgrade your product and related add-ons
• easily install software patches delivered by Nuxeo’s support team

For partners and contributors:

• create apps, features, add-ons for Nuxeo’s product and access our install base (application builders decide – free or priced as you wish)
• easily distribute updates and collect revenue from what you’re doing

For system integrators and developers:

• benefit from a completely unified experience, plus support and customization with Nuxeo Studio
• quickly deploy your Studio-based customization

How does this work?

The Nuxeo Admin Center lets you link your product with your Nuxeo Connect subscription (if you don’t have one, you can start a 30-day trial ). Once your application is registered, the Update Center is activated.

The Update Center manages packages: it can notify, download, install, upgrade and remove them. The Update Center communicates available updates (and patches) for installed software, fetching and delivering Nuxeo Studio-based apps/customization and installing packages from the Marketplace.

On the Nuxeo Connect side, Nuxeo Marketplace hosts the package repository and offers a central place to browse available packages via the web-based gallery of apps and plug-ins.

Want to create new packages?

Creating new packages is very easy when you have done plug-ins for a Nuxeo application. You just need to bundle them with an install script and the resources to create a new package suitable for the Marketplace.

How to help? Want to know more?

• Try the Marketplace & the Admin Center

• Read the FAQ

• Create and submit packages

• Report bug and give feedback

Timeline?

The Nuxeo Marketplace and Admin Center are available today for members of our community, contributors, partners and customers for preview, testing, improvement and package creation. Nuxeo Connect customers can benefit from this update system now, receiving bug fixes and patches from our support team for Nuxeo DM 5.3.2.

The general availability release of the Nuxeo Marketplace will be done for Nuxeo DM 5.4, at the end of September. We expect to have many packages available by that time and directly available with this version.

Let’s get started!

EB.

As most involved in the broad content management market, I’ve seen the news of the week: Adobe acquires Day Software, the hot WCM vendor.

I have known and respected Day for a while: they deliver neat technology, have a clean business model and contribute significantly to open source. Plus, I appreciate the people I know from there.

Waking up on Wednesday and seeing the news starting to pour in my tweet stream was a big surprise. I thought about it a bit over the breakfast. My take: great for them, I know some people in the industry are going to hate it, but won’t be change much for Nuxeo and for the open source projects Day’s people are leading. So sent some congrats, a dinner invite, and went on my day waiting for the analysis and industry reaction overview from our great CMO later in the day. Which, in turn, confirmed my take. All good, move on.

I’ve been asked a few time about my opinion and gave it. Until the last time when I thought “but what if Adobe doesn’t follow the Day way?”. Because many people have talked about Adobe closing more of Day’s technology and I don’t buy it. Developers working on the open source project are well respected, they will continue to work on those projects be it for Adobe or for an other company. So that wouldn't be a problem.

The question that started puzzling me is: What if Adobe goes onto a more open way? First reaction: That would be huge!

Imagine, for a second, that Adobe open source the whole CQ5 product. You have:

• CQ5, great WCM software considered as one of the best in its category (the best?), available as open source

• Day’s team, a team that knows how to ignite and lead communities

• Adobe’s marketing war machine to let the world know

You get a winning product, with the capacity to transform the WCM market. By commoditizing this technology, Adobe would hit hard its competition in the WCM market. Despite the fact that it would unify some of the opens source WCM crowd, EMC/Fatwire, Autonomy/Interwoven, OpenText/RedDot/Vignette/Obtree and friends would be under heavy attack.

Adobe could concentrate on monetizing global service offerings: Omniture, Livecycle, end-to-end workflows for medias, acrobat.com on steroids, more online services, etc. Commoditizing the core WCM technology would keep the competition busy and let them make money where they hardly have any meaningful competition, innovate more with new services spanning and leveraging the wide reach of their offerings. We also would see an ecosystem thrive on CQ5, providing the ignition — for free — Adobe needs to enter the market. Kinda the Google way, after all.

Actually the more I think to this and after having read Adobe’s plan for Day, I think it’s the best way to achieve it. If they truly want to create a platform for customer engagement management, this is the way. This is how the industry builds big platform nowadays, by open source software.

All this for a mere $240M and -$50M in revenue addition. That would be the slam dunk that Laurence Hart doesn’t see coming!

Am I crazy enough to think that Adobe will execute this? No. And I haven't thought all this thoroughly. But that would be really fun to watch!

Onto some real work now,

EB.

The “open core” debate has been around since the inception of the model itself, and gained significant adoption among so-called “commercial open source companies”. The debate is heating a bit these day, and I got inspired by 2 recent blog posts from Brian Prentice and Matt Aslett. I advise to read both posts to understand the reactions bellow.

I think a lot about business models leveraging open source as it’s what makes our business run and I’m deeply convinced that “open core” is fundamentally flawed. This conviction has been formed by real world observations: running a real business for several years now. And I’m happy to see high-profile analysts reach the same conclusion with a sharper analysis and better process!

About Sales & Marketing Savings

James Dixon from Pentaho argues — not suprisingly — that open core is the right model because it reduces the sales and marketing costs to distribute the software. And that might be true. But it is not linked to open core neither to open source, intrinsically. It’s linked to the internet distribution model and the rise of the web as a way for new and small companies to become known.

I would also add that I think the open core market is less powerful as a distribution model than a freemium (or free trial)-one based leveraging proprietary software. The reduction in sales and marketing spend is more related to the online distribution of the software than the open source aspect of “a software core”. So, of course, when you distribute a software online, you have to make it easy to install (hence improve packaging compared to traditional proprietary offerings). But it is really linked to internet-enabled distribution, not to the open access to the source code of the software.

Atlassian (or Skype) might be the flagship of success for this model… without being open source at all (but while contributing to it)!

About the “open core” model

With an open core model, you have to exclude/remove features (hence value) from the open source software to in order to preserve your business: you could be forced to even limit innovation in the open source branch because it could damage your business. It does not leverage any benefits that should be derived from the open nature of the code — which is the very core aspect of open source. It only leverage free distribution not the open aspect of the source code.

I would add that a subscription-based model (where subscription is for maintenance and support services) is superior on the long-term because it drives the company to align and organize itself around the value created for its customer. The more the customer deploy and benefit from the software, the more revenue goes to the vendor. So I think it’s a great way to align vendors and users on the same value stream.

Also, using an open source license does not require free download (advocated by open core users): RHAT is, I think, considered as the most successful company in the open source world. Yet their software is not freely downloadable, while 100% open source.

Hybrid?

I read a lot about “hybrid models“, based some blend of proprietary and open source software, to justify/support an “open core” model. I don’t believe in this at all. Of course, proprietary software is not going away anytime soon. It’s a valuable and proven business model that works and can deliver value to customers when properly applied. Same for open source: it’s here to stay for good. But the “open core” model offer no long-term benefit for customers: it just blurs the real value of open source for them, only leveraging the distribution channel it implies for the vendor benefit.

I believe in clear business models. Successful companies use clear business models because that’s what enable trust from customers. Open core is not one of them: there is no clear line between open source / proprietary, neither serious justification for the customer. Open core is just the good old proprietary model, nothing new here. All vendors uses open source software today!

From a higher perspective, I believe that the whole IT market is moving toward service-based approaches — SaaS paved the way — because it aligns customer value with vendor revenue. That’s why we — at Nuxeo — won’t use the open core model even if it could increase short term revenue. We’re here to stay and we believe that basing our revenue stream on the value we create for our customers is the best way to create sustainable growth.

Cheers,

EB.

Note: this post follows the previous one about the ECM market and I advise you to read it to better understand the context of this one.

What differentiates you from the other enterprise content management offerings?

I get this question regularly, and too often the expected answer is “open source”. While playing a role, I wouldn’t say that open source is what makes us different. Open source is in our DNA, but that’s not the key for our customers, nor the biggest change we’re aiming to bring to the market.

What makes us different? Our technology, the ECM platform.

This is by far our main market advantage and what we have to bring to the market: Nuxeo Enterprise Platform (EP), our ECM platform. We’ve built superior technology, leveraging an up-to-date Java stack, design pattern and modularity. This is hands down the main reason that we win deals today with enterprise architects and technology-savvy business sponsors.

The value proposition here is simple and compelling — We dramatically reduce the time and the cost of building on top of the ECM platform when compared to LiveLink or Documentum. This is why we won major deals with Jeppesen — a Boeing Company, Orange, BBC, EllisDon, Cengage Learning, Overstock.com, and many more.

We don’t try to hide from architects, we bring them back to the center of the game and give them the tools to answer challenges of the 21st century. To fully bring competitive advantage and deliver the value it promises, technology is important. We believe software is an engineering discipline, at the service of the business.

Of course, open source is deep in our DNA and brings a lot of value, ease and insurance to our customers. But from a decision-making standpoint, it plays a role but isn’t usually a key factor. The same is true for cost. Yes it is important but clearly only satisfying the functional and technical requirements are paramount. Ironically, price regularly plays against us: such as when our competitor friends have the financial resources to buy deals from us when money is key. Hence the best case for us to win is when what we offer is not achievable by the incumbents.

We offer a better ECM platform, enabling a new generation of content applications

On the platform side, our mission is to commoditize the market for “ECM platforms” with standards, widely known technology and great infrastructure. We made a strategic bet 3 years ago on a stack of technology and infrastructure that is now mainstream. So we have a great ECM platform, leveraging open standards and a well-known technology stack, highly modular and flexible. It runs on a wide range of hardware (from embedded devices in planes to large farms with terabytes of data) and serves very diverse needs (from mission-critical editorial systems for press agencies to a highly secure case management system for a nuclear agency or a mobile document repository for an offshore welding engineer.)

The net result of all this is that our platform is the most flexible and modular on the market and is widely recognized as such. This has become a great market advantage for us with the rise of content applications (CEVA/CCA: Content Enabled Vertical Applications / Composite Content Applications – as Gartner puts it and discussed at its recent Gartner Portals, Content & Collaboration Summit).

Content Apps represent a steady move in the ECM market where buyers want to buy vertical solutions, solving actual business problems. They don’t want to pour money into generic technology anymore. We are seeing a new category of ISVs, packaging business knowledge into software to create and sell those content applications (ex: construction project management, clinical facts management for biotech and life sciences, software for control and command centers, etc.). Content apps are a logical evolution of the ECM market toward more vertical, business-ready solutions. And we believe we offer a great development and composition model for the next generation of content apps.

As such, I believe Nuxeo is well-positioned to benefit from this evolution given that:

• Open source software has shown superior ability to commoditize markets, recycling big vendors’ license revenue into a new stream of value. We participate actively in this commoditization, deriving revenue for us and offering better value for the customers.
• Our platform’s flexibility and feature scope combined with the open source aspect of the software ease the life of content app architects and developers. The development model the platform offers is widely recognized and praised. We believe we can enable a new way of building content apps. Easier, cleaner, faster.
• Our business model derives value from applications built on top of Nuxeo EP (thanks to the subscription-based business model we have created).

That’s why we’re here. To offer and evangelize an ECM platform and the associated content apps, responding to the new needs of businesses in this era of information explosion.

I hope this also bring some clarification and will entice people to look beyond the “open source” label. Because there’s a lot more to discover and that could really help your business!

Cheers,

EB.

While exchanging with a well-recognized and successful industry expert about our differentiators and the market we are in. Since they popup frequently, I thought it might be interesting to publish the answer.

ECM is a mature and crowded market. Is there really room for anything more than a niche player at this late stage in the game?

Hegemonic vendors

At a macro-level, the enterprise content market is composed by 5 hegemonic vendors (OpenText, EMC, IBM, Oracle, Microsoft) and a set of minor ones (~15 notable), after a strong and fast consolidation of this market. Gartner says: 3 top vendors have 52% of the ECM market. The Triad of ECM?

As many vendors have skipped investment in technology aggregating software from their acquisitions (with the notable exception of Microsoft) much of the current batch of software has been designed 15 years ago and hasn’t evolved much. They have forgotten they are in engineering, not retail. In this world of lean, on-demand, instant-on, the major ECM payers still talk literally in days or weeks to install their software. It’s faster to setup a whole virtual datacenter processing and storing terabytes of data on the Amazon Cloud than setting up a vanilla ECM system!

On top of this technology breakdown, many of these acquisitions have been poorly integrated, to say the least (with a special mention to OpenText on this side). And the pace of the recent consolidation has created a disturbance in the market.

Those two combined dynamics enable new vendors with good technology and the right go-to-market approach to enter the ECM arena, tickle the incumbents and rise, and bring some fresh air and fun to this market.

Perspective shift from customers

We see important shifts in how customers evaluate and choose ECM platforms:

• More and more Architects are actively involved in the choice of next-generation ECM platforms (not only business users / archive managers) and are putting it at the core of their information system. This sets high expectations in terms of software architecture, integration capabilities or flexibility and technology stack.

• They need to update systems deployed in the ’00s because incumbent vendors are not supporting those versions anymore => the cost of upgrading is high and they are looking for alternatives. Often we can offer efficient and better replacement for those systems for a fraction of the price of the ongoing maintenance. Let alone the license fees…

• Given the lack of technical investment and the legacy of major ECM platforms, implementation is complex and expensive => we can do better with today’s technology. Monolithic is no where near the state-of-the-art of software-and Architects care because it directly impacts their ability to make these ECM platforms meet the new business challenges.

Move fast, commoditize legacy, create value with the rest

I really believe that the market maturity combined with the legacy technologies of monolithic players is a key advantage for us: we are disrupting the market by commoditizing the technology (platform) and deriving value from this commoditization.

We target what hurts: the fat and comfortable maintenance stream. We target it with more flexible, up-to-date technology and a company organized to provide superior service for support & maintenance as our customers actually deploy and use our products. That’ll tickle!

So yes, I’m firmly convinced that there is a room for new players, like us. And timing seems just right for a big one. The market needs to evolve and renew, in the best interest of customers. And they well deserve it, given the challenges of the knowledge era that just starts…

That’s going to be a tough ride. But… feels fun too!

Cheers,

EB.

As you might have noticed, in September we (proudly) welcomed a new member of our executive team, Cheryl McKinnon has joined to lead our marketing, bringing many years of ECM experience from big name players.

Cheryl is a key member of our executive team and I am proud to have her on board: she brings deep knowledge of ECM alongside great sense or marketing. It’s a unusual hire for a company like Nuxeo. I believe the hiring process is a very interesting aspect of this story… It’s a total “2.0″ process.

Earlier this month, Cheryl organized and hosted a workshop for tech professionals who needed to get back into the job market – a move that ‘went viral’. She has lived the new Recruiting 2.0 experience and offered to share her learnings with others – because this is how we found her:

For several months I was thinking of finding a CMO to accelerate and strengthen our go-to-market strategy, as well add some serious brain power and experience in the field of ECM to our company. It wasn’t an active search at first – it took time to imagine the profile I was looking for. Once figured out, it became one of those sticky ideas I get sometimes… I had to fix this!

I considered several options to find the right person:

1. Hunter Route -> great to find the typical “world-class marketing guy” but he/she might miss the twist that I was after. Plus I wasn’t sure I could properly explain the profile, let alone assuming the head hunter really gets it.

2. Wait for somebody to send a resume spontaneously -> can work, but I wasn’t confident in the exact timeline for obvious reasons!

3. Find her/him myself using my own (limited) resources.

As the first route seemed wrong (and/or too expensive) and the second one too uncertain I went for the third one and started to work on the topic.

I wanted an “ECM expert / Web 2.0 thinker / social media pundit / community-aware marketer”. That would have been the first brief for a head-hunter. Hence, I headed to LinkedIn: refined searches, careful manual review of profiles (including blog / twitter-feed reading).

Applying several rules: proper Linkedin profile, a professional blog, a twitter account, some activities in social media and communities of practice. But more than anything, I was looking for the “twist”, the small things, difficult to describe, that make a person right for a particular job at our company. The thing that makes your company special and that is so difficult to describe. I was looking for “Nuxeo’s CMO”, not “a CMO”.

I ended up with a very small hand-picked group of people that seemed to fit the profile. Next, I sent an intro email to explain the opportunity, got answers, (lot of) calls, in person meetings, explained and discussed about vision and strategy. Kind of a standard hiring process, actually, for a key position. With a difference, however, from the old times… I would never had been able to do it, just 5 years ago. LinkedIn, social media, blogs and twitter made that possible: find great people for key position in (close to) no time. Less time than describing such a complex profile and complex position to a head hunter actually.

I now use this approach for all key positions in the company: you don’t find us, we find you (well, if you find us that’s cool too…). The social web is just a wonderful opportunity for great companies to find great people and for great people to find great companies. It enables to hear the voice of the talents and connect with them, before the first interview. That’s a brand new way of seeing the hiring process. This would have been completely impossible just 5 years ago. And I don’t think we’re an isolated case, my wife has been hunted and hired the same way a few month ago (which is maybe what got me started with this approach, actually).

As a CEO, it’s the most valuable result I’m getting from social media: being able to connect and engage with great people that can join and strengthen the company, at no cost (except participating to the system, being very open and transparent). I have access to a virtually unlimited pool of talent: just need to pay attention and look for people. This is a huge opportunity, totally new compared to what our predecessors had to deal with. And a great threat for those who don’t get it.

We’re living amazing times…

EB.

Matt Asay, in the good post "Open source is a platform, not a product", is claiming the end of the platform wars because open source has won. Clearly, open source platforms are winning. Just take Eclipse (development apps and desktop apps), Java, Android, etc.

But saying that open source platforms are winning doesn't mean the platform wars are over. I would say the contrary. Platform wars will continue, and this helps innovation (if the wars stop, then I would worry actually). We'll see a lot of open source platform wars. Competition rules the world!

The question is: why are open source platforms winning? I don't think it's because of their flexibility. Flexibility is a feature of a software platform open source or not. Being open source doesn't give you inherent flexibility, goodness or ease of use. Of course, flexible platforms win, and often they happen to be open source. But not always.

I think the core reason lies in the intrinsic economic efficiency: open source is a better way to produce software platforms from a market perspective. It's just more efficient at the macro-economic level, factoring cost and fostering collaboration. Hence, it wins. Period.

I believe the economic efficiency aspect is key in the success of open source software, especially for platforms. And it's not pure magic. Open source licensing scheme and open development models enable collaboration between self-interested entities, which can combine forces as they need within a clear legal framework, and such without a complex initial collaboration setup and big contracts negotiation.

And as platforms are inherently meant to serve a wide range of needs and people, open source reveals its superior nature: it enables great collaboration between actors using the platform, hence aggregating their work to advance the platform.

This virtuous cycle is clearly shown by great successes such as the Eclipse Platform (the more vendors joined the game, the more Eclipse became the de facto platform for dev tools), Apache projects, WordPress as a blogging platform, Firefox and WebKit as browser platforms (on different fronts), and the list goes on…

And, open source doesn't kill innovation. Quite the contrary – thanks to the inherent openness of the model and the competitive nature built-in (forks are an extreme example) – open source fosters great innovation.

So yes, as Matt says, for any given market segment, open source platforms win, are about to, or at least represent a significant share. But it's not because of their flexibility or because of their open source license. It's because the open source licensing scheme catalyzed by an open development model bring so much efficiency that it beats any proprietary competitor.

That's economic reality, not software architecture. And it's a lot stronger!

I’m reading a lot recently about “Commercial Open Source” being the next great thing in the software industry. I’ve just read the presentation “Talk Slides: The Commercial Open Source Business Model” by SAP Labs's Dirk Riehle. It’s a great presentation that really captures the vision and strategy of some high-profile companies in the so-called “Commercial Open Source” arena.

In summary, the “commercial open source” business model is based on the 3 pillars:

1. a GPL (or GPL-like) software tagged “community”
2. a proprietary version of the GPL software with some “proprietary extensions” sold using a traditional license
3. a serious dose of communication efforts to explain how open source magically creates cheap great software for everyone (and that in fact you’re not really selling it) and generates a ton of leads allowing you to get to market faster and cheaper

Core myths of the “Commercial Open Source”

Here is how I analyse the core speech of the current "Commercial Open Source" model. I would be happy to hear about your opinion.

“Community Editions” you mean… “Free Demo”?

I don’t get the fundamental difference between offering a “low-end” open source version of your software and offering a free but proprietary one. Especially when I read that the “Community version” is for “developers, hobbyists and small deployments ‘cause it’s cool and fun tech” while the “Enterprise version” is for “enterprise deployment ‘cause it’s full of tests and stable code.”

Hmmm… how do you turn an untested, unstable software into an enterprise-grade, rock-solid software with “some extension”? Well, you don’t. Either your software is well-tested and rock-solid, or it’s not.

If you just want to create a product line with different features depending on varying customer size, that’s fine but let’s call it this way.

Open source software generates leads, right?

Wrong. Freely downloadable apps generate leads. Free trials generate leads. Smart marketing efforts generate leads. Having access to source code does not generate leads, at least not when you are offering applications (it might be different for middleware or dev tools).

Want to generate leads? Create great software and offer free trial and downloadable software.

“It’s not proprietary software, it’s giving reason to buy when people use the software”

I love this one! Seriously. Of course customers need a reason to buy. That’s why they buy.

The reason to buy is called “license fee for usage right”. It’s been around for 20 years and if you want to give people a “reason to buy” your software, just use a “license fee” for usage and maintenance. That is what it's designed for — it will save you a bunch of marketing dollars.

Open Source is good for Communities

It helps but it’s not enough. And it’s not limited to Open Source.

Openness, honesty, good software and good marketing create community. Ask Atlassian, Google, Twitter, Salesforce or even Microsoft. Not open source, but great communities and vibrant ecosystems.

“Commercial Open Source” or “Ashamed proprietary software”?

There is nothing wrong with selling “usage right to use binary software” (or more often called “license fees”…), which is what all “Commercial Open Source” vendors are doing. It doesn’t prevent you from creating great software, building a community and be nice. It just requires a bit more effort.

It's time to go public and add some clarity to all this. There is nothing wrong selling proprietary software, especially when you're contributing a lot of open source code (I’m a great fan of Atlassian and Day, in this respect). It is nothing to be ashamed of. Just be clear and focus on your software's competitive advantage rather than its open source "nature."

“Commercial Open Source” is not the business model of open source

There is no such thing as a business model of open source, by the way. There are many reason companies are producing open source software (from Microsoft to Google, from Oracle to RedHat). The only common fact: it’s a tsunami in the industry. Everybody’s using it, software vendors being the firsts. And many are producing some.

There are a lot of reasons to produce open source and a lot of ways to make money leveraging it, as some brilliant analysts and bloggers already said (two notable reading: “On open source business strategies (again)” by 451 Group’s Matthew Aslett or “Making Billions with Open Source, Revisited” by Redmonk’s Coté).

Here is how I would summarize it:

1. Proprietary software (!): Build and distribute proprietary software leveraging open source ones (be it complete apps or just extensions). Take Day Software, quietly producing tons of good open source infrastructure components, they sell a great proprietary app. Or IBM with Geronimo / Websphere. Or Oracle. SpringSource and most “Commercial Open Source” companies fall into this category too. I think it’s the easiest way to make money out of open source.
2. Support & Packaged Services: Sell support as subscription and high-value packaged services (monitoring, inventory, etc.) for open source software you’re producing. JBoss was the flagship in this business with quite a success making money with it. This is Nuxeo’s business too.
3. Proprietary distribution: assemble open source software into a proprietary stack. It’s all open source software, but the recipe to assemble the different components together and deliver a coherent and supported stack is kept secret. This can also include some “proprietary services” such as automated updates or monitoring. This is RedHat’s business. Sun seems to look toward this way too (see Solaris and the recent WebStack).
4. Proprietary tooling: sell proprietary tools that help running / operating / managing open source products. These tools are usually development tools, administration tools or deployment tools.
5. SaaS: package open source software to deliver apps as a service. This is the business of managed apps hosting (to make apps run) and packaged services (to deliver great customer support and business domain knowledge). This is also Nuxeo’s business.

So in the end, what’s the key point? Is it doing open source no matter what for the sake of hype or is it solving problems by delivering great software and/or services to customers?

I wish people of the Commercial Open Source arena would focus more on the later…; cause it does not diminish their contribution to open source overall nor does it diminish their company’s greatness and value. For the best of the open source industry. These times are about transparency and openness after all…

What do you think? I have spent 10 years in the open source software industry, building a company, living through short-term hypes and various business models. And I'm still learning. Would be really happy to discuss more about all this.

Cheers,

EB.

We’ve been challengeded by Day Software for a CMS meme, inspired by Kas Thomas’s A reality checklist for vendors.

Since it’s kind of fun and we’re not shy, let’s take the challenge, even if we really don’t focus on WCM!

1. Our software comes with an installer program?

Yes. We have a native installer for Windows and a multi-platform installer for Linux and Mac.

Note: 3/3

2. Installing or uninstalling our software does not require a reboot of your machine.

Of course.

Note: 3/3

3. You can choose your locale and language at install time, and never have to see English again after that.

You choose your language at login time, and your done. If your browser is properly configured, it’s automatically detected.

Note: 3/3

4. Eval versions of the latest edition(s) of our software are always available for download from the company website.

Full versions are always available from our website. Oh, and with the source code. And the development is open too!

Note: 3/3

5. Our WCM software comes with a fully templated “sample web site” and sample workflows, which work out-of-the-box.

Yes to both (as of version 5.2). We have two technology options for sample websites (WebEngine and WebWorkspaces) and we supply two sample workflows for document management. The level that one would describe as “fully templated web site” is arguable but these samples are pretty basic. And you also get a fully ready system for collaboration & document management.

Note: 3/3

6. We ship a tutorial.

We have a user guide that walks you through the software using most of the features. We also have a book in progress – you can read and comment on the draft online- that teaches you how to develop for the platform. And a big “reference guide” for experimented developers.

Note: 2/3

7. You can raise a support issue via a button, link, or menu command in our administrative interface.

Yes, for supported customers. We also have an issue tracker available to anyone. You can raise issues on the forums or on email lists as well.

Note: 3/3

8. All help files and documentation for the product are laid down as part of the install.

No. They are available and downloadable via the web site. Does that work?

Note: 2/3

9. We run our entire company website using the latest version of our own WCM products.

It’s an older version for some parts of our website. We do use our software for our document management system and our content infrastructure.

But remember: we don’t do “corporate” WCM (yet, at least).

Note: 2/3

10. Our salespeople understand how our products work.

Yes. They work with the technical staff directly for training, pre-sales, and support. Plus, they install and demo the software by themselves! And they use it to manage their documents and proposals, so they're eating our dogfood too…

Note: 3/3

11. Our software does what we say it does.

Yes, and you can verify it yourself anytime you want. It’s open.

Note: 3/3

12. We don’t charge extra for our SDK.

No. But you can mail us a thank-you note or buy us a beer.

Note: 3/3

13. Our licensing model is simple enough for a 5-year-old to understand.

Yes: Zero cost (LGPL). You pay for support and packaged services.

Note: 3/3

14. We have one price sheet for all customers.

Yes. And it’s easy to verify: http://www.nuxeo.com/en/services/support/operations/.

Note: 3/3

15. Our top executives are on Skype, Twitter, or some similar channel, and: Feel free to contact them directly at any time.

• Florent Guillaume, Head of R&D: @efge – blog – linkedin

• Anne de Forsan, Marketing & Communication: @adeforsan – blog – linkedin

• Stefane Fermigier, Founder and Chairman: @sfermigier – blog – linkedin

• me, CEO: @ebarroca – blog – linkedin

• and the company! @nuxeo – blog – linkedin

Plus, a lot of others, of course.

And we blog, too !

Note: 3/3

Conclusion

Final Score: 41/45.

Not too bad, and we’re not even focused on WCM. And I don’t tag, since I can’t find any serious player that hasn’t been tagged already…

Would be happy to play to a ECM, DM or collaboration meme, now… Someone interested?

meme ID: 9c56d0fcf93175d70e1c9b9d188167cf

The round-table about “Open Source for CIOs” was co-led by Carol Rizzo from Kaiser Permanente and Michael Gallagher from ABN-AMRO. Both have successfully brought some open source software in their organization. This round-table was the right occasion to actually give some feedback on this experience and explain what’s the main issues with the current state of the open source industry, from a CIO point of view.

This talk was really enlightening about what we might be missing in our market approach, as an industry. And was pretty funny, too. Read on if you’re interested by the main topics for me and some personal opinions, of course.

Michael Gallagher, SVP Enterprise Architecture, ABN-AMRO

Michael Gallagher started as Chief Architect in a subsidiary of ABN-AMRO, and begun to introduce some open source in the development strategy of his team. He is now SVP – Enterprise Architecture of ABN-AMRO.

What has been achieved:

• An Open Source policy to define a framework to use open source software in the IT environment

• A managed central repository with all approved open source components available for developers. The repository is managed and a team is now in charge of updating packages, monitor new interesting components that might qualify to be added, etc.

• Related processes for risk management and adding component to the repository

Executive, while no being direct sponsors, supported the project and enabled the change.

Open Source is now widely used by the development at ABN-AMRO and is bringing a lot of value: more agility and flexibility in the developments process, cost reductions, etc.

ABN-AMRO IT dept is now going up the stack, onto the applicative level.

Carol Rizzo, Chief Technology Officer, Kaiser Permanente

The project started for a simple reason: many tactical apps were developed by the users with a variety of unapproved and unsupported proprietary products;   products that were not scalable or supportable, thus making the applications difficult to support.  The IT dept and the management must be able to support the applications and direct the technology environment future to assure cost efficacy and supportability. This needed to be balanced against the users desire to build innovative decision support systems they believe they need. Those tactical apps, often play a major role in the organization's mission. But it was time to assess the risks (legal, maintenance, legacy) and be able to support users.

Hence, those achievements:

• Defined a OSS policy that defines how OSS can be used and under what conditions.
• Negotiated an agreement with a vendor who will provide the OSS library, assure there is community support for the OSS, test it, send us notifications of updates, provide tools for discovery and asset management and indemnify the company if there is a legal action.
• Library of open source components that can be used to build applications
• Got a support service and indemnification for this stack (from [OpenLogic](http://openlogic.com) in this case)
• Created a training program for people interested in creating those apps

The operation is now fledgling success: users are adopting the tools and feedback has been really positive.

Unfortunately the dev teams for the central IT dept are slow to embrace the open source world.  Much more communication and training is still required to convince them, but there's hope.

Personal note: I think the acknowledgment of the importance of those "tactical apps" is very interesting. Might be a new market for OSS businesses: help IT to control those apps, while enabling people's creativity.

Now here is some key quotes I’ve selected from the roundtable. They are not straight quotes, but it should reflect the general arguments. (note: I’m not a journalist

Market approach: “get a marketing pitch!”

First major point: OSS need a better marketing pitch, understand what CIOs are looking at and how they buy it. Stop explaining what is OSS. Explain what it brings and what are its benefits.

Excerpt:

Stop thinking that CIOs understand tech aspects! Most CIOs understand business cases, budget management and cost control. Get a marketing pitch, guys!
— Carol

Moreover, procurement dept prefers public company because "the vendor's financials are known and the vendor's ability to sustain and grow the software is still the risk". Procurement want to assess the financial viability of the vendor. And it's easier when the company is publicly traded.
— Carol

A don't tell me about not being locked-in: as long as I have the software installed on my servers and my users have been trained and are using an application, I'm locked in. That's all!"
— Carol

CIOs need to understand what open source actually is and what it can bring to them. Moreover, OSS can be a good way for large corporation to taste Agile, and introduce Agile in their IT dept.
— Michael

OSS is very subversive for IT processes: it bypasses easily all IT firewalls. But that could be damaging for OSS. Find a way to get in with the processes. Help IT to use you. Explain the dynamics explain what you can do for us. Explain why your approach can change things.
— Michael

Even if a bit provocative (but I like it), I think it touches the right points. I agree on most of this and this matches a position we’re defending at Nuxeo since a long time: focus on your business and “open source” is as much a business as “proprietary”. ECM is our business. OSS, our development and distribution model.

I would disagree on one point: vendor lock-in. If the software is actually open source, it does not reduce the “software-lockin” but it actually reduce the vendor-lockin, especially if the later fails. If the software is mature-enough (importance of the community), you will have alternatives to change the vendor / service-supplier. This is maybe the biggest benefit when using OSS: you have an option which is not even remotely available with proprietary software.

And on “publicly traded” and vendor viability I would say that it’s not related to open source but more to large software corp vs. small ones. And if we take our field (ECM), a strong balance sheet does not really gives any inssurance of stability: vendors can be acquired by larger ones. And in that case, you’re lock-in depends on the acquirer… Except if you choose open source, where you’ll have options anyway, thanks to competition.

About IT Department

IT dept are struggling maintaining a diverse jungle of apps, while trying to cope with new users’ needs and staying up to date on the tech innovation front. They will face huge transformation and open source might help in the mix.

Excerpt:

80-90% of IT budgets are assigned for maintenance. You can’t innovate with this. And existing apps are already paid, they don’t cost so much. Change means more money. Hence, often IT can’t deliver fast enough.
— Michael

“Shadow” IT departments are created within the organization and deploy apps, because they need it. And IT doesn’t like this. But, there here for a reason. Understand why and adapt the service delivered to answer those needs. Don’t fight them blindly. IT has to change to deliver more innovation to their users.
— Michael

The fact is many IT departments are focused on control instead of focusing on enabling. Tech is clearly enabling, IT dept should adapt themselves to become an enabling organization inside the company, and drive change. Not fear it.
— Carol

Technology has come to organizations and people understand its power. Thanks to Microsoft with Excel and Visual Basic, people have started to innovate and create interesting business applications, everywhere. Don't prevent this, it's a huge advantage for an organization. IT needs to be able to support and catalyze those tactical apps, that can be very powerful to improve the organization's performance.
— Carol

This one was really enlightening because I didn’t see all of this this way. But it makes a lot of sense. I think I’ll have more to say on this later:-)

That’s all for the excerpt of the roundtable. A lot more has been said, of course. I just captured was I thought was most important.

Thanks a lot to Carol and Michael for sharing their (deliciously irreverent?) views on IT role in organization in general and open source in particular.

One of the outcome of the Open Source Think Tank 09 was the ignition of a “Open Source Trade Association”. This might be an answer to some of the issues and advices Carol and Michael gave us today.

*To come: Business Case III — Proprietary software vendor: to switch or not to switch?*

Hope this helps,

EB.

Image by The Library of Congress via Flickr

This business case was really interesting as it’s involving an actual software user and a critical environment of deployment.

Company “A” is a medium-sized manufacturing company who needs to upgrade their enterprise software to better conduct business with partners, vendors and customers through a more seamless sharing of data and user friendly interface. Company “A” would like to remove a large dependency on a single vendor and is willing to take some risks to lower costs and reduce vendor lock-in, but is not sure how to weigh the risk vs. rewards of a different approach using multiple smaller open source vendors or how to direct/influence their principal integrators or solution providers to support that route. Company “A” wants to keep control of the solution, and therefore has decided to keep the solution in house, not hosted at a remote 3rd party vendor site.

Our group was pretty diverse: two large vendors (open source and proprietary), three small ones (open source) and a "top-CIO", which made the discussion interesting…

First recommendation: don’t start with this!
It’s pretty tough to start implementing Open Source with your ERP when you’re a manufacturing company. Start with less critical systems to get skilled, refine and assess the process.

But well, the business case is here, so okay… let’s take the challenge.

A. Can open source change the way enterprise software (especially ERP) is evaluated, deployed and serviced? Suggest one approach company “A” can take to utilize smaller open source technology components instead of purchasing the majority of the software solutions through a single vendor. What are the first 3-5 things to do to support your approach?

Open Source can certainly change how the software is evaluated. Just because it opens new horizons, risks and possibilities. As any other business innovation, basically…

So here is what we think are the must-does:

1. Get someone skilled on board, be it an external consultant or an internal resources. You need someone to guide this process and avoid the obstacles. He/she needs to be knowledgeable is all aspects of the project: business case, it projects, open source. Or build a team to merge all those skill if the project if big enough.

2. Get an Open Source Policy and a Common Infrastructure Stack: either you want to start an integration work for your ERP or take an OSS platform, you need an OSS policy (licensing, contribution, etc.) and a “standard stack” (what are the core tech choices: you don’t want a tech mashup instead of a well engineered tech stack) of components to guide the RFPs and/or your tech team in their choices.

3. Take care of Open Standard and software architecture: if you start integrating components, it’s the right time to make sure you’re building on open standards and on a well-defined and well-engineered software architecture. If you choose a platform, it helps too anyway. [Personal note: it should be the case regardless the open source or proprietary nature of the software. It’s just a good practice for your organization.]

B. Typically, mid-sized companies deploy the technology their SI or solution provider recommends. What are the top three (3) things a mid-sized company could do to incentivize channel partners (SIs, solutions providers) to accelerate development and deployment of enterprise solutions based more on open source components?

Well, money is usually a good incentive…

1. Explicitly ask in the RFP to have — at least — an alternative technical platform leveraging open source software

2. Constraint the budget allowed to license fees. In the worst case you’ll get a better deal on license costs. In the better, you’ll spend less and more wisely: actually adding real value (that actually matters to your business) to the software. And the SI will think it’s good for him because he’ll get more on implementation and support.

3. Highlight that developing an open source skill in its existing practice will give him a competitive advantage compared to other SI. And other company of your field might also consider this way if your experience is positive.

C. Are the decision factors and priorities (e.g., acquisition costs, vendor lock-in, maintenance costs, risk of software failure running the business, risk of vendor going out of business, etc…) the same when comparing traditional ERP solutions vs. multiple, open-source based software solutions? If different, name the top 2-3 factors that would be prioritized differently.

Well, from a business perspective, it’s alway a balance between cost, gain and risk. From that perspective, it doesn’t change actually. But there is new factor you need to take into account:

1. Check the community size and the actual software adoption in the world. This give resilience to the open source software. This resilience is a protection from vendor failure (or acquisition) you wouldn’t hope for proprietary actors (small and big). If the main vendor/maintainer fail and there is a market for support and innovation around this software, the market will do its work and players will propose services and maintenance. The community is key here, it gives you a way to be sure of the resilience the software will have, hence drastically reducing the vendor lock-in.

2. Assess that the SI can actually deliver support for the software. Require he gets the right contract from actual maintainer of the core software. You don’t want to be stuck because the software has a bug and the SI cannot deliver the right skills to fix it. Open Source Vendors exists for a reason.

3. Benefit from the speed of innovation you can get from open source: influence the roadmap, ask for generic features to be contributed back on the main code line (hence reducing the specific code you’ll maintain), understand how you can benefit from ongoing work on the software.

D. Is a SaaS model always preferred for an SMB company looking to utilize open source enterprise applications due to the high risk integration costs? Under what circumstance would SaaS NOT be a preferred alternative for an SMB with similar dynamics?

General answer: don't seem to be interesting for the case, but would need to dig into it. And it would require a complete business case only for this.
One key point, though: do not loose the flexibility of the software and the control on your data that the open source approach is giving you.
[Personal note: using SaaS for your core ERP does not make sense to me except if you don't need customization and flexibility and that your completely trust the provider to not loose / keep your data.]

Done!

I tried to represent what was said. If I forgot something, comment. And if you have reactions to those results: same.

Happy implementation!

EB.

Image by Julie, Dave & Family via Flickr

Today's been the last yet most productive day. Very intense. We had two brainstorming sessions on Business Cases, one great talk about "Open Source and Fortune 500 CIOs" (by two of those top CIOs) and one open discussion about doing marketing as an Open Source Industry. And the results are actually so interesting that I'll report/discuss them in separate posts.

The lunch was pretty innovative. Much like speed dating. Open Source Speed-dating! (I should go to a VC with this idea! It fostered networking and worked pretty well. I think many people discovered great companies and great people, exploring this new horizon in the software business.

The afternoon lead us to the second Business Case of the day and to an open discussion on whether we should or not do some marketing as an industry as a whole, using some kind of trade association, focusing on open source business. This question comes back on the table for the 3rd year in a row. But now the answer is a loud and definitive: yes. Some work started on this, let's see where it goes now. But things are moving around this. And I think it might be a major step onto global awareness of CIOs. Something huge has been ignited today, hopefully…

After all this work, volunteers have been kindly invited to another wine tasting session at a nice Napa Valley's vineyard, for a casual closing party. Was relaxed and entertaining.

SO, now the event is closed, what the general impression? I would say: inspiring, hopeful and productive yet fun. I had the chance to meet quite a few very interesting people and to start some interesting discussions. Let's see where it goes, but the event is a clear success from my perspective.

Thanks to the Olliance Group, to the sponsors and to all participants. I'm excited to see you again in Paris for the next session of the think tank and see where we'll be. Growth is around us, for good!

I'll be posting more detailed post on the two business cases and the talk of the day in following posts. Don't hesitate to comment or drop an email if you'd like to get more information.

Thanks Napa… onto Paris now!

EB.