Ian’s Blog on Open Source Marketing

You are entitling people to what they were previously denied. As I wrote in my previous post the customer knows:

• The high-end systems are too expensive and complex
• The low-end systems are low-priced but don’t meet requirements

Customers no longer have to make a trade-off. It is the power of open source that is enabling this. Open source is also about the “good guy” vs. the “big bad guy”, abusing their position of strength with both customers and competitive vendors. Your tag line needs to say this and be a springboard for your messaging that will be more campaign oriented.

As the Blue Ocean Strategy says you need to say it in a tag line.

Generically this is:

• The Open Source Alternative to (Generic Term for Expensive Proprietary Vendor without stating names directly) when there is no clear “Dark Side Gorilla”

or

• The Open Source Alternative to the specific “Dark Side Gorilla” when one clearly exists

When the market had no clear ECM leader with Documentum/EMC, FileNet/IBM, OpenText, Interwoven, Vignette

• Alfresco the Open Source alternative for ECM

When a new “Dark Side Gorilla” emerges

• Alfresco the Open Source SharePoint alternative

In July 2007 we launched the Open Source Barometer - a survey using opt-in data provided by 10,000 members of the Alfresco Community with the aim of providing a global survey of trends on the use of open source software in the enterprise. Users were asked about their preferences in operating systems, application servers, databases, browsers and portals to capture the latest information on how companies today evaluate and deploy open source and legacy proprietary software stacks in the enterprise.

This is the largest open source enterprise stack survey and is used by Alfresco to prioritize platform and stack combinations for the larger community. The Barometer is also designed to ask questions such as:

• How and where is open source used in the G2000 Enterprise stack
• Is it a pure open source stack or a hybrid
• Are things different in different parts of the stack
• Are things different in different parts of the world
• Is there a leading player in each part of the stack
• What are trends over time

If those were the questions, one answer that clearly came back was - MySQL is the clear leader in an Alfresco environment being chosen 61% of the time.

The Open Source Barometer is published twice a year. The next one will be announced at JBoss World in Orlando, February 13th, 2008, where I am presenting.

I have been working on the next version today. The sample size is now up to over 35,000. As well as the sample increasing significantly we have also expanded the Open Source Barometer to include analysis on preferred virtual machines, office environments, how users are planning to evaluate alfresco (hosted, corporate server or laptop) and type of content management. The new barometer has some very interesting results.

One statistic that came out was “The Sun is still shining on MySQL”.

As the previous Open Source Barometer showed, in open source at each level of the stack there is a clear leader. If you say open source linux, database, app server, enterprise content management, crm most people will be pushed to come back with more than one name. For open source database that name is MySQL.

In my previous posts I have discussed “The Blue Ocean Strategy” in “Make Markets not War - A Simple Marketing Model for Enterprise Open Source”. To be successful you need to focus on what Kim and Maubrogne call a “Blue Ocean” or “Non-Customer.” Alfresco has been very successful with the 80% of Knowledge Workers who don’t use ECM and collaborate with a shared drive and email - The places ECM vendors don’t go (and actually aren’t very good at). MySQL has not focused on replacing Oracle but powered the largest Web 2.0 sites in the world.

MySQL is a great company managed by great people and the Sun is still shining on their Blue Ocean. The acquisition by Sun makes sense - Sun powered the first generation of websites. MySQL powers the next generation of Web 2.0 sites. Sun has already proven their alliance and cooperation with open source and this move further validates the value of open source as a way to drive innovation and build companies and value in a better and more efficient way.

The Open Source Barometer will be announced at JBoss World on February 13th, and also posted on www.opensourcebarometer.org , where details on the last barometer can also be found.

When there is a pure technical innovation/discontinuity customers often don’t understand the technology. So it needs to be explained in industry terms. It’s not a “virtual document” it is a “drug submission.” In “Main Street” everyone knows what the technology does. Therefore there is no need to micro-market to a specific vertical, user and application and pray you will cross the chasm to the riches of the tornado. What is needed is to maximize your “Blue Ocean”.

Alfresco targeted, the “Blue Ocean” of non-ECM users who were “Knowledge Workers” who used a shared drive. The S:/drive population. This is the majority of desktop users and much larger than the traditional ECM market. These users want to collaborate and publish to websites easily using their standard tools.

What is important is to integrate into the environment the knowledge worker lives in on a day-to-day basis to make it easier for them to do their job “better”. This has driven Alfresco to ECM-enable the mass usage tools that knowledge workers use in the Global 2000. This has evolved as follows:

• ECM enable the shared drive
• ECM enable MS-Office
• ECM enable forms and Office for simple website contribution (with Virtualization and Sandboxes)

An audience is a audience is an audience and that audience may be customers, partners, prospects or employees. Enterprises are beginning to realize that a Social Computing Tool is reaching an audience of customers, partners and prospects as much as a website. To drive this we evolved to offer:

• ECM enable publishing to leading Blogs – WordPress and TypePad
• ECM enable publishing to leading Social Networking tools - Facebook

In all of these environments ECM is critical, but must be provided as a service (”Content-as-a-Service”) from the mass usage tool the knowledge worker is using as opposed to a specialist ECM tool that is part of and monolithic ECM suite. As I wrote in my previous post, innovation is focused on ease-of-use making it simple and often transparent for for knowledge workers to get access to ECM. The suite approach stems from the 1990’s when ECM vendors went on a spending spree buying up companies at bargain prices after the .com bubble. This strategy says we have all of the tools you want - they may not be what you use in your daily work, they may not be what you want to use, you may need to get trained on how to use them, they may not be integrated, they may use separate architectures - but hey look at how many tools we have in our suite. We have everything you could possibly ever (read probably never for the majority of users) need.That’s why ECM enabling existing mass usage tools with Content-as-a-service is the way forward.
Kyle McNabb in a very interesting blog wrote:

http://blogs.forrester.com/information_management/2007/11/facebook-alfres.html

“And we’re just starting to tap into the persuasive power of content as organizations try to use content, across multiple channels (not just the Web site) to improve the customer experience. And there’s a mountain of content stuck on network file shares that need to be put to use to help improve how information workers get their jobs done more effectively. My contention: You can’t put this content to use if you don’t manage it. You need to manage this content to ensure you’ve got a single source of the truth, that you have the right content ready for use, and that you know where to get it…

But organizations, and information & knowledge management professionals, will want a way to define and enforce how this information gets managed, how it gets retained, and MOST IMPORTANTLY, how it will be used, regardless of where it physically lives — Facebook, Microsoft SharePoint, or on my dreaded C: drive (I can never find anything on it).

The Blue Ocean is being ECM enabled.