Ian’s Blog on Open Source Marketing

There is a famous film called “It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World” where the film begins as the occupants of four vehicles on a narrow road in a southern California desert stop to help Smiler Grogan, a man who has just careered off the highway. With his dying breaths, he tells bystanders about $350,000 hidden in the fictional town of Santa Rosita, A wild race follows to find the treasure. There was a recent study by Accenture that reminded me of this film where in this case the chase was for content not money.

The study highlights:

• Managers spend up to 2 hours a day searching for information
• More than 50% of the information they obtain has no value to them
• 59% said that as a consequence of poor information distribution they miss information that might be valuable to their jobs almost every day because it exists somewhere else in the company and they just cannot find it
• 42% of respondents said they use the wrong information at least once a week
• 53% said that less than half the information they receive is valuable
• 45% said gathering information about what other parts of the company is doing is a big challenge
• 31% said that competitor information is hard to get
• 57% said that having to go to numerous sources to compile information is a difficult aspect of managing their jobs
• 40% of respondents said that other parts of the company are not willing to share information
• 36% said that there is so much information available that it takes a long time to actually find the right piece of data
• Only 16% using a collaborative workplace such as the company’s intranet portal

When you look at these statistics it may seem like a “Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World” but in reality it is a “Consumer-Driven, Distributed, Federated, Heterogeneous Content World”!

Content Management and Search is critical for people’s productivity

• Managers spend up to 2 hours a day searching for information
• 59% said that as a consequence of poor information distribution they miss information that might be valuable to their jobs almost every day because it exists somewhere else in the company and they just cannot find it
• 36% said that there is so much information available that it takes a long time to actually find the right piece of data

Content Control and Records Management is critical to people’s productivity. Content that is not approved should not be available to everyone. Security should be applied to search so that users only get access to content that are are supposed to view. Out-of-date, incorrect and invalid content needs to be marked and retired.

• More than 50% of the information they obtain has no value to them
• 42% of respondents said they use the wrong information at least once a week
• 53% said that less than half the information they receive is valuable

The web is not one website and corporate content is not one repository - It’s a Distributed Content World

• 45% said gathering information about what other parts of the company is doing is a big challenge
• 57% said that having to go to numerous sources to compile information is a difficult aspect of managing their jobs
• 40% of respondents said that other parts of the company are not willing to share information

It’s a Federated World. To analyze a competitor you need to search across internal repositories and external repositories. These may be content management systems, blogs, wikis - It’s a Heterogeneous World

• 31% said that competitor information is hard to get

The consumer interface is coming into the corporation. Interestingly 31% said it was hard to get competitor information vs. 45% for other parts of the company. It is easier to search the web and get useful information on a competitor that search an internal repository and also users don’t want to use their internal portal. Users want the simplicity of the web interfaces across internal and external content

• 31% said that competitor information is hard to get
• Only 16% using a collaborative workplace such as the company’s intranet portal

It’s a Standards, Standards, Standards, Standards World

Given this scenario the only option is to use standards to search across these repositories. In the old proprietary, legacy content world distributed meant going across a couple of that vendors repositories and maybe another competitors repository. In this scenario creating adaptors in feasible. In the consumer driven, distributed, federated, heterogeneous world of today the options are endless and not under a companies control. Writing hundred of adaptors is not an option.

That is why is this world OpenSearch against content repositories is the solution today. OpenSearch is the standard used by:

• Google
• Yahoo
• Amazon
• eBay
• Wikipedia
• Technorati
• Creative Commons
• and many more

Alfresco version 2.0 has adopted OpenSearch as a search standard.

David Caruana has written an excellent blog on Alfresco OpenSearch.

John Newton has also written an excellent blog on Open Search.
Alfresco 2.0 can be downloaded at

http://dev.alfresco.com/downloads/

and read about in the Wiki at

http://wiki.alfresco.com/wiki/OpenSearch

Last week I was writing my presentation for the upcoming joint seminar with Unisys focusing on the commoditization of ECM and it reminded me of a book and phrase “Barbarians at the Gate”. I worked in enterprise software for 20 year and still have many friends there. A thing that is often said is “The problem with open source is it is 10 times cheaper than enterprise software so you have to do 10 times as many deals”. The key thing here is commoditization is happenning and the commoditization is happenning at the software, business model and marketing levels. The net effect is that the large enterprise deals are going away and the sales process is being commoditized. What is key now is to have a business model that is efficient in this new world.

Geoffrey Moore was always my marketing hero and in “The Gorilla Game” (1998) he makes some points that are particularly applicable today and to working in “Open Source Time”. Moore talks about the differences between “Applications and Enabling Technologies” (page 65) and says:

“The plug-in structure of layered technology, makes it critical for standards to emerge in the enabling technology layers, but it is not as critical for this same process to occur in the application layers.” Applications “do not commoditize easily and thus cannot proliferate as broadly or interoperate with other systems as intimately. As such these vendors have networks effects only with entities immediately adjacent to their market space … By contrast enabling technologies commoditize extremely well, allowing them to proliferate into markets far afield from the original starting points and generate a high degree of network effects. These in turn put pressure on the overall marketplace to standardize exclusively on a single set of components driving market shares to extraordinary levels …”

Open source is key driver of commoditization and a modern example of the network effect. These principles explain why many of the leading open source companies are infrastructure companies - they can be commoditized more easily and benefit more from the network effect - MySQL, Red Hat, JBoss. Traditional enterprise markets tended to follow a pattern of moving from hundreds of companies in a space, to a pack e.g. Oracle, Ingres, Informix and Sybase to a gorilla emerging form the pack - Oracle. In open source the network effect and commoditization happens much more rapidly - in open source time. That is why in many open source categories there is very quickly one clear leader.

Alfresco has benefited from these principles, being infrastructure software in a commoditizing market with a massive network effect. That is what has made it the clear leader in its segment in just over a year. GPL just accelerates the commoditizaion and network effect. We feel strongly that open source is the future of software. There is a phrase that you can’t be “half-pregnant” and similarly you can’t be half open source and half proprietary. It is open source, not hybrid models that will drive true disruption, commoditization and benefit most from the network effect. The GNU General Public License (GPL) is the ideal license to drive forward this industry disruption and accelerate the network effect. That is what drove us to move to GPL.

The acceleration of the network effect is happening. Friday saw us have 3 times the traffic we have ever had on our website and we have had more enquiries about Alfresco than ever before. Open source works and GPL just accelerates the network effect.

Here, Gian Trotta, ebizQ’s product manager interviews me on various topics such as: