Ian’s Blog on Open Source Marketing

A year ago I wrote “Howells Ten Rules for Open Source Marketing.” At Alfresco we believed that open source was different and needed a different marketing model. Geoffrey Moore was at the root of our thinking when he wrote about “Darwin and the Demon” and markets being ripe for disruption in the form of marketing and business model disruption. We saw that there was no “cookie cutter,” standard approach and tried to blend our experience in growing large successful enterprise software companies with some best principles from marketing visionaries such as Geoffrey Moore, who had a massive influence on all of us from Documentum.

Since I wrote that article Alfresco has been downloaded 700,000 times, is actively used at over 21,000 sites and supports over 300 paying customers predominantly from the Global 2000 and Government. Alfresco in just over a year has become the clear leader in Open Source Enterprise Content Management, and one of the fastest growing open source companies ever. This series of posts is an attempt to review what we got right, what we got wrong and the new things we have learned along the way. It is also meant to be a way to share ideas and for open source companies competing against enterprise software giants.

I have previously worked for companies focused on crossing the chasm in the early days and later being leaders. I have also worked for companies that were number 2 to a dominant player. The marketing models we used and the understanding of them was critical as it drove a coherent approach to all that we did.

Often you focus on your position in the market - a follower or a leader - the Avis vs. Hertz model or a gorilla, a chimp or a monkey model. The open source marketing model tries to break away from that mindset. We have used some of our own thoughts combined with the best ideas from marketing visionaries such as Geoffrey Moore, Zagula and Tong with their “Marketing Playbook”, Trout and Ries with their “Marketing Warfare” and Kim and Mauborgne with their “Blue Oceans”. That is why such concepts as “Chasms, Tornados, Main Streets” “Gorillas”, “Drag Races, Best-of-Both”, “Blue Oceans, the Model T, Apple, Nickelodean and Megaplexes” have so much to do with the success of Alfresco!

A Marketing Strategy for Open Source
Strategy Rule 1 - Make markets not war
A simplistic view of open source strategy is to target a big, greedy, lazy incumbent enterprise software vendor and offer a lower-priced alternative. This means the market is a zero-sum game and you are dependent on swapping out the large incumbent vendor. If that was the case, low-priced enterprise vendors, that the Moore system categorizes as “monkeys” vs. “Chimps” and “Gorillas,” would have been successful decades ago.

To be successful you need to focus on what Kim and Maubrogne call a “Blue Ocean” or “Non-Customer.” These are the users that have either tried and rejected the software in question or have never been able to afford it. That is where Alfresco has focused.

This series of posts is featured in Enterprise Open Source Journal. To read more goto:

http://ajax.sys-con.com/read/431544.htm

Good reading and for the open source star wars fans amongst you “May the Force be with you”

ian