Ian’s Blog on Open Source Marketing

There is a common phrase “a camel is a horse designed by a committee”. Well if that is the case an ECM camel is a suite built through acquisition. The problem is that you get an extra hump you don’t need or worse still two humps that do the same thing and one hump has to go.

On a more serious note the last decade has shown us that when ECM companies expand their suite, new products either take a long time to get integrated or never do. Overlapping products become orphan children starved of resource and left to wither.

When companies pay large amounts for an acquisition they need to get a return on their investment and it is the customer (existing or new) that pays. The customers typically suffers either through:

• Higher license prices
• Higher maintenance costs
• Higher integration costs
• Lower customer service as key people leave
• or paying for support and maintenance on a product that is on life support with little investment

This is in contrast to an ECM industry that is going through:

• Commoditization - Driven primarily by Open Source in the ECM space
• Standardization - Driven by new standards such as CMIS
• Consumerization - Driven by simple mass market social computing interfaces
• Dramatic Cost Reduction - Publicly verifiable figures show this to be in the range of 89% to 96%

As I have previously written,  the open source model operates at a dramatically lower cost and thrives in blue oceans where vendors such as Interwoven have been too complex and expensive. Websites don’t live forever. Many of our customers are existing Interwoven and Vignette customers who have chosen to build new sites on Alfresco and gradually move away from the legacy proprietary vendor. The new world is a heterogeneous one where users choose what is most appropriate for each project.

In acquisition situations such as this customers are taking a big risk staying with an ECM Camel. What products will exist in 6 to 12 months time. Which will be on life-support. Which ones will be in the process of being integrated. Even those that are being integrated come at a cost. A focus in integration means a long wait and a new version with no new functionality that is often less stable than the old version.

Interwoven was a good product in its day and to keep using the analogy a racehorse. Customers need to think about if they want a camel or to move to a modern racehorse that is very different to the one of the 1990’s.

Autonomy adding Interwoven for Governance and Risk Compliance makes sense when adding the WorkSite product which is strong in the legal sector. But what about the Digital Asset Management and Web Content Management humps? Also, what about the two humps of WorkSite and Meridio.

The Credit Crunch and acquisitions such as this make people stand back and think as opposed to just doing business as usual.

The blue ocean just got bigger and the flood gates are opening.

Welcome to a world of:

• Choice
• No Tie-In
• Standards
• Simplicity
• Dramatically Lower Cost

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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.