Ian’s Blog on Open Source Marketing

The Year of the Compliance – I can’t afford not to be compliant but how can I afford to be compliant

With every new year comes a look back at last year. The current monetary crisis will reignite regulation, governance and compliance concerns. What this crisis has taught us is that markets are global and local regulations cannot protect global markets. New global regulations will come into place and need to be enforced globally. From a content management perspective this means:

• Audit everything and everybody in everything they do in every region
• Audit not just documents but also email, instant messages and also social networking when it relates to business
• Audit not just additions or changes but also access
• Enable rapid searching and eDiscovery across not one but all repositories of all types that a person may have accessed
• Make it simple to show the process and rules you have been using and the change control in your systems including your websites

This will require open standards and architectures to support these new requirements and avoid costly highly damaging eDiscovery requests. This “mass” compliance will require systems that are:

• Low cost
• Simple for all users to use
• Simple to rollout on a large scale
• Based on open standards for integration

Then you can address the question in a rational way:

“Can I afford not to be compliant and also how can I afford to be compliant

Prediction for 2009: 2009 will see a resurgence of compliance and an audit everything approach from a content management perspective. This will further drive open standards adoption to enable cross repository access and analysis offering commoditization driving down the cost of content compliance.

The Year of the Consumerization of Buying Enterprise Software – Discover, Try, Buy - with the Wisdom of Crowds

In the 1990’s there was a lack of freely available product information and the only way to access and try an enterprise product was through the sales division of that company. The world has changed and the internet has made:

• Information on a product freely available
• A product download freely available
• Advice on that product freely available
• The opinions of masses of users freely available

The credit crunch is forcing companies to look for value – not just in the cost of software but in the way they evaluate software. Today, to discover a product you go to Google. To get opinion and information you rely on the wisdom of crowds. People are turning away from “the complexity machine” and rewarding simplicity, value and transparency. Tools such as Google trends show in real-time market trends. Masses of blogs offer up-to-date information. Ranking and access allows good information to rise to the top. This is what has driven the success of Wikipedia vs. Encyclopedia Britannica.

Prediction for 2009: Enterprise software acquisition will be consumerized. Companies will “Search” the web, trusted blogs and forums, “Try” the software via download or in the cloud, and ‘Buy” if they like it, typically through a subscription model.

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The third Open Source Barometer found that the US continued to be the largest adopter of open source globally. However, it is interesting to note that open source has a “long tail” effect with, in this case, over 180 countries being members of the community and the European tail being 2.5 times the size of the US.

We believe that in Europe, government is driving adoption, with leading exponents being France, Germany and Spain. India is also significantly increasing its use of open source.

The Linux analysis in the third barometer shows Red Hat and Ubuntu as the clear Linux leaders, each at 31%.

As with the previous survey findings, this shows a continued trend to these two vendors within the community.

It is important to note that SharePoint only runs on a Microsoft stack and some have speculated that SharePoint is the next operating system from Microsoft. One of the goals of the survey was to examine the influence of SharePoint and the Microsoft stack on the open source community.

Previous surveys have shown that community members tend to evaluate on a Windows laptop and in deployment the majority turn to a Linux server.

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This survey continued the trend with 64% of users preferring to evaluate on Windows. Of interest is that 91% do not intend to use Vista but instead are staying with XP or Windows Server 2003. The logical conclusion from the analysis is the open source community either deploys on Linux, or stays with the Windows operating systems it has, not moving to Vista.

The BPM analysis shows a strong preference for “other” at 62%.

Once again the probable conclusion is that an ECM user, working in an ECM environment, will use the integrated BPM or workflow software. This is also reflected in SharePoint BPM usage in a SharePoint environment.

Business Process Management can break down into a number of categories:

• Content Centric - Content Creation, Update and Review
• Integrating a Business Process across Multiple Systems

For the former the preference will be for integrated BPM/Workflow. For the latter the preference will likely be for cross application BPM often using BPEL and Web Services

The wiki analysis, similarly to the blog analysis, shows a strong preference for “other” at 60%.

Again, the probable conclusion is that an ECM user, working in an ECM environment, will use the integrated wiki software. This is also reflected in SharePoint wiki usage in a SharePoint environment.

In summary, for the majority of the time the user will prefer the integrated wiki software but if they have a preference they will choose the leading open source Web 2.0 Wiki software – MediaWiki, which powers Wikipedia.

The blog analysis shows a strong preference for “Other” at 63%.

From this data it is possible to draw one of two conclusions. Either “Other” represents a hosted blog being used on the web. The more probable conclusion is that an ECM user, working in an ECM environment, will use the integrated blog software. This is more likely and reflected in SharePoint blog usage in a SharePoint environment.

In summary, for the majority of the time the user will prefer the integrated blog software, but if they have a preference they will choose the leading open source Web 2.0 blog software – WordPress.

Web 2.0 has had a major impact on how users create and access content, particularly from an ease-of-use perspective. One of the goals of the survey was to examine the influence of Enterprise 2.0 technology such as wikis, blogs and portals  on ECM.

The browser or portal analysis shows a strong preference for Browser access at 66%. Open Source ECM users want to recreate the external web experience with either simple browser access or browser access with AJAX or Flex components. If users have a preference for a portal they go for open source leaders such as JBoss or Liferay or a segment of SharePoint portal users want an alternative server and repository.

The Rich Internet Application (RIA) analysis shows a strong preference for AJAX at 58%.

AJAX frameworks have for a long time been strong in the open source community. However, the analysis segmented the Windows-only users and found 92% do not use or intend to use Silverlight, 52% want AJAX and 24% Flex.
Windows operating system respondents are turning away from .NET/Web Parts and Silverlight, instead looking for an open stack based on Java with either an AJAX or Flex based client

Previous surveys have shown that community members tend to evaluate on a Windows laptop and in deployment turn to a Linux server. This survey continued the trend with 64% of users preferring to evaluate on Windows.

The Open Source Barometer III shows that 71% of members use or intend to use Java as their architecture.

Java has for a long time been strong in the open source community. However, the analysis further segmented the Windows-only users and found that 86% do not use or intend to use .NET/Web Parts and 53% want a Java architecture. A logical conclusion to this is open source users want an open stack, even on Windows.