Ian’s Blog on Open Source Marketing

I haven’t written on open source marketing for some time. This is a continuation on something I wrote some time ago - Strategy Rule 6 - Say it in a Tag-Line - You’re the Open Source Alternative.

Messaging should complement and reinforce the differentiation and positioning (tag line) but also be more campaign oriented, fun and controversial. Messaging should intuitively feel like what the customer already thinks and believes - no salesman required to give a complex explanation. To re-enforce and support this it should be simply verifiable with a call to action. Transparency is key. Facts should be in the open in a similar way to code being open.  You are up-against the deep wallets and a large sales-force whispering into the customer’s ear. If the message is not what the customer intuitively believes and can simply support  the FUD (Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt) volume dial will be turned up by the enterprise sales force and become deafening.

Good open source campaigns typically revolve around undeniable facts focusing on:

• Dramatic Cost Savings
• Consumerization - Innovation through Simplicity for all Users
• Choice - No Tie-in to a Proprietary System

Some Dramatic Cost Saving examples are:

Do More with Less - Use Alfresco and save 89% to 96% compared to Documentum, OpenText, Vignette and SharePoint

For an analysis of publicly verifiable US Government GSA figures go to:

http://www.alfresco.com/products/whitepapers/

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Some Consumerization - Innovation through Simplicity for all Users examples are :

Does your ECM system feel like this?

Alfresco - As Simple as a Shared Drive and Facebook

Click here to try it immediately

Some Choice - No Tie-in to a Proprietary System examples are:

Don’t get Tied in by Proprietary ECM Stacks

and be held to ransom with enterprise software price rises

Total Cost of Ownership just got Green - Reuse your existing software, hardware and skills to reduce costs in areas such as:

• Linux, Unix or Windows
• Oracle, DB2, MySQL or SQL Server
• J2EE – JBoss, BEA Web Logic (Oracle), Web Sphere (IBM)
• Existing High Availability (HA) and scale-out architectures
• PHP, Java, JavaScript, Ruby
• Dreamweaver
• Microsoft Office or Open Office
• AJAX. Adobe Flex, YUI
• Firefox, Safari or IE

Be Fun. Be Controversial and be Transparent

These three things when combined with open source are louder than enterprise sales FUD

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Kyle McNabb, in my opinion, is one of the best analysts in the ECM space. He recently co-authored a report “Identifying When To SharePoint, Or Not, For Business Content Needs”. This has some interest findings and quotes:

“A SharePoint initiative is like bamboo: the challenge isn’t getting it to flourish; it’s keeping it from taking over your IT garden”

“many I&KM professionals would say I’ve worked with ECMs, and I know ECMs. SharePoint, you’re no ECM”

Pandas may like bamboo but it not so good for managing content when the compliance and productivity of your company depend on it.

The limitations are discussed

• Lack of repository scalability
• Lack of structured workflow support
• Limited support for non MS-Office file types
• Limited lifecycle management

Some key lessons are discussed:

• Higher value content such as contracts or engineering assets are often stored in non-SharePoint systems
• Large files such as schematics can bring the system to its knees
• Often SharePoint is used as a work-in-progress repository and are then published into an authoritative library

This brings me to my point. Companies are having to:

• Manage more content not less
• Manage content for more users not less
• Offer greater compliance and productivity

ECM for the masses should offer a very low-cost set of simple content services for all users and all content that scales across the enterprise using standards so that all applications and all users are equal citizens. This is not SharePoint.

Forrester point out that the attraction of SharePoint is that “in conjunction with Office 2007 it offers a comfortable, if not intuitive, working environment for business users.” What is really required is a simple SharePoint front end such as MS-Office or another simple web-based consumer client accessing the enterprise content services. As Forrester point out Web parts to mimic the SharePoint user experience fall short. “to date, only Alfresco has implemented support for the SharePoint protocol to match SharePoint’s integration with Office desktop applications.”

Alfresco 3 addresses  these issues:

• Native SharePoint protocol support
• CMIS standards support through REST and Web Services bindings
• Share - a simple consumer web application for collaboration on content with a flex document previewer enabling office 2007 and non-Office 2007 users to share documents
• Email In support for document storage and discussions
• Support for all content types, Microsoft and non-Microsoft, large and small files, high-value and low-value content
• Scalability beyond the dozens of of SharePoint recommended restrictions - 100GB databases (often users restrict to 30GB for acceptable performance), 50 million documents per server
• A content services platform for Alfresco and non-Alfresco applications - MS-Office, Joomla!, Open Office, mediawiki

Alfresco can be downloaded at:

http://wiki.alfresco.com/wiki/Download_Labs

I would encourage you to read the Forrester report at:

http://www.forrester.com/Research/Document/0,7211,47368,00.html

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The End of it
Scrooge changes his life and reverts to the generous, kind-hearted soul he was in his youth before the death of Fan. He anonymously sends the Cratchits the biggest turkey in the butcher shop, meets the charity workers to pledge an unspecified but impressive amount of money, and spends Christmas Day with Fred and his wife.

The next day Scrooge catches his clerk arriving late and pretends to be his old miserly self, before revealing his new person to an astonished Cratchit. He assists Bob and his family, becomes an adopted uncle to Tiny Tim, and gains a reputation as a kind and generous man who embodies the spirit of Christmas in his life.

I believe that this time next year when we look back at 2009 we will see it as a positive year. Times like this turn us all into what my friend Nancy Garrity calls “Econnoisseurs”. The Urban Dictionary defines econnoisseur as “One who insists on the highest quality at the lowest price.”

After the tech bubble burst every company needed to find a way to do more with less. Lee Thompson of E*Trade discussed in Business Week how by using open source software, running on less expensive hardware, he saved $13m per year going from 2002 to 2003. Open Source with commercial Service Level Agreements in a typical enterprise configuration saves between 89% to 96% for Enterprise Content Management.

In times of recession companies can’t just do business as usual. They need to look at what they do, look at what is really necessary, innovate, simplify and cut out un-necessary costs. This creates great software companies and enterprises that are great users of software. Out of the bubble came great companies such as Google, Amazon and eBay that benefit people every day of the week. Out of this recession Open Source and Cloud-Based Web 2.0 companies will emerge as similar powerhouses that benefit people every day of the week.

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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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5. The Year of Choice is Important Again – CMIS becomes the SQL for Content Management

“Choice” has always been a nice word. The headline grabbing price rises of Oracle and SAP and the new lock-in of SharePoint have made customers realize they don’t want to put themselves in a situation where they have no choice in the future. Choice is core to lower prices today and lower prices tomorrow. Geoffrey Moore, a great visionary, a number of years ago predicted the “Stack Wars”. Stack wars tie a customer not just to one product but a whole stack. To reduce the cost of software today you need not just lower cost for the software you are buying but also choice of the lowest cost software stack to run it. This allows you to in the future, if your vendor increases its prices, to switch another vendor. You could for example go from BEA to JBoss, Oracle to MySQL, Windows to Linux or vice versa.

Prediction for 2009: Support for an open stack at the operating system, database and application server levels will be demanded. Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) will become the SQL for the content management industry and the catalyst for choice, developing applications once that run on any compliant system with painless switching.

6. The Year of New Enterprise Software Pricing Models

Traditionally enterprise software has been bought with a large upfront payment, followed by a large, typically 20%, annual maintenance renewal. This was driven as a capital expense (cap ex). Discounts for enterprise deals have tempted companies into buying more than they need, creating shelf-ware and rich software companies. This purchasing process is changing, driven by Open Source and Software-as-a-Service pricing models. Customers are now demanding:

• No large upfront fee
• A subscription model
• The ability to budget out of operating expense (Op ex) as opposed to capital expense
• This purchasing process is changing, driven by Open Source and Software-as-a-Service pricing models

Customers are also demanding fair pricing for fair usage highlighting the flaws of traditional pricing:

• Per user pricing – often called Client Access Licenses (CALs)
• No difference in pricing for someone who uses the software for 1 hour a year and someone who uses it 24 hours per day
• A single user paying multiple times to use different software just to access or edit different content formats e.g. Word and CAD files

Prediction for 2009: A move to a subscription model driven out of operating expenditure and a move to fair usage based pricing not CALs.

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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.