Ian’s Blog on Open Source Marketing

I have worked for US software companies all of my working life but lived in Europe for the most part of my life. Over the last 3 and a half years at Alfresco it has been interesting to see the differences in European and US peoples opinions and approaches to open source. I have come out of meetings in one geography and said “I  haven’t been asked that in years. I thought everybody took that for granted”. These differences were documented very well in Larry Augustin’s Weblog where he wrote about “Commercial Open Source in Europe Versus the US”. These were captured from the first Europe Open Source Think Tank (OSTT). In summary they are:

Larry points out that US buyers want “better, cheaper software and a better relationship with vendors;” all of which Open Source helps create for them. He also points out that “The European community sees those benefits, but in addition recognizes that the Open Source nature of the code is the driving factor behind those benefits.”

As I have written about in previous posts:

• Open Source with commercial Service Level Agreements in a typical enterprise configuration saves between 89% to 96% for Enterprise Content Management. - Lower cost
• To reduce the cost of software today you need not just lower cost for the software you are buying but also be able to choose the lowest cost software stack to run it. Avoiding vendor lock-in is core to lower prices today and lower prices tomorrow.  Stack wars tie a customer not just to one product but a whole stack. - Avoiding vendor lock-in and therefore lowering cost

Commercial open source has been the driver to enable:

• Reusing existing software, hardware and skills - Avoiding vendor lock-in and therefore lowering cost
• New fair usage pricing models that can be driven out of op ex as opposed to cap ex - Lowering the cost of money

So lowering vendor cost and avoiding lock-in go hand-in-hand with the same goal. A common phrase about the US and the UK is two countries separated by a common language. Maybe “Reduced Cost” and “Avoiding Vendor Lock-in”  is the same thing - but in a different language.

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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