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I originally wrote this after the news broke of HP buying the Autonomy. I have now been upstaged in reality that life is stranger than fiction with the rapid departure of Leo Apotheker from HP on the back of his decision, the appointment of Meg Whitman. I thought it worth publishing after the revalations from Oracle and the analysis on the reality of Autonomy’s business.
The surprising announcement that HP is to buy the largest UK software company I think caught many by surprise. It was a nice surprise for Autonomy shareholders. HP simultaneously made several announcements de-committing from WebOS and potentially the PC market and lining their business up as a monolithic enterprise software supplier (AKA Oracle, IBM). |
So what’s the real story here? Well it’s clear that it’s a great exit in the nick of time for Autonomy. The real story is that for the past few years the core of the CMS and search market has being replaced by Open Source software, typified by Alfresco and Lucene/ Solr (Lucid Imagination). Dr Michael Lynch founded Autonomy on a great innovation and the company exploded in value in the dot com boom as UK investors bought in on the promise of the ‘British Google’.
However innovation is very hard and Autonomy found that in order to feed investors quarterly appetite they need to deliver topline growth and so Dr Michael Lynch embarked on a dizzying spree of acquisitions to bulk up revenues. Their ‘dot com’ proceeds gave them lots of firepower to acquire. Autonomy rapidly moved to be the CA of content management, buying established companies with limited prospects and integrating disparate technologies with the Autonomy Idol ‘marketecture’. These could now up cross sold by a rapacious sales force to a locked in customer base. Of course the customers have been resentful and have rebelled against these wildly disparaged tactics in the enterprise software world, often turning to open source such as SOLR and Lucene for search.
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The Autonomy management style was, according to many ex employees I have spoken to, the antithesis of ‘Autonomy’. One wonders how long Dr Michael Lynch will be content to be a prince of software at HP rather than the absolute ruler of Autonomy. For customers it’s yet another crazy global software acquisition that validates why every corporation needs an open source strategy to protect its priceless content assets. Now it seems even the HP shareholders agree on this. |
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October 6th, 2011
The rise of social networking and the use of social content (Facebook, Twitter etc) are having dramatic effects on our societies. With any new technology this has opened the door of opportunity as well as some tricky problems. It has been widely acknowledged that Facebook and associated social networking has played a major role in facilitating the so called Arab spring. More recently the authorities in the UK and US have struggled to cope with the rapid ability to organise that these tools deliver to groups of ‘Flash Rioters’.
| This clearly goes to the heart of the discussion on freedom of speech. The social networks have strongly defended this amid calls for these sites to be shut off during periods of unrest. In fact Facebook engineers worked hard to ensure their users in Tunisia could continue to use the service despite attempts by the then authority to block the site. It’s also obvious that these sites have a monetary interest in staying open and online. Now the government in both the USA and UK are bringing in (or considering) curfews as a means to prevent Flash Mobs and riots. |
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In the past the broadcast media had the infamous 7 second delay to control (censor) news. Given that it now seems we are looking at trading our Freedom of association for freedom of speech do we need to balance the right of free expression with the ability to filter and manage our social content.
August 19th, 2011
On my way to work I have listened to a lot of discussion on the radio waves of fairness in the face of the unpalatable budget cuts the new coalition needs to deliver.
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In our complex society Citizens rely on the provision of Justice in an open and fair manner. With advances in forensic science, personal data capture and mobile communication the justice system faces a massive content management problem. How will they cope with the tremendous budget pressure faced by governments globally? For if justice is seen to be opaque, cases collapse due to errors in process and fair only to the rich this undermines our democratic society at its core. |
Well in recent years Justice Ministries and Law enforcement authorities have been adopting open source on a massive scale. Open source is well suited to the objectives of open and transparent justice. Alfresco has become the defacto standard for leading Justice Ministries. It is used for case management by several law enforcement agencies including the ‘real’ CSI. From Switzerland, Spain, France, ECJ they have been able to meet their objectives using Alfresco.
With the creation of the Ministry of Justice in the UK the then Labour Government had the opportunity to break with the past and follow the lead of US and European Agencies. Disappointingly they chose the tried and failed route of big ticket licence software to consume the bulk of their budget and then reaped the wind of insufficient funds left to meet the March 2010 role out dates for the much vaunted e-working system (http://www.zdnet.co.uk/news/systems-management/2009/09/14/courts-on-track-for-e-working-by-march-2010-39750728/) .
Comparisons of the MOJ byzantine projects have been made with the success of others in rolling out largely the same functionality at a fraction of the cost. http://www.lawgazette.co.uk/blogs/in-business-blog/why-are-we-behind-dubai-courts-it
The new coalition administration should learn from this and act quickly to deliver the value for money systems a modern fair Justice systems demands.
August 18th, 2011
It was a pleasure to attend the Silicon Valley Entrepreneurs Forum organised by NESTA. Here we could bask in the collective wisdom of the über entrepreneurs of Silicon Valley USA.
The attending aspiring UK entrepreneurs have created some astonishing products and services for the digital world. What they wanted to hear was how to build their fledgling start-ups into successful global businesses.
The problems they identified for UK entrepreneurs were:
- Cultural attitudes, not thinking globally and a stigmatisation for failure.
- Difficulty in raising funding from UK investors who did not understand risk and start-ups (focusing on P&L metrics too early compared to US VC’s).
- How to enter the massive but fiercely competitive US market.
- How to go global fast.
The panelists came with lots of great advice, but the bottom line synthesis was for our UK entrepreneurs to leave the UK, settle in the USA, get US funding, leverage the advanced tech networks and thrive. The UK could be a good ‘offshore’ development base.
At lunch we heard from David Willetts, the Minister of State for Universities and Science. He talked about the actions the UK government was taking to drive entrepreneurs for example “a review of IP and Patents” (well, we all know patents are what big companies use to stifle innovation), working with big US companies (Cisco, Facebook) and lower corporation tax, as far as I heard it was a list of policies all aimed at big mature companies.
Where are the policies to encourage our entrepreneurs?
How do we encourage people to risk their time, reputation and money on innovation to create and build great companies?
Where is the incentive to take long term risk?
After the abolition of long-term capital gains taper relief is it little wonder entrepreneurs are being encouraged to leave for a more hospitable shore where they can get rich (and pay their taxes).
November 19th, 2010
The team is just back from a busy few weeks hosting Alfresco Developer Conferences in Paris and New York. The feedback has been very positive and there was particular interest in Activiti BPM & Alfresco Web Quick Start.
With Activiti BPM, the vision we saw of a universal capability to manage – with seamless coordination and management – complex workflows across any number of enterprise systems, whether based on premise or in the cloud, has now been delivered by the Activiti team.
I attended the New York DevCon and found it a very valuable experience, especially the opportunity it gave me to talk to a wide range of customers, community users and partners. Some of the feedback I picked up on, which we will consider when planning the next DevCon, is whether to add a user/business orientated track and how to solve the problem of popular presentations clashing on the schedule.
One of the new technologies I saw at DevCon was a totally web-based mailroom automation and document capture and scanning solution from Ephesoft. This could do to Kofax and Captiva what Alfresco has done to proprietary ECM solutions.
Those who were able to attend DevCon will have heard John Newton and AIIM’s John Mancini speak about moving from systems of record to systems of engagement. Those of you who were unable to attend, can listen to John Newton’s conference interview and view John Mancini’s slides.
These sessions resulted from a research project into the Future of ECM that the AIIM Board (including all leading ECM vendors) undertook with Geoffrey Moore. If you want to learn more, don’t miss the AIIM webinar on December 14, when Moore will present his findings on the impending Social Business Revolution.
Once again I would like to thank all those customers who have been sharing their Alfresco project experiences with us (see new case studies). These are invaluable for the Alfresco community at large and also those who are just starting to work on their own projects using Alfresco.
This month, Alfresco launches the first in a series of on-demand training courses. The e-learning will enable customers to take advantage of more flexible, lower cost training options. Alfresco’s first e-learning course will be an introduction to System Administration. Check out the sneak preview of Alfresco’s first e-Learning training course.
Enjoy!
November 12th, 2010
Charles Arthur’s recent article in The Guardian was both accurate and scary. It’s particularly timley given David Cameron’s will be visiting China this week. Like the Labour government before it, the current UK government seems to be continuing the trend of believing that big is best (or at least might is right).
They have become convinced that cloud computing will reduce the cost of delivering government computer systems. In this they are correct. However, in order to ensure the costs savings are fully realised its essential that the government cloud is designed to allow choice of application remains open.
There are good examples of this – Amazon has used economies of scale to pass on reductions in the cost of computing to customers, while also giving customers the choice of which applications to run in the cloud.
However, by comparison no such reductions are available in a typical SaaS model – for example Salesforce customers locked into a proprietary application that only runs on the Salesforce infrastructure.
The way to ensure competitive price is for the customer to have freedom of choice. This is inherent in the philosophy of Open Source software and is why the US government is so keen to utilise Open Source to contribute to reducing the budget deficit.
So it’s worth remembering that Google’s interest in cloud computing is to have as much of our data in their private cloud. In this way they can use their search and inference algorithms to greatest effect. If Google was in any way responsible to the citizen then this would be for the common good. But Google is responsible only to its shareholders and as such will push the boundaries on copyright (they are already in the dock for infringing the GPL license), privacy (Google Streetview) and patents whilst they can gain commercially.
Now it’s interesting that Western Governments condemn China, precisely because they know that economic might does not give you the right to trample on human rights yet blithely look away when falling into the arms of the mighty IT giants.
Let’s hope it’s not out of the Microsoft frying pan and into the Google fire.
November 8th, 2010
Reading Oliver Diedrich’s recent article I have to agree that on the surface the hype surrounding open source appears to be over. However, far from seeing his conclusions as negative, I see much to commend the continued growth and use of commercial open source.
But is the hype really over? Well if by hype we mean an irrational exuberance without sound justification, a fashion of purely subjective choice, then I agree. What has happened is that open source has moved into the mainstream, adoption continues to grow and many of the arguments used against it (as is often the case against any new movement that is seen to threaten the establishment) have been refuted; for example open source software is insecure, there is no support, not suitable for ‘enterprise’ use, etc. Just as the hype over online shopping and social networking has died, these activities have moved into the mainstream and are growing. Has online shopping replaced bricks and mortar shops? No; the two now coexist, compete, yet often serve different needs and markets. The same can be said of social networking. All of these activities are carried out on the internet – i.e. a ubiquitous communications network – and all display the characteristics of the network effect. Those that can innovate and then establish early momentum often end up as the dominant players. We can see this with eBay (who now remembers QXL, which still exists and offers auctions in markets eBay is weak in?), Amazon, and Facebook.
In the open source world success was gained when open source projects were able to enter an established proprietary software market and meet the needs of those organizations looking for freedom from lock-in, equivalent or superior features and lower cost. This meant Red Hat with RHEL Linux was able to successfully compete with proprietary Unix, principally Solaris and become the dominant commercial Linux distribution. Other Linux distributions have had to find their niche and they continue to prosper when they differentiate from the niche occupied by Red Hat. Meanwhile, JBoss was able to enter the market principally dominated by Oracle WebLogic and IBM WebSphere to become the dominant (but not the only) open source application server.
In Alfresco’s case, we were able to enter the ECM market and principally target those looking to add social/collaboration capabilities to key business processes and offer a viable alternative, not only to EMC Documentum, Open Text and IBM FileNet but also to the Microsoft SharePoint distribution model.
So it’s no surprise that the InfoWorld Bossie awards continue to cluster around a clutch of commercial open source companies – this is a feature of the network effect selecting those that continue to execute.
Where I disagree with Oliver is his thesis that commercial open source is no different from traditional software. The commercial open source projects (Alfresco, Jaspersoft, Pentaho, SugarCRM, etc.) have all contributed and continue to develop free open source software used by millions. In Alfresco’s case, we offer commercial services to a great many organizations, while our software is used by thousands more. This choice and continued pressure on Alfresco to offer an excellent low-cost service that saves our customers time and money is, I believe, the key to our success rather than a failure. It’s a pressure no proprietary company feels, and accounts for the lack of improvement in proprietary software as it ages.
Alfresco now employs 130 people, an achievement of which I am proud. But more than this, the Alfresco ecosystem provides employment to thousands more, with an estimated value in excess of $1billion.
September 21st, 2010
Accenture recently released a survey revealing investment in open source software (OSS) is set to rise in the next 12 months – no surprise to many of us, but interestingly they report that quality has overtaken cost as a primary adoption driver. This reflects Alfresco’s experience, where the value of OSS for organizations is no longer calculated in purely financial terms.
Paul Daugherty, chief technology architect, Accenture: “We are seeing an increase in demand for open source based on quality, reliability and speed, not just cost savings … We can expect to see this trend develop as open source continues to evolve and address even more business critical functions.”
The Accenture survey identified quality, improved reliability and cost control as the key benefits of OSS.
GigaOM’s influential Ostatic blog concurs: “It’s not just a question of cost, although even with support contracts each of these projects is significantly less than anything from traditional sources. The real benefit of using open source packages like these is ease-of-management, ease-of-deployment, and reliability.”
It is clear that OSS has the ability to deliver significant value to organizations beyond purely cost savings.
In addition to the drivers of value identified above, at Alfresco we also focus on supporting open standards for interoperability (CMIS), encouraging community contributions (ACCP) and sharing expertise and best practice (DevCon).
Let us know what else we can do to add value to your Alfresco experience.
September 15th, 2010
The WCM market has been one of the most fragmented in enterprise software and today’s announcement of Day’s acquisition was inevitable. This is further evidence of consolidation of the proprietary software market and we have seen the disappearance of proprietary WCM as a stand-alone market with a logical progression to developing marketing applications. Other examples include:
- Vignette acquired by Open Text
- Stellent acquired by Oracle
- Interwoven acquired by Autonomy
- Tridion acquired by SDL
- RedDot acquired by Open Text
- Mediasurface acquired by Alterian
Pure-play WCM vendors like Day have focused on marketing departments and marketing applications with a traditional enterprise sales model. With Adobe’s new customer engagement model this acquisition makes sense particularly with the acquisition of Omniture and made Day the obvious target for the missing WCM capability they needed to execute on this vision.
This is a very different strategy to Alfresco’s which focuses on CMIS, developers, content services platform and using an open source distribution model. Adobe has used this platform as an important part of LiveCycle and Adobe’s Content Services and we are committed to providing Adobe with the best possible support and content services. This use case of Alfresco is very different from the use cases for marketing solutions in which Day is engaged and we rarely see each other in competitive sales engagements. Unlike Day, Alfresco’s model for WCM has been to provide tools and a platform for developers to build rich content services for web sites with an open source distribution. We continue to invest in this area and will be previewing the next iteration of our WCM product in September.
Alfresco’s strategy of supporting CMIS is shared by the widest consortium of ECM players from IBM, EMC, Microsoft as well as Adobe. We were especially pleased when Day committed to CMIS.
It has been a long and winding road for Day since it was founded in 1993. I wish the team at Day well and look forward to continuing to work with them and Adobe on CMIS and on joint sales engagements.
July 28th, 2010
I read with interest the article in The Register which highlighted the way UK Government has approached IT.
As many commentators have covered, the UK Government in the last 12 years focussed on large, risky IT projects with a catalogue of high profile failures. In order to minimise the risk of failure government civil servants instituted a process that actually created the failures they were trying to mitigate. This is not unique to the UK, it’s been a facet of other large organisations across the world. The heads of IT in the government competed to have the biggest spending projects as these bought more kudos, resources and influence with the vendors. However only big vendors could deliver big projects which reduced competition.
As the projects were large and complex (to justify the big budgets) they rapidly exceeded the competence of even the largest vendors to deliver. The complexity drove inflexibility which resulted in scope creep as requirements changed, budget escalation and an endless spiral until someone brave enough pulled the plug (often only possible once the original decision maker had retired with golden handshakes). It resulted in just a handful of vendors receiving 80% of the IT spend. At Alfresco we encountered this frequently, during one meeting with the UK Department of Trade and Industry I was told “Alfresco’s proposition sounds very compelling but we would only consider US branded products”, bizarre for a department whose function is to promote British industry.
Open source software solves many of the intrinsic issues that caused failure in the governments’ project methodology. Open Source is open, easier to integrate, enables ‘try before you are locked in’ and most importantly if it doesn’t work you have minimal expenditure to write off. Strange as this may sound and statistically 3 out of 5 IT projects fail it’s important to minimise the cost of kicking off the project.
A great example of this is the US Small Business Administration, as featured on the US governments whitehouse.gov as a case study of how a well run project with open source components can deliver at a fraction of the cost. They replaced a system (using pretty much the technology the UK
www.businesslink.gov.uk used when they ran up their huge bill) serving very similar citizens needs at a fraction of the cost of their previous system and around a 100th of the cost the UK taxpayer spent.
The new coalition government has introduced a moratorium on all IT projects over £1m to break the big project cycle and has indicated that it is looking to open source software to help in its ambitious plans to reduce the budget deficit. Welcome news for hard pressed UK taxpayers.
July 8th, 2010
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