It's been an eventful half year (seven months, actually) since our public launch in mid-February of this year. At that time, we launched with a vision and ten founding members backing it up. Since then, we have made substantial progress against this vision, and have grown to 22 members, demonstrating that our activities are garnering broad support and lend themselves to broad participation. Now is a good time to reflect what we have accomplished and where we plan to go from here. We're still a young organization, but we have laid the groundwork for significant progress in the next half-year and participation from an even broader share of the open source ecosystem.

In this five-part series we explain in more detail how we're doing this - Both our successes to date, and where we're going from here.

I couldn't help but notice Dana Blankenhorn's article this morning (The Lock-in Battle Shifts to Sharepoint) and feel compelled to respond. Google alerts can be a dangerous thing.

Therein, he points out that through a combination of low cost, better integration, great channel and superior marketing muscle, that open source will continue to be an underdog to Microsoft Sharepoint. In particular he made these comments:
Continue reading "An Answer to the Sharepoint Lock-in Challenge"

This morning we held our second customer forum, at the San Francisco Courtyard Marriott.
Our customer forums are intended to educate customers on the OSA's work, and solicit their input regarding challenges they are facing and where the OSA should focus going forward.



Each of our customer forums have distinct topics, in addition to the overall topic of open solutions adoption and interoperability. Co-hosted by Palamida and JasperSoft, this event included a focus on best practices for ensuring IP compliance, especially in projects involving multiple open source applications. Approx 20 attendees from Bay Area businesses, with titles including developers and IT architects all the way up to CIOs and former CIOs, sounded off on this and other issues.

We started with JasperSoft's Barry Klawans and I giving presentations on the OSA and interoperability, followed by an excellent presentation on IP compliance issues by Palamida's Jeff Luszcz. By the way, all presentations plus a discussion forum are posted on the "Customer Forum" section of our community site.

We heard many war stories of open source projects gone awry because of compliance issues, the worst being of one software company buying another, only to find that its source base was so riddled with incompatibly-licensed code, and some of which was in violation of redistribution provisions of GPL and similar licenses, that much needed to be rewritten from scratch, to the tune of over 12 person-years of development. Would have been nice if a compliance best practice, or at least a software inventory, was in place prior to acquisition!

In addition to compliance, we also heard of other challenges... For example, how does one support applications involving multiple vendors, and how to ensure everything hangs together if every vendor has their own support SLA's, release trains, patch mechanisms, end-of-life policies, and so forth? While not a technical issue, this is an interoperability issue nonetheless that is critical for customers who are trying to keep the moving parts working together.

Tony Wasserman (of CMU's Center for Open Source Innovation and OpenBRR fame) also attended and started a lively discussion on dependencies... and not just tracking what database or app server an application may depend on. But what happens when you deploy multiple applications that purport to be compatible, but one runs on "patch level 21 of this version of Red Hat, but the other wasn't certified beyond patch level 17"? These minor details can cause deployment challenges, nullify SLA's, or worse, bite you in production.

But this forum wasn't just about raising problems, there were also discussions of possible solutions. The idea of a rating system was discussed. For example, as the OSA expands its interoperability projects and criteria, could we begin to rate various applications, so prospective customers know in advance what they are getting themselves into? The answer is yes, potentially leveraging OpenBRR as a starting point. Also, could there be a system by which common combinations of applications can be tested in advance (perhaps by the collective OSA membership before each ships their respective product releases) to ensure they work together in a common environment? Again, the answer is yes, and the OSA has started moving in that direction with our Common Customer View as a starting point. And finally, regarding IP compliance, is there room for best practices to ensure code compliance, not just in terms of tools to use and policies to enforce (although these are certainly necessary) but also in terms of process - How should enforcing compliance overlay the overall development lifecycle of an integrated application, and how to educate the broader industry on these best practices? Again, yes, and look forward to an OSA interop proposal in this area.

Overall this was a great event, and true to the OSA's spirit of open collaboration and listening to customers. Our priorities begin and end with what real business end users need in order to be successful, and these forums are a critical part of establishing what those priorities should be.

And finally, many thanks to Palamida and JasperSoft for hosting this excellent event!

Last week (Friday the 20th) the OSA held its first Customer Forum event. The event was a resounding success, with over 25 attendees representing 15 organizations, both public and private sector, who are adopting various open source applications. Attendees included the former CIO of Deluxe Check (a check printing and business stationery company), the lead IT architect for the Minnesota Dept of Transportation, and also the deputy CIO for Minnesota State Colleges and Universities (a.k.a. MNSCU, and on whose facilities, not coincidentally, we held this event).


This was a half-day session, including a series of interactive presentations. First, Anthony Gold from Unisys led off, painting a broad picture of open source adoption in the enterprise, and what issues are getting in the way. Then yours truly provided an overview of what we're doing about it, introducing the OSA and the interoperability issues we're undertaking. Finally, Michael Grove from OpenITWorks presented what his company is doing to encourage broader end customer collaboration with open source and related projects. These were interspersed with lively discussion, as customers sounded off on their experiences adopting a wide variety of open source, including Moodle (curriculum management), JBoss/RedHat, Apache, Alfresco, Groundwork, and other tools and applications.


The interoperability challenges these customers face were as wide-ranging and diverse as the applications they are using, but the common theme is these challenges are getting in the way of greater adoption. Single signon and centralized identity management (the topic of our hack-a-thon at OSCON) resonated, and so did the notion of a "single source of truth" (a key feature of our Common Customer View project), among other data integration challenges. Proprietary integration also came up, especially Microsoft. And also common SLA's and the notion of a single throat to choke. And the list went on.


You can find all presentations, as well as the results of a questionnaire that several attendees filled out and returned, on the "Business Users Forum" project on the OSA community site.

After the event, we had lunch with Al Essa, the above-mentioned deputy CIO of MNSCU, and we discussed his various open source interoperability projects. His challenge: To integrate his curriculum management and other student self-service applications into front-end user experiences that students would find natural and easy to use. This had to include the ability for students to interact not only with the applications, but with faculty and staff, and with each other. With hundreds of thousands of students in over 50 college sites across the state, this is as gargantuan a collaboration and integration challenge as one can imagine. His insight: To get people to collaborate, let them use the tools that they are most familiar with, and for today's teens and twenty-somethings, it's not necessarily the email and static websites that us middle-aged folk have become accustomed to. Today's younger generation, a.k.a. "Millennials", are growing up with media-rich, interactive online applications like MySpace, Facebook and even Second Life. Those are the "front-ends" that come most naturally to them. His innovation: Integrating curriculum management and student self-service with these applications as a front-end. The Second Life integration is most interesting - A MNSCU island on Second Life, and his group is an active contributor to the Sloodle project. His feedback: Second Life as an immersive front-end to self-service applications is an emerging trend, and Second Life's APIs are both feature-rich and very complex, often requiring significant changes in the underlying application to make the most use of it. If you think that just plugging in your current MVC framework is good enough, then think again. Wouldn't it be great if there were some guidance and best practices for Second Life integration... Coming soon on an OSA interop roadmap near you.

In closing, I'd like to extend a special thanks for organizing this event to Ron Fresquez, who runs TOSTA (the Open Source Technology Alliance), a public-sector-focused open source advocacy organization, and a community member of the OSA. He did "yeoman's work" (using his words) to pull this event together. Also thanks go to MNSCU, who were kind enough to let us use their excellent facilities at Wheelock Whitney hall in downtown Minneapolis (pictured above).

This was a great kickoff to our customer forum series and we got great customer feedback. Now on to the next customer forum event in San Francisco on August 23rd, which will be co-hosted by Palamida and JasperSoft. This next event will have a different flavor, with a focus on licensing and compliance issues in addition to discussing interoperability in general. We hope you can make it!

IBM made this announcement today, regarding granting universal access to intellectual property that might be necessary in implementing interoperability standards.

This is a significant event in the industry, and we hope will result in an acceleration of interoperability innovation. The OSA has always maintained that interoperability is a challenge best met with collective action, and this requires a certain open, collaborative spirit and willingness to share ideas. We are pleased that IBM recognizes this too, and applaud this move on their part. By helping remove the fear, uncertainty and doubt associated with patent litigation, developers around the world are further empowered to collaborate and contribute their ideas to this common cause. It is unfortunate that some vendors have chosen to take a different approach. But we see IBM's move as a positive step in the industry and hope to see other major vendors to follow with similar policies.

I attended the kickoff of the Linux Foundation's Collaboration Summit yesterday, at Google headquarters in Mountain View, CA. Also representing the OSA was Kumar Thiagarajan, VP of Community Dev for Adaptive Planning.

Overall it was a productive and enjoyable event, and it achieved the Linux Foundation's goal of bringing together a critical mass of Linux thought leaders to collaborate and agree upon Linux's future directions. There was also lots of customer representation as well - I met with Kenneth Topp from Goldman Sachs, Michael Breuer from NYSE and the always irrepressible Tim Golden from Bank of America, among others, and judging from the attendee list, many more were in attendance. Hats off to Jim Zemlin and team for pulling together this event, and at relatively short notice, from what I understand.

Indeed, this Summit had a "revival" feel to it, with Jim giving a motivational sort of keynote, highlighting the success of Linux thus far, but also pointing out the work that remains, and imploring the community to work together. "It's easy to point out philosophical differences and poke holes at each other's ideas, but as leaders of the community, we must work on bringing people together and be the seekers of truth, not finders of contradiction." This message was then reinforced by an excellent (albeit shortened) talk by Mark Shuttleworth about how we can take better advantage of collaborative tools and techniques to work together better, not just within individual community project "silos" but also sharing knowledge across communities as well. Additionally, a series of panel discussions expounded upon how the collaborative spirit could address other challenges in various areas (kernel development, customer adoption, application ecosystem growth, and legal/licensing issues).

My own takeaway is that these issues aren't just limited to the Linux community, but the broader community of open solutions as well. Actually there were two moments in particular that struck me as us having a lot in common, once while talking to customers, and once while listening to the "application ecosystem growth" panel session.
Continue reading "At the Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit"

At last week’s OSBC, there was as much hallway chatter about Microsoft as about any other topic. Clearly, their position on patents was the “elephant in the room”, given the ongoing fallout from the now-infamous Fortune article published during the prior week. Unfortunately, the firestorm continued unabated at OSBC, with some of the public commentary being rather polarizing and condescending. But under the public rhethoric, there are some subtler trends that are worthy of mention:

Continue reading "On Microsoft, Patents, and the NXT Program"

OSBC 2007 occurred over just two days last week (Tue and Wed), and here we are, one week after the event, and I am still in the midst of following up from all the great meetings and introductions during the show. This was truly an incredible event, with the most positive energy and optimism I’ve seen in a trade show in years. Many congratulations to Matt Asay and the folks at InfoWorld for organizing such an excellent event. The quality of people both exhibiting and attending was outstanding, and afforded a steady, literally non-stop stream of constructive and insightful conversations, many of them regarding the OSA.

Open businesses are truly taking the world by storm, making further and further inroads into markets formerly dominated by proprietary alternatives. This was the case across a wide spectrum of open businesses I met with, ranging from ISV’s like MySQL, AdaptivePlanning, EnterpriseDB, Jive, Funambol, Groundwork, Liferay, Mulesource and ZenOSS, to integrators including Optaros and Unisys’ open source practice, to the OSS-focused business units of larger platform vendors such as Intel. By choosing to be open, these organizations all believed they were ultimately more competitive and better able to meet customer needs than the alternatives.

But what was particularly interesting was the spirit in which this optimism was being conveyed. What became apparent throughout many conversations was that these weren’t just companies that decided to make their source code available (or, for integrators, to work primarily with open source products), but were taking the spirit of open-ness and collaboration to heart throughout their business practices.... Continue reading "OSBC - Open Businesses Taking the World By Storm"

Unless you've been in a cave (or on one of those rare completely-disconnected vacations), you know that this has been an eventful week in open source related news.

It started on Monday, when Fortune magazine published its "Microsoft Takes On the Free World" article, indicating that Microsoft intended to enforce 235 patents it claimed were being infringed by various open source projects. Reaction from the open source community was predictably strong, in no small part because there was no indication of exactly which patents were being allegedly infringed, or how. If there was clear evidence of infringement of a specific patent, that's one thing, let's deal with it was a common refrain, along with assertions that the lack of such specifics amounted to nothing more than a "Be Very Afraid" tour on Microsoft's part.

Continue reading "After an Eventful Week, Let's Not Forget About Customer Value"

There's been a lot written on the blogosphere recently about what it means to be "open". At the OSA (Open Solutions Alliance), we have a diverse membership and are often asked what we think this means.

Inevitably discussion has gone down the path of licensing, or how strong each member’s community is. What isn’t discussed enough, IMO, is what best meets customer needs. Ultimately I think customer success should determine which business models are best, and as much as we want to believe there is a single simple answer, that's not the case. Customer requirements can vary greatly, depending on industry, their IT best practices, the type of solution in question, and the skills and know-how required to implement it. Companies that serve different market segments must evolve their business models to best meet the requirements of that segment. Some may be more services-intensive, requiring frequent code customization for example. Others may be strictly regulated in a manner that dictates how licensing and IP is managed. Because open source, especially in the applications space, is still relatively new, we think there is much room for experimentation regarding what business models are best for the most customers. Consequently, we don’t limit our membership based on some preconceived notion of which business models we think ought to be the best. We would rather let customers decide that, not us.

Continue reading "On "Open-ness""

Today, the OSA announced its newly elected board, along with its interoperability roadmap and projects that are currently underways. This roadmap is a work-in-progress, but already represents a great deal of effort that has gone into ascertaining the common interoperability challenges that our customers face. (And I really mean “our” customers – What we have heard over and over again is that these are common issues, and not unique to specific products or specific vendors.)

In addition, there are many other activities ongoing within the OSA, including planning for various developer activities, business customer outreach events, new interoperability projects, and so forth. Indeed, the last three weeks since our board election has seen a tremendous burst of activity, along with the joining of several new members to the organization.


The Governance Challenge

With so many activities, and so many new members, we have had to put careful thought into governance. We intend the OSA to be a true community, with each member contributing meaningful time, expertise and thought leadership of their own choosing, but meanwhile, all this activity needs to “roll up” to the success of the OSA’s mission. How to balance between top-down “management” that can crimp innovation and self-motivated participation, while avoiding a free-for-all where nobody is minding the budgets and overall strategic objectives? How to do this is an interesting challenge, and is a great case study in community development. Continue reading "The OSA's Governance Model - Taking "Open-ness" to the Next Level"

What happens when you get 10 current and former experienced no-nonsense "I-have-no-time-for-bull" mid-market CIO's in a room and talk about the OSA?

On February 23rd, we did just that.

Attendees included the CIO's of Network Appliance, UC Berkeley and Rambus, and the former CIO of Tivo, among others. This was very much an "early adopter" crowd, all of whom already use various open source products in their organizations, but are also well connected with "mainstream" audiences that may not have adopted as much OSS as they have.

We gave a brief intro presentation on the OSA (CIOCouncil23Feb2007-OSAportion.ppt), and asked the series of questions on the last slide. Below is a sampling of their responses. The overall response was overwhelmingly positive - The mission of the OSA speaks directly to real-world issues they are dealing with.
Continue reading "The Voice of the Customer: Last Month's SpikeSource CIO Council"