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Sun's purchase of MySQLfor a cool $1 billion is all the buzz today and rightfully so. I think this news goes to show the power, visibility and growth in adoption of open source. And in this particular case MySQL.
As enterprises continually seek competitive advantages they find their way to open source solutions. Sun has certainly recognized this with Jonathan Schwartz at the helm, but today's news takes another step towards ensuring they are going to be a major player in offering such solutions. It will be interesting to see how this purchase affects Sun as the inherent value proposition of MySQL is that it is an open, potentially low cost alternative to Oracle. The other potential hitch is that companies want best-of-breed solutions for their needs and Sun just might be becoming a monolithic vendor offering one set of solutions.
I am thrilled to see the increased adoption of open source and the excitement of my friends over at MySQL, but also see this news as an opportunity for system integrators (SI's). With IT spending and acquisitions on the rise, it furthers the need for technology agnostic SI's (Unisys, Cap Gemini, Accenture and others) in this space to play significant roles in customer IT implementations. Companies are looking for the best independent solution for their needs, not for one monolithic vendor to lock them into an IT environment of their choosing. The OSA’s common-customer view reference architecture, as one example, demonstrates interoperability across multiple vendor products to achieve best-of-breed functionality.
Another piece of big news today (other than the continued economic impact in the Financial Services sector as a result of the sub-prime lending fallout) is Oracle’s purported acquisition of BEA. Obviously this would further position Oracle against IBM in the middleware space and further Oracle's goal to dominate that market. But this also creates another “integrated stack” that possibly precludes clients from choosing best of breed product, hence furthering the need for large Systems Integrators to help fulfill that gap.
It’s been awhile since I traveled to Albany. And, this time of the year, seeing the leaves changing colors along the Hudson was absolutely spectacular. This is the 19th year for the event, obviously highlighting New York’s leading-edge efforts at studying emerging technology and its implication for government.
 I had the honor of presenting a seminar session entitled “Open Source – Ready for Prime Time?” I co-presented with Ross Brunson, one of the solutions experts at Novell. My pitch focused on how big open source has grown in government, how we got here, and what hurdles remain impeding even faster growth ... including discussing how the Open Solutions Alliance (OSA) is working to drive interoperability standards across open solutions. If you’d like a copy of my presentation, just comment here and I’ll send it to you.
As I walked the show floor, it seemed like all the big players in government were at this show, but one company that surprised me was Apple. They were there not to showcase the iPhone (nor were they particularly interested in my complaint of receiving only a $100 store credit when they dropped the price of the iPhone by $200). Apple was there showing off a server … what looked like a bunch of 2U-3U blades in a small rack. The rep indicated that this had been somewhat of a stealth product for Apple. So, an Apple server, presumably tuned and configured with government-related applications. It will be interested to see what sort of traction they get.
Another honor for me was receiving (along with RedHat) an award at the show for “Best Solution” for our New York State Courts’ Family Case Management System. Show n in the photo is (L to R) Mary Sharp, Unisys GOIS; Dr. Melody Mayberry-Stewart, NYS CIO, Joseph Lynch, Unisys Account Executive and also Advisory Board member for GTC; Naren Paten, Unisys Sales Executive Head for NY, and Garry Russell, Unisys sales executive. [Click on the photo to see a much clearer version.] As the state migrated to RedHat’s JBoss application server, some issues remained with web service enablement. According to Project Manager Carol Champitto and Technical Services Manager Jason Hill, the system is the court system’s most mission-critical application, processing close to 700,000 cases per year. Once we completed our efforts, the new JBoss cluster was comparable to the previous proprietary solution in terms of performance and scalability, but with much faster build and deployment cycles. Furthermore, by migrating to open source software, New York State Courts saved tax payers over $75,000 annually in maintenance fees and $500,000 in licensing fees over time.
I call it the “CIO Conundrum”, and it goes something like this: you are the CIO of a large company and each year, your budget is, on average, decreasing by about 4%. And, most of the money you’re allocated (perhaps 70% of more) is used to maintain your existing environment, with probably a lot of legacy stuff in there. Of course, your users are demanding more and more features with greater accessibility to key data. And, if you are like most Fortune 500 companies, you probably have over 40 different financial systems and three ERP systems*. These systems are obviously each performing similar functions, but perhaps not exactly the same way (think 48 different versions of tax calculation).
To make matters worse, your company’s end-user customers want seamless, consistent access to their information. For example, if you are a brokerage house, your customers want access to their accounts and trading platform from anywhere including their cell phones. And, if the customers have multiple accounts (ie savings, corporate stock plan, 401K, capital growth, etc.), they absolutely want a common interface and “look and feel” into each of their accounts. The customers don’t care what applications are running in your environment, nor do they particularly care which databases, operating systems, and hardware are there. They expect it all to work and to give them what they want, when they want it. And, no doubt that if you don’t meet these user’s needs, your competitors will.
And, if that weren’t challenging enough for our hypothetical CIO, you are also being held more and more accountable for business results. You are no longer just a cost center. You are actually being asked to contribute to the business at the top line as well, and you may even have a seat at the executive committee table.
Hmm. That sounds like a pretty daunting task, and it is. That is the “CIO Conundrum”, and it is what makes the modern-day CIO job a very difficult role. But, the good news is that there is a way to solve this conundrum. And, that was the thrust of my keynote talk at the InterOpen Forum yesterday in Minneapolis. The forum was designed to help senior business executives leverage open solutions and interoperability toward improved business performance.
My talk was titled Harnessing Mass Collaboration for Business Results – How Open Source and Web 2.0 Are Solving the “CIO Conundrum”. We had a full house in the be autiful Wheelock Whitney Hall at the Minneapolis Community & Technical College. We had a great discussion in the hall, and also heard a wonderful presentation from Dominic Sartorio, President of the Open Solutions Alliance (OSA) who presented “A Case for Customer Centricity” and the activities within the OSA. Michael Grove, OpenITWorks CEO, also spoke about collaborative projects to drive business results. My special thanks to Ron Fresquez, CEO TOSTA, for setting up a great event (and also for the great dinner at Brit’s Pub... although we never got around to lawn bowling).
If you are interested in seeing any of the presentations, send me an email and I’ll be happy to forward them to you.
*2006 Bloor Research report
If you’ve never heard Don Tapscott speak, try to do so. Not only is he the author of the world’s number one bestselling business book (Wikinomics), but he is also a fantastic speaker. I had the opportunity to speak with him at a CIO Breakfast meeting in the Club Room at the New York Stock Exchange.
Don presented the Web 2.0 phenomenon and its impact on business. I followed his pitch with specific challenges going on in the world of financial services and how modernization and open source are creating opportunities for dramatic enhancements to business. It was great speaking with some of the executives of the largest financial institutions in the world, discussing their challenges and opportunities for future growth.
After the presentation, the NYSE folks gave us a tour of the stock exchange floo r. It was the first time I had ever been on the floor. I walked up to the Unisys market maker and jokingly asked him if I could buy a share of stock. Although the place was packed and scraps of paper were littered all over the floor, they told us that traffic has greatly reduced over the past few years due to electronic trading. Although security to get into the NYSE building was incredibly tight (took me over 15 minutes to get through the security checks), it was worth the wait. Thanks much to Laura Prescuitti and the folks at Ziff-Davis for a great event in NY.
Following this, I hopped a train to Washington DC to present to the General Services Administration (GSA) and Small Business Administration (SBA) folks on the current and future states of mass collaboration and how it can help them. It was a great event setup by my friend and colleague Andy Gordon. And, although the public sector space is a lot different than financial services, many of their underlying challenges are the same: most of their IT dollars spent supporting existing (lot of legacy) stuff, business functions duplicated all over the place in monolithic applications, declining budgets, a need to add new features or enhancements to existing applications, a need to provide better services to end users, and so forth. In each presentation, I spoke about the Open Solutions Alliance (OSA) and its role in helping drive the interoperability standards and reference architectures required to drive the impact and consumption of open source and open solutions on addressing the business challenges noted above. In the public sector space, you have additional groups such as The Open Group and the OTD. The OTD roadmap is used by the Department of Defense for its future technology strategy. And, check out this quote, lifted straight from the OTD roadmap: “This report recommends shifts in the process of technology acquisition from closed, locked-in black box systems to open and modular approaches. These open approaches are based on open standards, services based architecture, open source collaboration, and reference open source implementations. These shifts, in turn, enable a business process migration from proprietary products that can only be changed by one vendor, towards a marketplace for professional services to extend and adapt capabilities on demand.”
Sean Michael Kerner wrote a nice article on the state of open source business, summarizing findings by 451 and other research firms. Having just attended and presented at the Open Source Business Conference (OSBC), not to mention spending the last twelve months meeting with CIOs and CFOs of Fortune 500 companies discussing open source, much of what Michael discusses rings true.
However, one comment jumped out at me that I felt warranted further discussion. I’m not sure if this quote is Kerner’s or is attributed to Andrew Aiken at Olliance, but in any case, the quote reads, “CIOs apparently feel that proprietary solutions still have an edge over open source solutions when it comes to on [sic] integration and interoperability.”
Certainly if the reference was to proprietary solutions that are built by one vendor as a true end-to-end solution, I would agree. However, I’m sure we’ve all battled with proprietary solutions across the stack from multiple vendors … the data doesn’t integrate, the same service is performed in multiple applications, user interfaces are different, and so forth. The real challenge: how do you leverage the benefits of open solutions (no vendor lock-in, reduced cost, etc. … all the points mentioned by Michael in his article) without suffering from the multi-vendor integration issues that plague our industry?
Enter the Open Solutions Alliance (OSA), and the primary reason that Unisys joined OSA. The OSA is all about helping address those interoperability issues, building reference architectures and customer proof points, driving greater developer involvement in open solutions, and creating increased consumption of open solutions in the business community. The first proof point: a demo at LinuxWorld (August 6th-9th) in San Francisco showing the interoperability of a legacy point-of-sale application tied into a CRM, ERP, and other open solution components. And, there are several other activities going on within OSA including a single sign-on working group. Everything in OSA is transparent to the entire world (members and non-members alike), with the goal of addressing the problem statement noted above.
I think the future of business solutions, whether they are open or proprietary, depends heavily on how well they interoperate across the business … hence the major thrust around Services Oriented Architecture. And, the key to making that work is interoperability standards that allow it all to play together.
What a great show put on by Matt Asay and the rest of the crew. Kicked off by a compelling presentation from Matthew Szulik, the buzz during the first day was wonderful. Just about anyone who is “anyone” in Open Source was there, with a few notable exceptions (I didn’t see any folks from Sun or IBM). During Matt Asay’s welcoming remarks, he commented on the value of the Open Solutions Alliance (OSA) and what we are trying to do there.
I served on one panel session discussing the traction of open source in the channel. My fellow panel members included Ranga Rangachari (CEO, Groundwork), Lars Nordwall (Sales VP, SugarCRM), and Anthony Roby from Accenture. Some great points were raised about the role of the channel and how important it is to optimize heterogeneous environments in order to leverage open source within existing environments.
I also delivered one of the breakout keynotes on Open Source in High-Performance Information Systems. The group asked some good questions around how business executives determine which open source projects are right for their particular strategy and how to go about integrating within legacy environments. I also presented some case studies around Reuters, SHK (largest non-bank financial services company in Hong Kong), and Redmayne-Bentley (largest independent stockbroker in the UK) and how each of those companies is using open source in mission-critical environments to modernize their business.
It was also very nice speaking to many companies about the Open Solutions Alliance (OSA) and the work that organization is doing to drive the development and consumption of open solutions. Plus, with a nice plug from Matt Asay during his kickoff presentation, I received a lot of questions about how to go about joining OSA.
One of the surprising elements was the amount of Microsoft bashing that went on in public presentations. Certainly MSFT has its share of detractors, but they are also doing a lot of work in the open source space (Bill Hilf’s team are top notch with a great vision). I suppose people have a need to identify villains and victimizers (helps make us feel better perhaps). But, in a few cases, the villainous statements directed toward MSFT were flat out wrong. The curse of being big.
Another surprising element (at least to me) was the lack of business users at the conference … you would think with the title of “open source business conference” that there would have been many more customers and potential customers. However, the show seemed to be comprised of vendors, their partners, some VCs, and a lot of lawyers. Interesting, even with so many lawyers there, I did not hear a lot of debate around GPL 3.0 (nor a lot of lawyer jokes).
It was also very nice seeing some old friends there like Tom Costello, CEO UpStreme in Pennsylvania; Derek Rodner, marketing executive for Enterprise DB; and Peter Gallagher, CEO Devis. And, since I’ve gotten in the habit of commenting on the hotels I’ve been living out of over the past year, the Palace Hotel on New Montgomery Street in San Francisco was superb. The rooms were decent and the ambiance was great. My only complaint: they have this air-conditioning system where you can set the temperature to anything you want (down to 65 degrees), but it is controlled by a motion sensor. So, once you stop moving around in the room (ie sitting at the desk working or sleeping in bed), the A/C turns off and the room gets very warm.
Today Unisys issued the results of a study commissioned from Forrester Consulting. It surveyed European, UK and North American companies that had evaluated or are using open source software. The interviews with nearly 500 senior IT decision makers indicate a growing acceptance of open source in business-critical applications. They also indicate a major need for integrated solutions wrapped around services, including consulting, integration and continued support, to unlock the full potential of open source for mission-critical applications.
Those results indicate a strong and growing role in open source for systems integrators. With proficiency in delivering enterprise solutions and broad – often global – solution delivery capabilities that small software and even service providers lack, SI’s can provide the key to unlocking the full value of open source software, transforming low cost into full business value.
I encourage all of you to check it the results, and I’m hoping we can have some good discussion around this topic. Furthermore, along the lines of open source integration, take a look at the OSA interoperability roadmap and the Common Customer View prototype. There is some really cool work going on there. I look forward to your comments. Thanks for reading.
On Monday I attended the Linux on Wall Street conference. The overall theme of the conference was leveraging open source (and Linux) to power mission-critical business applications, particularly financial services applications. Many of the big boys from all spheres were there (customers, vendors, press, and analysts). I had the opportunity to present a keynote session entitled “Open Source in High-Performance Trading Systems”.
My talk began with a discussion of how popular Linux and open source have become over a relatively short period of time, where the market is today and is projected to go, and what lessons there were for all of us in this era of mass collaboration and the “architecture of participation”. Who of us a few years ago would have imagined that the terms Linux and Wall Street would be in the same sentence, let alone a conference title?
I also drew the comparison between the early rise of the internet and the current trends going on in open source development. Does anyone remember folks who said, “What would our company ever use the internet for?” I recalled the “Sustained Inattentional Blindness for Dynamic Events” study, or what I called the “Gorilla Experiment”. For those of you who don’t know about this, it’s an experiment that was put together by researchers from the University of Illinois and Harvard.
Volunteers were asked to watch a video and count the number of times that two teams of people passed a basketball back and forth to one another. So, in the video, you had these two teams throwing the ball back and forth, and the volunteers were asked to count the number of passes that were made. The video runs for about 45 seconds and at about 30 seconds into the video, a person dressed in a gorilla outfit comes into the video, right into the middle of the action, stays there for about 9 seconds, and then leaves.
Here’s the amazing part. 50% of the volunteers never saw the gorilla. They were so intent on counting passes that they missed the gorilla walking in. To me, it’s this whole idea of conscious unconsciousness. Applied to the open source development model, on some level, people are aware of it, but on another level, they are choosing to do nothing about it. Details of the “gorilla experiment” can be found here.
We then dove into the details of the financial services market, the challenges that companies face with their legacy infrastructures, and the need they all have to offer more “portalized” experiences for their clients. As customers, we all want to access our account information from wherever we are: brick, web, mobile, etc. And, we don’t care what applications, databases, or operating systems are running the systems. These portals need to serve as windows into services on the network and back-office functions. Of course, with their legacy heritage and various M&A’s, most financial institutions are struggling with modernizing their environment and achieving this sort of services oriented architecture (SOA).
But, these problems are solvable with the proper phased approach. And, this is one of the areas that the Open Solutions Alliance (OSA) is working to address. In their common customer view prototype (which will be demoed at the upcoming LinuxWorld in San Fran), a point-of-sale legacy application will be integrated with an open source ERP system, an open source CRM system, and a bunch of other open source components. The customer information will be captured once (at POS) and automatically propagated into every system and every database. The reference architecture will be published for anyone to use, and the entire project is completely transparent … anyone can come to the OSA site and contribute.
Back to Linux on Wall Street, I also flew in a client of ours from the UK to speak about their success. Redmayne-Bentley is one of the UK’s largest independent stockbrokers. And, Michael Wheeler, their CIO/CFO equivalent, is one of the nicest people you’ll ever meet.
Redmayne-Bentley was running a legacy Cobol application on SCO Unix and essentially was running out of horsepower, and of course, had very little opportunity to innovate. And, this was their main trading system! So, they were looking to modernize the application environment. They have had a very good relationship with Unisys (kudos to our sales lead there Richard West), and we guided Redmayne-Bentley to an open source modernization solution leveraging three ES7000 systems.
To make a long story short, the migration to the new system was completed with zero down-time, they now see a 10x improvement in overall performance, their overnight processing is now down from 13 hours to just 1.5 hours; and they’ve had 100% reliability and availability since the migration (zero seconds of downtime, other than the normal software maintenance updates).
Yes, Linux and open source have made it to Wall Street, and yes, they belong there. Mass collaboration is changing the world, and Linux and the open source development model have helped usher in this phenomenon. Here’s to the road ahead.
Finally, to my faithful readers, I would be remiss if I didn’t offer a comment about the Roosevelt Hotel, the venue hosting the event. Those of you who follow my blog already know my perspective on the Roosevelt. Beautiful hotel, lousy rooms.
So, not only was my room as cramped and suffocating as the last time I stayed there, but I must have also gathered some negative karma that resulted in my leaving my cell phone charger in the room. When I phoned the next day to check on whether anyone had “found” it, they told me that the current occupant indicated that nothing was plugged into the wall. I don’t suppose they ever considered asking the housekeeping staff.
I’ve spoken (and written) often on the need to drive open source not only from the bottoms-up, but also from the top down to help clearly articulate the value proposition of what open source can do for business, from a CxO perspective. There is noticeably much focus on enhancing open source components with new features, improved reliability, and the like. But, where is the push to ensure the business needs are being clearly captured and driven throughout the community? It sure would be nice if there was an unbiased initiative setup with the right level people and the right culture to drive such a focus. And now there is.
The Open Solutions Alliance (OSA) is a 501c organization (nonprofit) with a vendor-neutral membership focused on driving the development and acceptance of open source business solutions. The organization will work with open source software developers, system integrators, and the broader open source community to improve interoperability among software products. The goal: create more integrated and rapidly deployable solutions for business users. This is a very good thing for everyone involved.
Driving interoperability standards for open source components should lead to greater enterprise-class functionality and increased breadth of applications. Not only will standards help the incumbent players better develop their applications, but this should draw more ISVs into the fray leading to more competition and better products for the end user. But, in order to incorporate mission critical business requirements, you need someone who really understands systems integration, high-end enterprises, and vertical markets. Enter Unisys.
As the first SI player in OSA, we will work closely with the members to help position these requirements. Additionally, with our product development capabilities, we are going to help implement some of the glue code to help make that integration work. There are several other top notch organizations that are part of OSA, and I’m sure others will soon join. The end result: more rapid creation and better applicability of open source solutions to address compelling business challenges. I am very excited to help drive this initiative.
To those who follow my postings, I apologize for the short-term absence. Between completing 2007 strategic planning, meeting with clients, attending the Eastern Technology Council's CIO Rountable on Web 2.0, Web Services / SOA on Wall Street conference, Linux World in NYC, and developing a press-release around the open solutions alliance (OSA), it’s been a busy time. New York is such a great city to visit, especially when I have an opportunity to chat with so many open source leaders. The only negatives (besides the snow storm that stranded so many would-be attendees) were the accommodations at the Roosevelt Hotel. The rooms are very tiny, with zero sound-deadening, and the closets are no more than 10 inches deep … forget about trying to hang any shirts or jackets in there, unless you cram them in sideways. The in-house restaurant service is very slow, and, like everything else in NYC, prices are very expensive. A single bottle of spring water at the Roosevelt costs $16. But, putting all that aside, it was wonderful to see so much buzz around open source, both from a vendor perspective as well as from major Wall Street firms. And, that buzz is just starting to heat up for 2007.
Some great events coming in March include the Open Source Think Tank, the OTD conference, and the Emerging Technologies for the Enterprise event.
The Think Tank is sponsored by the Olliance Group and will be bringing many leading open source companies together to discuss the future of commercial open source. Myself and Ali Shadman from Unisys are planning to attend.
The ODT conference is a two-day event addressing the Department of Defense’s Open Technology Development (OTD) to leverage open source software, standards, and architecture into the DoD. One of the foremost leaders in this space, John Scott, will be attending this event, not to mention other top executives from the government.
The Emerging Technologies for the Enterprise event had a huge turnout in 2006 and looks to be even bigger this year. It is the largest event in the Philadelphia region around open source technologies for the enterprise. The conference is sponsored by Chariot Solutions, which, by the way, is a great open source consulting firm with some very impressive talent. A senior Unisys executive and CIO, John Carrow, will be speaking at the event as well as the founder of Spring Framework, Rod Johnson. Also, I will be part of a panel sessiondiscussing the various legal aspects of open source, including how to select the best tools, applications, and licensing models to best meet various business needs.
I know these events (and many others this year) will help further the open source movement and draw more businesses closer to realizing the huge potential from leveraging open source. I can only hope the accommodations for these events will not resemble the Roosevelt.
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I had the honor of presenting a seminar session entitled “Open Source – Ready for Prime Time?” I co-presented with Ross Brunson, one of the solutions experts at Novell. My pitch focused on how big open source has grown in government, how we got here, and what hurdles remain impeding even faster growth ... including discussing how the Open Solutions Alliance (OSA) is working to drive interoperability standards across open solutions. If you’d like a copy of my presentation, just comment here and I’ll send it to you.
n in the photo is (L to R) Mary Sharp, Unisys GOIS; Dr. Melody Mayberry-Stewart, NYS CIO, Joseph Lynch, Unisys Account Executive and also Advisory Board member for GTC; Naren Paten, Unisys Sales Executive Head for NY, and Garry Russell, Unisys sales executive. [Click on the photo to see a much clearer version.] As the state migrated to RedHat’s JBoss application server, some issues remained with web service enablement. According to Project Manager Carol Champitto and Technical Services Manager Jason Hill, the system is the court system’s most mission-critical application, processing close to 700,000 cases per year. Once we completed our efforts, the new JBoss cluster was comparable to the previous proprietary solution in terms of performance and scalability, but with much faster build and deployment cycles. Furthermore, by migrating to open source software, New York State Courts saved tax payers over $75,000 annually in maintenance fees and $500,000 in licensing fees over time.
autiful Wheelock Whitney Hall at the Minneapolis Community & Technical College. We had a great discussion in the hall, and also heard a wonderful presentation from Dominic Sartorio, President of the Open Solutions Alliance (OSA) who presented “A Case for Customer Centricity” and the activities within the OSA. Michael Grove, OpenITWorks CEO, also spoke about collaborative projects to drive business results. My special thanks to Ron Fresquez, CEO TOSTA, for setting up a great event (and also for the great dinner at Brit’s Pub... although we never got around to lawn bowling).
r. It was the first time I had ever been on the floor. I walked up to the Unisys market maker and jokingly asked him if I could buy a share of stock. Although the place was packed and scraps of paper were littered all over the floor, they told us that traffic has greatly reduced over the past few years due to electronic trading. Although security to get into the NYSE building was incredibly tight (took me over 15 minutes to get through the security checks), it was worth the wait. Thanks much to Laura Prescuitti and the folks at Ziff-Davis for a great event in NY.
