The Open Source Pragmatist

This past October 2009, I was lucky enough to be invited to participate in the Free Libre Open Source Summit and Think Tank in Paris, France. It was an opportunity for me to learn from the best and brightest that the world of open source has to offer – but more importantly, it was an opportunity to understand why, given the global relevance and reach of open source, Europe has so clearly established itself as the most dominating “consumer” of open source enterprise applications.

If you take one look at the global deployment footprint of say, a SugarCRM, or say an OpenBravo, clearly something is going on across the pond, that makes them more receptive, more successful, more bold and more committed, to the adoption of open source enterprise applications.  Given the spirit of innovation, and the burgeoning commercial open source business emerging in the US, I was curious…why there? why not here in the States?  why not in Asia?  Whats different?

At the conference, I came across folks from a number of VARs and integrators.  I was introduced to Smile consulting (www.smile.fr), a 300 person firm focused on Open Source implementation in France.  The team from RedPill-Linpro, the open source stalwarts from the Nordic region.  There were countless mid sized open source firms, all successful, all bullish about the future.

I immediately started to wonder, where the hell are the open source firms in the US?  Sure, we’ve got an abundance of innovators at the individual contributor level.  But large going concerns, exclusively focused on open source?  You’ve got us – Levementum,  and maybe Optaros, and maybe 2-3 others that are out there…but thats it.  And none of us are close to the big European players in size or reach.  So…Why?  After 6 glasses of Beaujolais in a bar on the Champs – I started to get some answers.  I’d name the individual references, but I suppose they were casualties of the investigative process(!).

I’ve come up with a few reasons.  Its not comprehensive, but its a start.

1. The reach of Government and the power of associations in Europe: No one doubts that the reach of government in Europe is far deeper than we’re accustomed to in the US.  Invariably, as is the case with most agencies of the state – there is a need to do more with less.  The notion of ROI tends to be “cost reference” versus the traditional “value reference” as it relates to implementation of technology.  Of course, value is paramount with respect to implementation, but the purchase profiles and criterion are different.  Additionally there is a clear distrust that the EU has for the big “IT gorillas” of the US…the Oracles, the Microsofts, et al.  The combination of cost sensitivity, government policy,  and mistrust has led European government agencies to supremely value “control of their destinies”…perhaps more so than their US counterparts.  Clearly open source gives them this control: on cost, on features, on scale, on customization.  This explanation, provided by my dear friends in Paris, made a lot of sense to me.

2. The need for regionally customized solutions in Europe. As a native of Boston, Mass, I can tell you there’s a lot of difference between Beantown and say, the Big Apple.  It starts with the Sox and the evil empire…but thats another story.  Back to point…even with the great diversity of the US, we still have a fairly homogeneous culture of business. Try and contrast French business practices with say Italian business practices.  Try and take your Spanish salesforce, and send them to close a deal in Copenhagen.  Doable yes…easy no.  Europeans are fiercely proud of their language, culture and history, and it permeates the business sphere in every way imaginable.  The walls start with language differences, and follow through to customs and legal practice.  Invariably, a business solution that works in Kiev, is likely not going to seamlessly work in London.  Open source applications, buttressed by their optimal flexibility, clean architectures, and open development environments, offer the European regions to shape a core of business features to their regional needs.  The US regions have much less of a need in this dimension.  These characteristics, that are inherent to open source, are vital in Europe.

3. The fall of the wall and the influx of skilled Eastern European engineers into the European market. With the fall of communism in Europe, millions of eastern European engineers and scientists were emancipated, armed tremendous skill, unparalleled resourcefulness, and a hunger for tools.  With a dearth of capital available to them…many of these great scientists and engineers jumped head long into open-source.  This created not only a skilled mass of open source experts and professionals, but also created new innovations that served to accelerate open source application adoption throughout Europe and the World.  If you want proof of this…take a look at odesk.com or guru.com.  Eastern European software developers outnumber just about any other global region (with respect to open source technologies).

In summary, its the perfect storm of demand, culture, and supply.  This European tempest will rage for quite some time…and frankly, I’m happy about it.  There are some lessons learned that I’m sure we can apply here in the new country!

NOTE: Ok…so, so what…what have I learned that we can apply here in the US?   I’m going to crack this code somehow – the elements related to government don’t seem to be that different than today’s US.  There’s an opportunity there I’m sure.

Industry, Insight & Thoughts, Software & Technology compiere, europe, Geoffrey Mobisson, levementum, magento, mindtouch, mobisson, open-source, optaros, oss, oss strategy, pentaho, smile, sugarcrm

You have likely heard the names before, especially if you are an advocate or user of open source software.  Beginning about, 3 or 4 years ago open source software began to get noticed in the world of enterprise applications.  The clear leader and fore-runner in the enterprise was SugarCRM, now several other common or soon to be common names join SugarCRM as credible enterprise applications and ‘Bossie’ award winners.  SugarCRM, Compiere, Magento and Pentaho are all 2009 Bossie Award Winners.  The Bossie’s are awards bestowed upon the Best of Open Source Software.  These applications though different in their capabilities and purpose share three distinct similarities:

1) They are all Bossie award winners – best in class in their respective categories.

2) They all can be integrated and complement each other in a typical enterprise.

3) They all are partners with Levementum, an emerging leader in the open source community as a system integrator and implementer.

Levementum’s customers span small business requiring CRM (SugarCRM) and a web store (Magento) to the multi-billion dollar enterprise requiring ERP (Compiere), CRM (SugarCRM), e-Commerce (Magento) and Business Intelligence (Pentaho) all complementing each other.  Creating synergy between these applications is both the dream and nightmare of most CIO’s.  Levementum has made this their bread-and-butter and understand the importance of applications that are integrated and support a single verison of the truth in an enterprise of any size.

Congratulations to the 2009 Bossie Award Winners.

Industry, Software & Technology compiere, magento, open-source, pentaho, sugarcrm

The VAR Guy recently introduced an upcoming webinar entitled, Can You Profit From Google Apps And Amazon’s Cloud?

“Instead of discovering the risks (and rewards) on your own, learn from three VARs who already profit from Google Apps and the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)…

This is a rare opportunity to hear from three VARs describing their own business success and challenges with the Google Apps Reseller program and Amazon Web Services. Forget the industry hype. Get the real story from three solutions providers that are working in the cloud today.”  THE VARGUY

Levementum’s Geoff Mobisson is a part of the panel and will be sharing how Levementum deploys open source CRM and ERP applications in the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) for their customers.

if you are interested in the growing trend of cloud computing and its influence and opportunities for open source software REGISTER NOW for this insightful webinar scheduled for April 15th, 2009

Industry, Insight & Thoughts cloud-computing, open-source

Software conferences are usually marginal at best.   Agendas are usually filled with sessions light on substance and heavy with promotion.   Exhibitors and partners are a ‘means to an end’ – there to help fund the event with access to customers their primary reward.   I’ve always found conference’s mediocre events of marginal value.   Rarely does the software company succeed in creating an experience where all involved get something really valuable.

SugarCON Bucks the Trend

This past week my team and I attended our third straight SugarCON event.  For those who don’t know, SugarCON is the seminal event for customers, partners, and followers of SugarCRM.  This year’s event was the largest to date – with over 600 in attendance.  Considering that this is only the third conference for a very young company (Sugar was founded just over 4 years ago), what struck me most about this year’s event was it’s overall quality.   Three things stood out in particular – the quality of the participants, the session agenda, and the breath of discussion about using SugarCRM as a platform.

The customer’s at this years event were, by and large, more sophisticated in their understanding of Sugar’s value and how SugarCRM could be used as a platform for more than basic CRM.   To their credit the team at Sugar did a great job of facilitating the sharing of ideas with two full agenda tracks dedicated to customer case stories.   The majority of the customers I met with were seeking to use Sugar’s rapid modeling tools (known as Studio and Module Builder) to integrated sales and operational processes and go well beyond a cookie-cutter CRM implementation.

Focus on Partners

However, I was more surprised with the focus SugarCRM placed on their partners this year.   In addition to an entire agenda track of sessions dedicated to the partner community, the conference included two additional days for the first “Partner Boot-camp”.   The dedicated sessions gave the team at Sugar a forum to facilitate collaboration amongst the partners, expose us all to new ways of providing value to our customers, and give feedback to Sugar on product features, strategy, and our takes on all this ‘cloud’ business (my thoughts on the cloud to come next week.)  The quality of the partners has also improved over prior years.   We saw a diversity of high quality and creative offerings from companies like Redpill (SugarCRM Training and Integration in Europe), Lampada (Offshort SugarCRM Development), and OutDare (CTI Integration).   The team at Levementum looks forward to working with these companies in the future.   Kudos to Mitch Lieberman, Jeff Campbell, and Paul Oh of SugarCRM for the extra focus on partners.   John Robert’s emphasized the importance of partners for Sugar’s growth strategy in his keynote for the bootcamp.  He backed it up with a great event.

Most Important Takeaways

The most valuable things I took away from the conference this week were:

• Sugar’s new Authorized Learning Partner program geared to expand customer access to quality SugarCRM training.
• Paul Greenberg gave a great keynote on the priority companies should place on customer retention during ecomonic downturns.   Paul continues to demonstrate why his unique insights on our industry are worth following.
• The awesome new CTI integration available from the guys at Outdare – while they need to add some additional work flow scenarios into their offering, the initial release is pretty dazzling.
• Cloud computing is on everyone’s mind, but means something different to each person you talk to.   It’s clearly hip to talk about “The cloud” (and SugarCRM is no exception) but we need to all do a better job of educating ourselves and the marketplace on the concept.   Most definitions are too narrow.
• Sugar’s product development team, led by Clint Oram, provided a good picture of the upcoming 5.5 and 6.0 releases.  As usually his team mostly hit the mark.   Although I’d like to see more emphasis on improving the flexibility of the mail plug-ins to match Sugar as a platform.   Stuff I was excited about:
  • A new REST base API layer to complement the current service layer
  • Rules based Studio capabilities for conditional UI interaction, dependent drop downs, conditional actions, etc.
  • Expansion of the portal to provide true Partner management capabilities – a key feature for companies with diverse sales channels.
  • Team Hierachies and ad-hoc team assignment in the security model
  • Improvements in Theme and UI management including better stubbing in the UI layer to help developers influence UI behavior in upgrade safe ways
• The ‘Phrase that Pays’ is now part of the sub-culture of SugarCRM events.  Congrats to Jason Nassi, who runs Sugar’s Support Team on being invited to the official PtP executive committee.
• Data Center Edition – Sugar’s toolset for managing deployments and licensing of Sugar has great potential for those of us providing managed administration of Sugar in the cloud.   There are also great applications for Business Process Outsourcers and call centers (more on that later).
• SugarCRM’s expansion continues with a new office in Munich, a support center in China, and conference plans for Europe in the fall.

Final Thoughts – Valuing the Cloud

At SugarCON, everyone was talking about ‘Cloud Computing’.   It was part of John’s keynote, the exhibitors displays, the customers questions.  But it’s such a vague concept that more often than not confusion trumped clarity.  I’m convinced more and more that the ‘cloud’ is not a place or thing, but a concept of leverage.  It’s about leveraging the best services and technology available.   It’s also about enabling that leverage when we design information related products and services.   I propose that we should value most, the tools that give users the most flexibility in leveraging the services and information ‘in the cloud’, without constraints.  I’ll elaborate further in my next post.

I’d like to personally thank John Roberts and the entire SugarCRM team for conducting such a valuable event.   I’m looking forward to next year’s event.

Industry cloud-computing, cti, levementum, sugarcrm, training