SpikeSource CEO Kim Polese lays out bright open source future

SANTA CLARA, Calif. — Industry veteran Kim Polese, formerly of Sun and Marimba and now CEO of SpikeSource, gave an upbeat address on the long-term repercussions of the open source phenomenon at the Software 2005 conference sponsored by Sand Hill Group.

Sounding at times like a CEO from the heady days of the dot-com boom, Polese characterized open source as a wedge that will change the world economy.

Polese, citing as one source author and New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, said we are currently in the third period of globalization. The first period started in 1492 when the New World began offering the Old World raw materials, resources, and eventually new markets. The second period, what she called Globalization 2.0, was the Industrial Age, when trade between nations blossomed.

“We are now entering Globalization 3.0, where individuals and small groups become empowered, causing disruptive behavior,” Polese said.

Open source plays a key role in this third period, the CEO explained. National economies, formerly based on a top-down approach where power was concentrated in a few giant industries such as oil and steel, are now flipping to a bottom-up approach.

The software industry was also top-down, with data concentrated in silos, but that was changed forever by the Internet, Polese said. Now groups are coming together across borders to create open source CRM, VoIP, and PBX.

“Everything is going open source and it is creating disruptions for dominant vendors,” Polese said.

Polese said we are witnessing what once might have been considered “strange happenings,” with governments issuing edicts about software and the use of open source.

Among the countries requiring the use of open source are Brazil, Germany, France, and China, which is building its own Linux distribution.

Working hand-in-glove with the open source phenomenon is the move to outsourcing and offshoring.

“Everybody participates,” Polese said, citing the fact that instead of a world of suppliers dominating, now “demand is supplying itself” and there is a shift of power.

Individuals and smaller entities are now supplying solutions faster and more efficiently than the usual suspects.

According to Polese, nobody owns open source. Everybody can use it and, most important of all, anyone can improve it.

“Innovation comes from anywhere,” she said, adding that when anyone can improve it, the software improves. Polese cited the fact that when you have 800,000 people debugging code, it gets better. “This is also a threat to the top-down approach,” she said.

However, Polese concluded her talk by saying problems do exist.

“It’s like shingles on a roof,” she said, “but you don’t always know what works with what, especially in a production environment.”

Polese pointed out that a patch to one layer can have repercussions to all the others in the software stack. “This is a roadblock to the production environment,” she said.

Echoing a theme pitched by Charles Phillips, president of Oracle, earlier in the day during his keynote, Polese said enterprises need to test and certify open source configurations before they continue to deploy open source in a production environment.

This, in fact, is the business that SpikeSource launched earlier this month.