Let a thousand open source flowers bloom

Back in my Lineo days, a colleague and friend (Craig Shank, now at Microsoft, and a fantastic person) once told me, after overhearing me apologizing profusely to someone over the phone, “Sheesh, Asay. When you fall on your sword, you fall hard!” I guess the gravity of the penitence is commensurate to the gravity of my sometime incompetence. Sometimes I’m wrong.

But you already knew that.

I feel that way today about CentricCRM. I spent some time with the CMO and CEO of CentricCRM at the Red Hat Summit, and came away feeling that my enthusiasm for SugarCRM has made me somewhat blind to the benefits that other vendors, including CentricCRM, bring to the market. I know from my work with SugarCRM how well that it is doing. Talking with CentricCRM’s executive team left me comfortable that there is plenty of room in CRM – and in all areas of software – for more than one successful open source vendor.

(I also spent time with Richard Daley of Pentaho today and Jose Morales of JasperSoft – same story. And earlier this week I had lunch with Bill Mason and Matt Bennett of EnterpriseDB, and had dinner with Zack Ulrocker of MySQL last night. Same thing. Lots of room for success.)

I’ve heard it said that open source is a “first past the post,” one winner takes all sort of phenomenon. I don’t believe this, as I’ve written. It may be true that there’s only room for one commodifier, but it can’t be true that there’s only room for one open source innovator.

All the arguments about “not enough community to go around” are specious and wrong. For one thing, the notion of community as a fixed pie is unsubstantiated by fact. “Community” is a malleable concept – SugarCRM’s community is very different from Alfresco’s is very different from MySQL’s is….You get the point. Where there are customers and prospects and partners and hecklers, there is community.

In CentricCRM’s case, the community is made up of those that are looking for a Java-based CRM system. The market for this, in my Java-based Alfresco experience, is substantial. There are 1.2 billion lightweight PHP-based web content management systems, but only a few – Drupal and a few others – that are of serious consideration. And even these are often not considered, rightly or wrongly, because many enterprises are committed to Java (or .Net).

So, CentricCRM has a built-in audience of prospective enterprise buyers simply due to the language it’s written in. [This, btw, is not to say that SugarCRM doesn’t also compete in the enterprise. The company has a range of exceptional Fortune 100 customers who like the flexibility and speed of PHP-based SugarCRM.] CentricCRM also has six to seven years in the market with robust functionality built into the product.

I suspect that these CRM systems compete, but that they’re generally looking at different areas of the market/buyer profiles. (In fact, as Matthew Aslett of CBR notes, SplendidCRM, a SugarCRM fork, is building its business on being the .Net SugarCRM, hoping that the language and tools that come with a Microsoft-centric focus will pay off. I’m not bullish on the approach, but I’ve been wrong before, as noted above.)

The open source market is not a one vendor show. There is room for a range of different approaches to different application/vertical markets. Look at the open source systems management market: Zenoss, GroundWork, Hyperic, and Qlusters (the “Little 4,” as Michael Cote of Redmonk dubs them. Each one brings different strengths and weaknesses to the market, and each will appeal to a different kind of buyer. I like Zenoss’ 100% open source approach (indeed, this is one thing that I wish I could change about many open source companies – I’m not a fan of the hybrid approach). I like GroundWork’s piggybacking on the Nagios installed base. I like Hyperic’s history and the innovative uses to which it has put its technology. (And I know nothing about Qlusters.)

I see no reason why open source can’t provide more choice and value than the proprietary market has managed to offer. Do you?