Constructive disruption: an enterprise perspective on open source

I’m not sure what happened. This is the second session I’ve been to today, and both have been standing room only. This one (“Construtive Disruption: An Enterprise Perspective on Open Source“) has been excellent. Robin Vasan, Managing Partner at Mayfield, started the panel by asking, “Why open source? Why aren’t you choosing a good proprietary system?” Here were some of the answers:

Oliver Marks, Senior Manager Web Portal, Sony Playstation:

We are 100% open source. We prefer to spend our money on good developers than software. It gives us more flexibility and ensures our technology fits our needs. It gives us granular control of our software.

Dan Cahoon, Architect, H&R Block:

We rolled out a number of initiatives in the past with proprietary software (Tibco, Documentum, etc.), and it worked. But it was expensive. The next year we decided to try doing similar things with open source software. Mule, jBPM, Alfresco, etc. The stack looked the same, but the pieces were open source.

We pulled it off. It worked. Open source works.

Russ Danner, Software Architect, Christian Science Monitor:

We’re all about value. We use open source because it delivers value. If we find value in Oracle, we’ll use it. But we find a lot of value in open source software.

Robin then asked where the panelists are not finding good open source alternatives. Here are some of the responses…

Oliver:

Open source calendaring is one example. If I were working with IBM I could write them a big check and they’d get me something. Open source is a bit more wild and woolly. We have a little less control to push a solution into being.

Dan:

Open source projects need to be “dumbed down” a bit more. They tend to require a higher level of technical competence than we can scale with. The bar is rising within enterprise IT, but if open source can deliver easier-to-use software, that would be a big plus. Also, it would be nice to have open source be more additive to existing proprietary software products.

Wilson D’Souza, Director, Infrastructure Software Development, MIT:

We need software to run on at least the big three of platforms: Windows, Mac, and Linux. I don’t know how many infrastructure decisions are driven by the need to support Outlook. Open source needs to provide choice of platforms.

Robin switched gears to ask how enterprises are using open source as a hammer to knock down the prices of proprietary software. Here are the responses…

Wilson:

We don’t look at open source as a hammer, though it is an option used in negotiation. Our interest is in value, not dickering.

Oliver:

We spend a lot of time talking geeky, alphabet soup (SOA and the acronym du jour). We need to speak “solutions” to IT people, not deep-geek speak. (This wasn’t an answer to Robin’s question, but I thought it was useful criticism of software vendors.

Dan:

Cost is not our driver. Support is. There are proprietary software companies that are right-sized to meet our needs, but not the bigger vendors. They make us get in line behind everyone else.

Open source companies seem to be willing to collaborate with us from the start, even before we buy into the software/service. We’re plugged directly into the core engineers writing the software. We don’t get that from our bigger proprietary vendors. Dan did emphasize that he’s interested in the collaboration, and doesn’t care if it’s open source or not.

Dan then suggested that open source moves to fast (and proprietary software companies move too slowly). Every panelist agreed. Open source needs to slow down to make implementing it more predictable. Wilson indicated, however, that in the early days of a project that fast-paced development is necessary, but should slow as it matures.

Tony Wasserman asked from the audience, “What community-based open source (Apache, etc.) do you use?” They each indicated that they actually use a lot more community open source software, but that it’s harder to talk about them in a coherent way because Spring, etc. are all over the place within the enterprise. With a commercial open source company it’s easy to grok the relationship, but that doesn’t mean it’s any less valuable to these enterprises.

It was refreshing to hear how ardently each panelist spoke of the benefits of open source. These are significant, global brand names, and each is leveraging open source to discover value and drive innovation. The tide surely has turned in open source’s favor.