Showing posts with label open source. Show all posts
Showing posts with label open source. Show all posts

Wednesday, June 29, 2011

Talend Open-Source Approach Provides Holistic Integration Capability Across, Data, Devices, Services

Transcript of a sponsored BriefingsDirect podcast on enterprise integration and new tools to put control in the hands of "the masses."

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. Download the transcript. Sponsor: Talend.

Dana Gardner: Hi, this is Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, and you're listening to BriefingsDirect.

Today, we present a sponsored podcast discussion on how the role and impact of integration has shifted, and how a more comprehensive and managed approach to integration is required, thanks to such major trends as cloud, hybrid computing, and managing massive datasets.

Moreover, the tools that support enterprise integration need to be usable by more types of workers, those that are involved with business process activities and data analysis. The so-called democratization of IT effect is also rapidly progressing into this traditionally complex and isolated world of applications and data integration. [Disclosure: Talend is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

So, how do enterprises face up to the generational shift of the function of integration to new and more empowered users, so that businesses can react and exploit more applications and data resources and do so in a managed and governed fashion? This is no small task.

We're finding that modern, lightweight, and open-source platforms that leverage modular architectures are a new and proven resource for the rapid and agile integration requirements. And, the tools that support these platforms have come a long way in ease of use and applicability to more types of activities.

We're here today to discuss how these platforms have evolved, how the open-source projects are being produced and delivered into real-time and enterprise-ready, mission-critical use scenarios, and what’s now available to help make integration a core competency among more enterprise application and data activities and processes.

Please join me now in welcoming our guests today. We're here with Dan Kulp, the Vice President of Open Source Development at Talend’s Application Integration Division and also the Project Management Committee Chair of the Apache CXF Project. Welcome back to BriefingsDirect, Dan.

Dan Kulp: It’s great to be here. Thank you.

Gardner: We're also here with Pat Walsh. He is the Vice President of Marketing in the Application Integration Division at Talend. Hey, Pat.

Pat Walsh: Nice to be here as well.

Gardner: Pat, let me start with you. We're talking about a shift here in some major trends. Everyone is talking about how IT needs to react differently. There is lots of change going on. Integration has always been important, but now it’s probably more important than ever.

With some of the shifts in computing models, such as cloud and the data intensive atmosphere that most organizations are now operating in, why is integration a real issue that needs to be approached differently?

Overriding trends

Walsh: We're seeing a couple of overriding trends that have really shifted the market for integration solutions. The needs have shifted with changes in the workplace.

First and foremost, we're seeing that there is much more information that needs to be managed, much more data associated, and there are a couple of drivers of that.

One is that there are many more interactions amongst different functional units within a business. We're seeing that silos have been broken down and that there’s more interaction amongst these different functions, and thus more data being exchanged between them and more need to integrate that data.

There’s also this notion of the consumerization of IT, that with so many devices like iPhones and iPads being accessible to consumers in their everyday life. They bring those to work and they expect those tools to be adapted to their workplace. With that just comes an even larger increase in the data explosion that you had referenced earlier.

Coupled with that are overriding trends in IT to shift the burden of supporting systems away from the traditional data center and into the cloud. Cloud has been a big movement over the last couple of years in IT and it has an impact on integration. No longer can an IT department have full control over the applications that they are integrating. They now have to interact with applications like Salesforce.com.

A number of these trends converged. In the past, you may have been able to address data issues separately with small portion of your IT group within the data center and say application integration separately with another group within the data center. Nowadays, you are not only in control of your own systems, you have to depend on systems that someone else would be supporting for you in the cloud. Thus, the complexity of all of the integration points that need to be managed has exploded.

The architectural trend is really driving the need for the data and application integration technologies and the team supporting those to come together.



These are some of the overriding trends that we are seeing at Talend and responding to in terms of issues that are driving our customer needs today.

Gardner: It sounds like there are two major shifts in addition to some other complexity issues. The two shifts seem to be that we now need to integrate data, applications, and services with some sort of a coordinated effect. Having them in separate silos doesn’t seem to work very well. And then, we have a shift in terms of the architecture of where the computing, the resources, and the data reside -- and that would be this cloud computing activity.

Why is it important for data and application integration activities to become closer or even under the same umbrella?

Walsh: The two trends that you talked about are related. The architectural trend is really driving the need for the data and application integration technologies and the team supporting those to come together. The reason is that data and application integration no longer are necessarily centralized in a single location.

When they were, you had, in essence, a single point of integration that you needed to manage amongst the data and the applications. Nowadays, it’s distributed throughout your enterprise, but also distributed, as I mentioned before, across a network of partners and providers that you may be using.

So many touch points

With that, there’s now the mandate that you can no longer isolate data from application, because the touch points are just so many. You now need to look at solutions that, from the get-go, consider both aspects of the integration problem -- the data aspect and the system and application integration aspect.

Gardner: And, I suppose we need to tool in such a way that we can approach both of these problem sets, the data integration and the applications integration, with a common interface or at least common logic. Is that correct?

Walsh: Yes, and up until now the two audiences have been treated quite differently. I think the tool expectations of the audience for data management versus the audience for application integration were quite different. We're finding that we need to bridge that gap and provide unified tool sets that are appropriate for both the data management user, as well as the application integration user.

Gardner: I think we understand the business requirements now, why this shift is happening, why it’s so important, and how it supports real agility capabilities of an organization. So, this is not a nice to have, but really mission-critical.

Let’s go to Dan Kulp. Tell me why a certain architectural or platform approach best address these issues. It doesn’t sound like a manual, labor-intensive, siloed approach works. Why must we take a different kind of architectural step here, Dan?

Kulp: As Pat mentioned earlier, with the shifting of the requirements from silos into more of a distributed environment, the developers that are doing the application integration and the people doing the data management have to talk a lot more to get these problems solved. Your older solutions, from five years ago or whatever, that had each of those things completely separate were not able to scale up to this distributed type environment.

Gardner: Let me ask you now from a different perspective, architecturally we have a shift, but why does an open source community approach help bring these constituencies together? What is it about an open source and modular approach to these infrastructure components that helps bridge these cultures?

Kulp: One aspect that open source brings is a very wide range of requirements that are placed on these open source projects. That provides a lot of benefit to an organization, as these requirements may not be required of your organization today, but you don’t really know what’s going to happen six months or a year from now.

You may acquire another company or you have to integrate another set of boxes from another area of your organization. The open source projects that you see out there, because of their open-source nature, have been attracting a wide range of developers, a wide range of new requirements and ideas, and very bright people who have really great ideas and thoughts and have made these projects very successful, just from the community nature of open source.

There is also the obvious cost benefit of not having all these high priced licenses, but the real value, in my opinion, is the community that’s behind these projects. It's continuously innovating and continuously providing new solutions for problems you may not even have yet.

Gardner: With cloud computing, you're also dealing with more moving parts. You don’t necessarily know where those parts are coming from or what the underlying heritage is, but if there is an open source commonality among and between them. I'm quite sure that many of the cloud providers have a significant amount of open source in their infrastructure that helps make these interactions, these common denominators technically possible.

New complexities

Walsh: Agreed. The cloud brings a whole new set of complexities and challenges and as you are deploying your applications into the cloud, you need to think about these things. And a lot of these open-source projects that are addressing some of these cloud needs have thought about these things.

If your organization isn’t into cloud yet, but you're thinking about it, leverage the expertise that's already out there. Talk to the communities and get engaged with those communities. You'll learn a lot, and you'll be probably better off for it in the long run.

Gardner: Dan, you've been involved with open source for quite some time in a number of capacities. Maybe you could explain about where you're involved, what sort of projects you are working on, and why this particular mix of projects sort of come to a head in helping us address this integration challenge?

Kulp: I've been involved with open source for roughly six years now, primarily at Apache. I got started at Apache as part of the Apache CXF Project. I've been there since the beginning. As you mentioned earlier, I'm the PMC Chair for that project, very heavily involved.

For those people who aren’t familiar with CXF, that’s the web services stack. At Apache, they're supporting all of your SOAP standards as well as JAX-RS and REST-based services. It’s really a framework for producing services.

As the problems in the enterprise expand from year to year, which they always do, it’s fascinating seeing these open-source projects at Apache being incubated.



Six years ago, that was the problem people were trying to solve. As things have evolved over the last six years, we're seeing more application integration challenges that are beyond SOAP and REST. That’s where projects like Apache Camel come in, where you're doing your enterprise integration patterns inside of your enterprise service buses (ESBs). So, I'm getting more heavily involved with that.

I've also been involved with even things like the Maven Project at Apache, doing build-related tools and deployment scenario things.

As the problems in the enterprise expand from year to year, which they always do, it’s fascinating seeing these open-source projects at Apache being incubated, or even graduating from the incubator, that solve these real world scenarios. To me, it has been an amazing experience to be involved with that whole process of seeing ideas bubble up through the incubator and into Apache projects that solve real world problems.

Gardner: Okay. We understand that there is a new set of requirements for integration. We know that we have an arsenal of approaches vis-à-vis the open-source communities, and some proven and mature projects that are implemented quite robustly in some of the most intensive compute environments.

How do we now bring this together in such a way that your typical enterprise can understand what they can do to bridge this gap between the data and the applications integration and then reduce their risk by setting up an architecture that’s cloud ready or hybrid computing ready?

Let’s go back to Pat Walsh. What are you finding on the street? What are people starting to do in terms of coming to grips with these architectural changes?

Expanded market

Walsh: One interesting point to raise before talking about what we're seeing people doing is that there is an expanded market now for these integration challenges. It used to be that we would see very large enterprises were the ones that were addressing complexity in their organizations.

With cloud-based initiatives and such, it’s affecting even small to medium-size businesses (SMBs). We see a much broader set of enterprises trying to address it. Companies that have fewer than 1,000 employees are now looking at integration solutions to manage their data and their applications in the cloud in a much more sophisticated way than just three years ago. It’s a much broader problem.

The way that people are hoping to address it is by looking for a way that doesn’t require a massive outlay of investment in consulting resources. The traditional large organization, in addition to purchasing product to help them with integrating their data and integrating their applications, would typically have systems integrator help them pull everything together. That’s obviously not an affordable path for an SMB.

Therefore, people are looking to see, how they can find a combined, easy to use way and how they can gain knowledge from people who have experience, having tackled these issues and problems in the past.

We're finding that people are looking for just a simpler, prescriptive way to do the majority of the challenges out there. In terms of the 20 percent outlier problems, you may need to have a systems integrator come in and help you with that. But, people are really focused on the meat and potatoes of the integration of their functions, the data, and the applications that go along with those processes and functions.

We grab those and bring them together, the best of breed from the various Apache projects that solve real world problems.



Gardner: Dan Kulp, we need to have architecture modernization in effect, but we need to do it in such a way that more people in a large organization and more types of organizations, small to medium-sized businesses, can avail themselves of these services, these capabilities.

Tell me a little bit about what you have done to allow that difficult equation to be solved? It seems to me that we are still talking about service-oriented architecture (SOA). In many respects we're talking about ESBs. Five or seven years ago, that was a very complex and costly activity. We've now been able to abstract up the value, but I suppose reduce and subvert the complexity. Tell me how you do that.

Kulp: The first step in that process to solve that problem was identifying where the best solutions are/ They're primarily in open source. I mentioned CXF and Camel, and there is Apache Karaf providing some OSGi stuff.

That was the first step. We grab those and bring them together, the best of breed from the various Apache projects that solve real world problems.

The next step was trying to find or produce a set of tooling that makes using those products a lot easier. One of the things about Apache that you will discover, if you are heavily involved is that we are hardcore developers. For us, writing Java code to solve a problem is natural.

Skill sets

One of the problems that we're trying to address is bringing this great technology produced by the Apache people into the hands of those that don’t have that same level of skill set, expertise, or mindset.

That includes those from the application integration side, where you have developers that are used to doing point-and-click type enterprise integration pattern things, to the data integration people that are used to their data mappings, GUIs, and things like that, and trying to bring both sets of people together into a platform that can solve both teams.

Gardner: A similar questions to you Pat. Where do we bring the value higher but make the complexity less of an issue and less visible? What is it about your tools and approach at Talend that is helping to bring this to the masses in a way that’s automated, a service factory approach, rather than a hand coding approach?

Walsh: Talend has a great history of unifying technologies onto a common platform, to really keep the power of the underlying tools, but simplify the interface to it. This unified platform really consists of five key components.

The first one is a common development environment that is used across the products. The second thing is a common deployment tool that allows you to deploy into a runtime environment.

By providing this unified platform of tools, it allows someone to learn a single interface, regardless of whether it’s at the development stage, the deployment stage, or the management stage.



There's also a common repository that allows you, across the lifecycle of your process, to be able to manage it consistently, regardless of the type of technology that’s being used. Finally, there is common monitoring across the entire environment.

What we are doing now is extending that model that has been applied to our data management products to encompass the ESB, the application integration aspect of it. By providing this unified platform of tools, it allows someone to learn a single interface, regardless of whether it’s at the development stage, the deployment stage, or the management stage, and get the power of master data management technologies, data integration, data quality, or the ESB technologies themselves.

By providing this one interface, this one common environment, allows people to become comfortable with this common interface, but have the benefit of multiple sets of tools.

Gardner: One of the things that I face when I talk about these issues with enterprises is that they like the idea of having more people involved, but they also see that there is a risk involved with that concerning permissions, access, control, and even policy and rules driven activities around who gets to integrate what. How do you solve or ameliorate that problem?

Walsh: We've gone to great lengths to include security mechanisms into the solution, so that we can have approaches whereby there are certain permissions for just individuals. Or, IT management can look at certain aspects while opening it up maybe to a broader audience, when it comes to development and use of the interfaces that are going to be developed on the data in application side.

Democratizing technology

I
t’s very important, as you say, that as we bring this technology to the masses, as we refer to it, democratizing the technology, lowering the barriers to entry that historically have been in place, we don’t remove any of the enterprise qualities that are expected. Security is certainly a major one, as is policy management, so that you could have a number of different business roles that allow you to have the flexibility you need as you deploy it into a large- or even medium-size enterprise.

We're providing both capabilities, simplifying the interface, while not removing any of the enterprise qualities that have come to be expected of the integration products we provide.

Gardner: Okay. Dan has told us a little bit about how some of the open source projects, such as CXF, Camel, and Karaf have provided some fundamental underpinnings for this. But, Talend has also been merging and acquiring. Tell me a little bit about your business and the evolution of Talend that has allowed you to provide this all in one integration capability to, as you say, more of the masses?

Walsh: It came quite naturally from Talend’s perspective. Data customers were using our data integration tools, as well as our data quality tools. We have Talend Open Studio, which is our popular open source data integration technology. Customers naturally were inquiring about how they could provide these data jobs as services, so that they could be reused by other applications, or they were inquiring how they could incorporate our technology into a SOA.

This led Talend to partner with a company called Sopera. They had a very rich ESB-based integration platform for applications. After two years of partnership, we decided it made sense to come together in a stronger way, and Talend acquired Sopera.

We're providing both capabilities, simplifying the interface, while not removing any of the enterprise qualities that have come to be expected of the integration products we provide.



So, we have seen this firsthand from our customers. It really drove us to see the convergence of data and application integration technology, and therefore the acquisition of Sopera’s technology, as well as the people behind that technology, has enabled us to really come in with this common platform that we are just now releasing.

Gardner: The timing sounds very good. There's movement in the market towards democratization, more inclusive platform approach to both data and applications and services integration. The driver in the market about hybrid computing is coming right at the right time in terms of being able to bridge different types of computing environments and integrate across them.

This all is great in theory and we have certainly seen a lot of action in the open source community that had bolstered the ability of these underlying products and projects. But, what about real use case scenarios. Do we have any examples of where this is being used now, perhaps early adopters? Maybe you can name them or maybe you can only describe what they are doing. But for me, showing is always better than just telling. Can we show how this all in one integration capability is actually being used in the field?

Walsh: We have a couple of examples that I can refer to. I think the most tangible one that may make sense to folks is that we have an insurance company that we work with. While they've been working with us for quite some time on the data side of the house, looking at how they can have their back office data shared amongst the different industry consortia that they work with to do ratings and other checks on credit worthiness or insurance risk, that has really been about integrating data on the backend.

Much like any business, they're making it more accessible to their consumers by trying to extend their back-office systems into systems that have more general web interface or maybe an interface at an ATM.

Opened to consumers

So, they required some application integration technology, and with that, they built this web interface and opened it up to consumers. The expectation of their user is a much more rapid response time. When they had to interface with an agent in the office, they may wait 24 hours for a response, but now they expect their answer to come during their web-based session.

The timeframe required has led them to have an application integration solution that can respond in sub-second response rates for their transaction. In the past, they were going with a much longer latency for the completion of transactions.

It's just a typical example that I think folks can appreciate. As people extend their back office systems to consumers, number one, consumer expectations raised the bar in terms of the overall performance of the system, and thus the technology that’s supporting those systems needs to necessarily change to support that expectation.

Gardner: In listening to Pat describe that use case, Dan, it sounds as if what we're trying to accomplish here is to do what the data warehousing, data mining, and business intelligence (BI) field have done, but perhaps allow many of those values to be extracted with more agility, faster, and then with a dynamic approach.

Is that fair? Are we really compressing or creating a category separate from BI, but that does a lot of what BI does vis-à-vis the integration of data and activities for application services?

That requires a whole new set of skills, a whole new set of challenges.



Kulp: That’s exactly what’s happening. A couple of years, data mining ended up being batch jobs that were run at midnight or overnight. Then, the data would be available to the front end people the next morning. You'd get your reports or you'd log into your system and check the results of these batch jobs.

With extending your backend data systems to the consumer, these overnight batch systems are really not meeting the expectations of the consumers. They're demanding that their information be available immediately. They submit a new request and they want to have things updated immediately, so that results are available and displayed within seconds, not overnight.

That requires a whole new set of skills, a whole new set of challenges. The people that were doing the front-end application integration that queried the data from the overnight batch jobs suddenly have to have some expertise in not just cleaning the data, but allowing or working with the team doing the data space, to provide updates to that information in a much more dynamic form.

Gardner: How is this going to become more critical? Looking to the future, particularly for organizations that are doing more and more web-based commerce, perhaps even more mobile commerce, whether it’s through a web interface, a HTML5 interface, native applications on mobile devices, it seems to me that the consumer activities are driving more need for this fast feedback loop integration and data analysis function.

Let’s start with you, Pat. Why in the future does what we are talking about today become even more important, therefore become more critical as a core competency?

Becoming more relevant

Walsh: You can see that, as the consumerization of technology increases. We're already seeing the pressure that IT feels from becoming more relevant to the business, that just expands.

As I said before about the consumerization of devices in the workplace, it really does come down to the interfaces and the expectations that it doesn’t require a specialist in an IT field to be able to manipulate and analyze the information that they need or even to create a service or application that would enable them to do their everyday task or work function.

That’s just going to expand it. It has been happening, and we are just going to see that at a more rapid pace. It’s going to require that vendors and technology companies like Talend respond in kind and build products that are more accessible to a broader audience of users.

I think it’s analogous to what we saw in the early days of the Internet. Early on you would do command-line interfaces to send files back and forth. Once there was a web-based interface, it opened it to the masses. Nowadays, we think nothing of using a web browser to do all kinds of activity that 20 years ago was reserved to just people that had a technical know how to manipulate those systems.

We are seeing the same across these aspects of the business that up until now had really been the bastions of IT teams.

If it’s beneficial to my organization, why wouldn’t it be beneficial to others in my industry or to an even broader audience?



Gardner: I would also wonder if data services become additional revenue sources for companies. If they can expose just the right amount of data safely and securely and give people some tools to work with that, not only do they provide services, but the fact that they were in a position to gather data about certain markets, certain activities, be it B2B or B2C, they can then in a sense monetize that data back out into a field of partners and/or end-users.

Is there an opportunity for enterprises to start looking at data, not just as an asset, but as actually a product or service to sell?

Walsh: Absolutely. Today, we see that they are really addressing data services as an efficiency within their organization. How can I leverage the investment that I have made in this initial data analysis or data job across the entirety of my organization? But it’s not a big step to take beyond that to say, if it’s beneficial to my organization, why wouldn’t it be beneficial to others in my industry or to an even broader audience?

So we absolutely see that as a level of commerce that will be enabled by more sophisticated data services, technology, with a more accessible interface to that technology.

Gardner: Dan Kulp, same perspective of the future of what’s going on in the future to you. How do you see the trends around mobile and even localization services and mobile commerce? How do these shape up, so that we will require more of the types of services we have been talking about today, that all in one integration, rapid iterative development around it?

Comes down to consumers

Kulp: It really comes down to the consumers of these services and data. As the markets have expanded and the consumers are demanding things to get their information faster or get more information or advertisers need to figure out, where are these consumers going and just the whole variety of information sources expand out as well, the architecture of the applications and the interactions between the front end and backend systems kind of get blurred.

Things are changing, and companies like Talend that are involved in the space need to adapt as well and provide better solutions that make these blurring lines occur a lot quicker. That’s what we are trying to target today.

Gardner: We will have to wrap up now. We're about out of time. Pat, for those folks interested in learning more, do you have some resources, some white papers, reports? Where would I go if I wanted to learn more about this integration across data and applications function for the masses? What do you have available?

Walsh: The easiest place to go would be our website at www.talend.com.

Gardner: Dan Kulp, what about in the open source community? Can you point folks to a place where they can learn more about some of these underlying and supporting projects?

The community behind those projects is as much of an asset to the projects as the code itself.



Kulp: Each of the projects have their own website with information. So CXF is cxf.apache.org; Camel is camel.apache.org; Karaf is karaf.apache.org. However, if you just go to the Apache website, at www.apache.org, there are links to all of them, as well as a lot of valuable information about how Apache works and how these Apache communities work and how you get involved?

A lot of that is just as important as what the technology projects themselves are trying to solve, but the community behind those projects is as much of an asset to the projects as the code itself. I encourage people to poke around there and see all the exciting things that are going on at Apache.

Gardner: You've been listening to a sponsored BriefingsDirect podcast discussion on how the role and impact of integration has shifted and how a more comprehensive and managed approach to integration is helping enterprises produce and leverage more data driven business processes.

I'd like to thank our guests. We've been here today with Dan Kulp. He is Vice President of Open Source Development at Talend’s Application Integration Unit. Thanks so much, Dan.

Kulp: Thank you.

Gardner: And also Pat Walsh, Vice President of Marketing at Talend in their Application Integration Division. Thank you, sir.

Walsh: Thanks, Dana.

Gardner: This is Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions. Thanks for listening, and come back next time.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. Download the transcript. Sponsor: Talend.

Transcript of a sponsored BriefingsDirect podcast on enterprise integration and new tools to put control in the hands of "the masses." Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2011. All rights reserved.

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Monday, October 25, 2010

FuseSource Gains New Autonomy to Focus on OSS Infrastructure Model, Apache Community Innovation, Cloud Opportunities

Transcript of a sponsored podcast discussion on the status and direction of FuseSource, which is being given its own corporate identity today by Progress Software.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. Download the transcript. Sponsor: FuseSource.

Dana Gardner: Hi, this is Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, and you're listening to BriefingsDirect.

Today, we present a sponsored podcast discussion on the rapid growth, increased relevance, and new market direction for major open source middleware and integration software under the Apache license.

We'll learn how the FUSE family of software is now under the FuseSource name and has gained new autonomy as its own corporate identity. We'll also look at where FuseSource projects are headed in the near future. [NOTE: Larry Alston also recently joined FuseSource as president.]

Part of the IONA Technologies acquisition by Progress Software in 2008, FuseSource has now become its own company, owned by Progress, but now more autonomous, to aggressively pursue its open source business model and to leverage the community development process strengths.

Even as the IT mega vendors are consolidating more elements of IT infrastructure, and in some cases, buying up open-source projects and companies, the role and power of open source for enterprise and service providers alike has never been more popular or successful. Virtualization, cloud computing, mobile computing, and services orientation are all supporting more interest and increased mainstream use of open-source infrastructure.

Please join me in welcoming ours guests. We're here now to discuss how FuseSource is evolving to meet the need for open source infrastructure with Debbie Moynihan, Director of Marketing for FuseSource. Welcome to the show, Debbie.

Debbie Moynihan: Hi, Dana. Thank you. It's great to be here.

Gardner: We're also here with Rob Davies, Director of Engineering for FuseSource. Welcome to the show, Rob.

Rob Davies: Hi, Dana. Good to speak to you today.

Gardner: Debbie, tell me about some of the trends. As I said, we're seeing some of the most aggressive use of open source and IT infrastructure. We're seeing great success in terms of total cost, efficiency, and agility. Why is that happening now, and where do you see the demand trends headed to in the next several years?

Cost reduction

Moynihan: As we all know, over the past couple of years, there has been a lot of focus on cost reduction, and that resulted in a lot of people looking at open source who maybe wouldn’t have looked at open source in the past.

The other thing that’s really happened with open source is that some of the early adopters -- we have had customers for many years -- started out with a single project and now has standardized on FuseSource products across the entire organizations. So there are many more proof-points of large global organizations rolling out open source in mission-critical production environments. Those two factors have driven a lot of people to think about open source and start adopting open source over the past couple of years.

Then, the whole cloud trend came along. When you think about scaling in the cloud, open source is perfect for that. You don’t have to think about the licensing cost as you scale up. So, there are a lot of trends that have been happening and that have really been really helpful. We're very happy about them helping push open source into the mainstream.

From a FuseSource perspective, we've been seeing over 100 percent growth each year in our business, and that’s part of the reason for some of the things we're going to talk about today.

Gardner: How about the popularity of the Apache license? We see controversy, in some cases, a lack of clarity and understanding about where some other licenses are going, but Apache seems to be pretty solid and pretty accepted.

Moynihan: We really like the Apache license. There's a lot of confusion around open source licensing. There are many different licenses. There is a lot of fine print. A lot of people don’t want to think about it, and a lot of legal departments get concerned about the gray areas. The Apache license is very easy to understand and it's very permissive in what you can do with software that’s licensed under the Apache license.

Essentially, you can make any modifications you want to the software and you don’t necessarily have to contribute back to the community. It's nice, if you can contribute back, but from a business perspective, if you want to use any of the components, it's what's considered a non-viral license. So, you're pretty free to do what you want, as long as you give credit back to those who wrote the initial code.

Gardner: Rob, we've seen a lot of popularity for open source in operating systems -- server operating systems, in particular -- but why has the use of open source for infrastructure, say for integration and middleware, become so popular? Why do you think that’s going to continue with such things as cloud?

Davies: There has been a trend over the last few years, and Debbie alluded to this, with companies looking to open source and kicking the tires around. In fact, I recently spoke to a large customer of ours in the telco space. They had this remit. Any open source that came in, they wouldn’t put into mission-critical situations, until they kicked the tires for a good while -- at least a couple of years.

Because there has been this push for more open source projects following open standards, people are now more willing to have a go using open source software.

Snowball effect

We've been around in this space for a while, but the earlier adopters who were just trying out in distinct groups are now rolling this out into broader production. Because of that, there is this snowball effect. People see that larger organizations are actually using open source for their infrastructure and their integration. That gives them more confidence to do the same.

In fact, if you look at the numbers of some of our larger customers, they are using Apache ServiceMix and Apache ActiveMQ to support many thousands of business transactions, and this is business-critical stuff. That alone is enough to give people more confidence that open source is the right way to go.

Gardner: Debbie, tell us a little bit about the FuseSource move toward more autonomy. This clearly is an opportunity, but it’s a different opportunity than a purely commercial license and software model. Tell us what’s going on with Progress Software and FuseSource.

Moynihan: We're really excited as a team. Progress is launching a new company called FuseSource that will be completely focused on the open source business model. The FuseSource team has been an independent business unit, since IONA was acquired by Progress Software. We have been fairly independent within the company, but separated as our own company we'll be able to be completely independent in terms of how we do our marketing, sales, support, services, and engineering.

When you're part of a large organization, there are certain processes that everyone is supposed to follow. Within Progress, we are doing things slightly differently (or very differently depending on the area) because the needs of the open source market are different. So being our own company we'll have that independence to do everything that makes sense for the open-source users, and I'm pretty excited about that.

Being our own company we'll have that independence to do everything that makes sense for the open-source users, and I'm pretty excited about that.



Gardner: So, here we are in the middle of October, and this is pretty much now a done deal. Tell me about the history of FuseSource and what led up to this movement.

Moynihan: Rob, who is on the call, can maybe talk about the early days. He was actually a founder of a startup company and that was really the genesis of that is now FuseSource. So Rob, why don’t you start out and I can chime in if needed.

Davies: The notion is of having open source infrastructure start with a group of developers and founders in open source projects. It worked for commercial license based infrastructure product companies before. We -- the other individuals are James Strachan, Hiram Chirino, and Guillaume Nodet -- realized that the best way to deliver open source for infrastructure was to develop open source at Apache.

We decided that open source is the best thing to do, because it opens up the software for engineers to look at, use, and enhance. We felt like that was a very good way to grow a community around the projects we wanted to do.

We started this company called LogicBlaze, which was acquired three years ago by IONA. At that time, we decided to sell to IONA because we wanted to piggyback on their expertise of doing large infrastructure rollouts. IONA, the FUSE brand, and the FUSE product line then really came into the forefront.

Get the message out

D
ebbie Moynihan, who was the director of open source at IONA, was working on another project at the time called Celtix, which morphed into Apache CXF. We decided to collaborate on this effort to get this message out about using really good infrastructure based on Apache open source projects and get that into the marketplace.

Then, when IONA was acquired by Progress, Progress initially liked the idea, or liked the fact that it’s disruptive. They invested in the group: we added more employees, more sales people, more people in marketing, etc. We have been involved in that for the last two years.

But, it has gotten to a point where we realized that to operate it in its most effective way it has to be outside of Progress to a degree, because it is so different in the go-to-market strategy and what we deliver to customers compared to the rest of what Progress is doing with the one-product solution.

Moynihan: Also, from a business prospective, Progress’ go-to-market is, as Rob said, offering solutions at the business level, whereas open source has traditionally been looked at by developers and project managers more from a technical perspective and more from an open source advocate perspective.

That’s growing over time, as we have talked about earlier. Open source is becoming more and more mainstream, but our approaches to marketing and sales are different in the FuseSource team and are much more community oriented and grassroots than the way that corporate marketing is done at Progress Software.

Our model is that there is no license cost. It’s a subscription support model.



Gardner: Let’s face it, the business models are quite different. The way in which you develop revenue is more through support and maintenance and not on the upfront costs and implementations. Maybe you could explain why the business models being separate makes more sense.

Moynihan: Absolutely. From a practical perspective, the business model is very different. In traditional enterprise software sales, there is a license fee which is typically a large upfront license cost relative to the entire cost over the lifetime of that software. Then, you have your annual maintenance charges and your services, training, and things like that.

From an open source perspective, typically upfront, there is no license cost. Our model is that there is no license cost. It’s a subscription support model, where there is a monthly fee, but the way that it is accounted for and the way that it works with the customer is very different. That's one of the reasons we split out our business. The way that we work with the customers and the way they consume the software are very different. It’s a month-to-month subscription support charge, but no license charge.

Gardner: It’s interesting to me that Progress with FuseSource recognizes that there is that little bit of apples and oranges going on, and perhaps keeping them separate is in the best interest of the users and the community. But, we're seeing the opposite in other companies, where people are looking to fold open source projects and products into a larger family or stable of commercial products.

Do you think that we are going to see that trail off in the market? I guess the question is: what about these mega vendors and the direction of how an open source model and a commercial model should or shouldn’t overlap or exist together?

Very difficult

Moynihan: There are a lot of opinions out there on whether or not open source can be successful in a hybrid model within a single mega vendor. My view is that it’s very difficult, especially because the business model is different. If you're a company and you're out there selling a large portfolio of products, where only a small amount of it is open source, you have a team of people trying to sell, market, and grow business around that portfolio. They're going to focus on the license product.

They're going to have a tendency to focus on those products that are going to drive revenue in the short-term, from a business perspective. It has nothing to do with whose model is better.

I'm very happy that Progress has decided to separate out FuseSource. We already had our own sales team, but now we can be completely focused on working with our customers to help them adopt open source, and when it makes sense, they can work with us to get support and to get training.

It’s a very consultative partnering model. In the early days we really like to provide everything someone needs to get going at no cost. You can come to FuseSource.com and get a lot of documentation, and you can get a lot of training webinars for free. We have weekly webinars that show you how to get going on our products, and that’s nothing that you would see in traditional commercially licensed software.

Gardner: Debbie, tell me about what a customer should expect. If you're a user of FuseSource and if you're in the community, how will this move towards autonomy actually impact you? Will you perhaps not even notice too much?

Overall, it will be really good for our customers. We've talked with them, and they're pretty excited about it. We're all excited about it.



Moynihan: From a customer perspective, this change will have a small but significant impact. We are continuing to do everything that we have been doing, but as I mentioned earlier, we will be able to have even more independence in the way that we do things. So it will all be beneficial to customers.

From an administrative perspective, our email address will change to FuseSource.com and invoices will say FuseSource instead of Progress Software, for example. But, from who they're going to be working with, who their account managers will be, who is developing the software, and who is providing the services and the support, it’s going to be the same people that they have been working with.

We have also launched a new community site at FuseSource.com, which we're pretty excited about. We were planning to do that and we've been working on that for several months. That just provides some additional usability and ability to find things on the site.

Overall, it will be really good for our customers. We've talked with them, and they're pretty excited about it. We're all excited about it.

Gardner: Let's get back to looking at the overall market for infrastructure, open source infrastructure in particular. Rob, tell me a little bit about what's going on in the market?

We're seeing a lot of interest in clouds, private clouds, hybrid clouds. We're certainly also seeing a great deal of emphasis on reducing costs, particularly from the service provider, where they are going down to minute margins in some cases. They really need to make to sure that they're doing this in the most cost-effective manner. Then I have to imagine that if the service providers are able to provide IT-as-a-service at a low cost, the IT enterprises themselves will have to follow suit.

Help me understand the new economics of IT and how open source infrastructure fits into that.

Disruptive in the market

Moynihan: From a market perspective, at a high level, open source is really disruptive in the market in that it's affecting how people are buying software. Generally, we've seen a lot of changes over the past 5 to 10 years anyway, where license costs seem to be coming down with more and more discounting, and people are looking at it.

Historically, software vendors looked at license revenue as the premium part of the business to focus on. More and more they're realizing that a lot of value really does come from the services side. Why? Because that’s where you partner with your customer. That’s where you get to know them. That’s where you help them select the right solutions.

In the open source community, that’s how it works. People come to the community and work with the developers directly. It eliminates a lot of the cost involved in large, complex software organizations, where you might have to wait to schedule time of the product manager, who then would have to spend time with the engineers understanding what's happening with the products, so that he could then relay it to the account team, and then they would meet with the customer.

Open source just breaks down a lot of barriers and eliminates a lot of the costs involved in getting the best software to the users. Why? Because people are talking directly to the developers in the community. The developers are getting the feedback directly.

While we do have some level of product management for open source, a lot of it is based around packaging, delivery, licensing, and these types of things, because our engineers are hearing directly from customers on a moment-by-moment basis. They're seeing the feedback in the community, getting out there, and partnering with our customers. So, from an economic perspective, the model is different.

You pay as you go. You scale as you go. And you don’t have that upfront capital expenditure cost.



Just from the overall "how it works" from a buy-in perspective for the customer, it's very different. It's very attractive in these times that we are having right now, because upfront you don’t have the capital expenditure costs. You can get going. You can go to an open source community site, download the software, and try it out.

We've actually seen people get to proof of concept before they have even spoken with us. We've seen people build our stuff into a product as an application provider, as an OEM, and then come to us. That will tell you how easy it is for people to consume and use open source without having to spend a lot trying to select or figure it out, before they even can try it out.You can try it before you buy it, and when you go to buy, you pay as you go.

That’s also the reason people like cloud. You pay as you go. You scale as you go. And you don’t have that upfront capital expenditure cost. For new projects, it can be really hard to get money right now. All these benefits are why we're seeing so much growth in FuseSource.

Gardner: Are there some salient examples that demonstrate what you've been talking about? I'll throw this out to either one of you. Some of your customers might be good examples of how this can work, both from an economic, technical, and innovation freedom perspective as well.

Moynihan: I'll mention a couple of examples. They are kind of similar and something that we are seeing more and more. Sabre Holdings delivers a lot of applications for various airlines. They have a lot of partners, travel agencies, and airlines. Also, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). Those are two of our customers.

In both of those cases, they started looking at open source at the project level, but eventually came to standardize on open source for their common integration infrastructure, and to recommend it - not just within their own organizations - but in both of those cases, to their partners.

Integration is easy

That’s the really nice thing about open source. Integration within your own company is easy. You can have any crazy interface and you'll figure out how to do it. But when you partner, you can't tell your partner how to build their interfaces. But, you can have a common integration platform and say, "Can you transform your stuff so it can connect to this platform?"

With open source, they don't have to have a license for that. So, it's quite nice. They can get going, try it out, and see how it works without requiring their partners to pay any cost. From an economic perspective, they could try it out, get going, look at some proof concepts, test it out, and then rolled it out for a standardized infrastructure internally for some major projects. Then, work with partners to roll it out further.

Gardner: To your point Rob, we've heard a call for more standards in the market around cloud, such as common operating environments and standards for interoperability. In lieu of having those structured standards develop rapidly, we have the open source fallback position. We can't always know what the commercial underpinnings are for services across an ecosystem of cloud consumers or providers, but having a common open-source infrastructure base might very well serve that purpose. Is that what we are finding technically?

Davies: That’s really on the money, Dana. There is this trend as well. When you look at cloud, there are different issues you have to overcome. There is the issue about deploying into the cloud. How do you do that? If you're using a public cloud, there are different mechanisms for deploying stuff. And there are open source projects already in existence to make that easier to do.

This is something we have found internally as well. We deploy a lot of internal software, when we are doing our big scale testing. We make choices about which particular vendors we're going to use. So, we have to abstract the way we are doing things. We did that as an open source project, which we have been using internally.

You have to have choice. You can’t really dictate to use it this way or the other way. You've got to have a whole menu of different options for connecting.



When you get to the point of deploying, it’s how do you actually interface with these things? There is always going to be this continuing trend towards standards for integration. How are you going to integrate? Are you going to use SOAP? Are you going to use RESTful services? Would you like to use messaging, for example, to actually interface into an integration structure?

You have to have choice. You can’t really dictate to use it this way or the other way. You've got to have a whole menu of different options for connecting. This is what we try to provide in our software.

We always try to be agnostic to the technology, as much as how you connect to the infrastructure that we provide. But, we also tend to be as open as we can about the different ways of hooking these disparate systems together. That’s the only way you can really be successful in providing something like integration as a service and a cloud-like environment. You have to be completely open.

Gardner: It sounds as if we've been able to capture the best of both worlds, with FuseSource being based on mature Apache software projects with the model around the FuseSource support, which is several years old and very well demonstrated in the market. But now that you are autonomous, you're also getting the benefits of being a startup, of being innovative, being able to move, being fleet, being able to be agile.

Debbie, is that a fair characterization? By going autonomous with FuseSource, you're getting the best of a mature, established mission-critical enterprise supplier, but also, you're able to move quickly in a rather dramatically changing market.

Best of both worlds

Moynihan: Definitely. We're really excited about it. Definitely being backed by Progress Software provides us the benefit that customers can have that assurance that we're backed by a large organization. But, having FuseSource as standalone company, as you said, gives us that independence around decision making and really being like a startup.

Sometimes, we get ideas, we want to make it happen, and we can make it happen. We can make it happen, the same day or the next day. We'll be able to move as quickly as we want. And, we'll be able to have our own processes in any functional area that we need to best meet the needs of the open source users.

Gardner: Rob, from a technical perspective, how do you view this best-of-both-worlds benefit?

Davies: From a technical perspective, it’s really good for us. The shackles are off. There’s a lot of suddenly reinvigorating that seems to move forward. We've got a lot of really good ideas that we want to push out and roll out over the coming year, particularly enhancing of the products we already have, but also moving onto new areas.

There's a big excitement, like you would expect when you have got a startup. It just feels like a startup mentality. People are very passionate about what they're doing inside FuseSource.

Because those shackles have been taken away, it means that we can actually start innovating more in the direction we really want to drive our software too. It’s really good.



It's even more so, now that we have become autonomous of Progress. Not that working inside Progress was a bad thing, but we were constrained by some of the rigors and procedures that you have to go through when you are part of a larger organization. Because those shackles have been taken away, it means that we can actually start innovating more in the direction we really want to drive our software too. It’s really good.

Gardner: Well, great. How can people learn more about FuseSource? You said earlier Debbie that you have a website that’s been refreshed. Are there some URLs or directions that you would point people to in order to learn more?

Moynihan: Yes, I would point people to FuseSource.com. They can always contact us directly as well. Rob and I would be happy to speak with anyone that has questions. You can send an email to info@fusesource.com and we would love to talk with anyone that has any questions or wants to hear more about it. FuseSource.com is the place to get information on the web. We have a Twitter account, twitter.com/fusenews, that you can follow as well.

Gardner: I want to thank you both. We have been discussing how a newly autonomous FuseSource is evolving to meet the need for open source infrastructure in a rapidly changing marketplace, and of course in an environment where cost and low risk are all very much top of mind.

So, thanks again to Debbie Moynihan, Director of Marketing for FuseSource. Thanks, Debbie.

Moynihan: Thank you, Dana.

Gardner: And also, Rob Davies, Director of Engineering for FuseSource. Appreciate your joining us, Rob.

Davies: No problem. Good to speak to you, Dana.

Gardner: This is Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions. You've been listening to a sponsored BriefingsDirect podcast. Thanks for listening, and come back next time.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. Download the transcript. Sponsor: FuseSource.

Transcript of a sponsored podcast discussion on the status and direction of FuseSource, which is being given its own corporate identity by Progress Software. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2010. All rights reserved.

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Monday, April 13, 2009

Open Source and Cloud: A Curse or Blessing During Recession? BriefingsDirect Analysts Weigh In.

Edited transcript of BriefingsDirect Analyst Insights Edition podcast, Vol. 39 on open source software and whether it has hidden risks or undercuts viability of commercial software models.

Listen to the podcast. Download the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. Charter Sponsor: Active Endpoints. Sponsor: TIBCO Software.

Special offer: Download a free, supported 30-day trial of Active Endpoint's ActiveVOS at www.activevos.com/insight.

Dana Gardner: Hello, and welcome to the latest BriefingsDirect Analyst Insights Edition, Volume 39. I'm your host and moderator, Dana Gardner, principal analyst at Interarbor Solutions.

This periodic discussion and dissection of IT infrastructure related news and events, with a panel of industry analysts and guests, comes to you with the help of our charter sponsor, Active Endpoints, maker of the ActiveVOS, visual orchestration system. We also come to you through the support of TIBCO Software.

Our topic this week on BriefingsDirect Analyst Insights Edition, and it is the week of March 30, 2009, centers on open-source software. The recession, virtualized data centers, cloud computing, and rumored mergers involving the likes of Sun Microsystems and Red Hat have all stirred the pot recently on the role and impact of open-source software.

We are going to look at open source in the context of economics, complexity, competition, and the disruption of the shifting business models in software, away from traditional per-processor licenses, to the pay-as-you-go and ongoing support and maintenance models.

The major question we want to answer is, does using open-source software pay off in a total sense, compared to commercial offerings? Furthermore, how will this change over the coming several years?

Here to help us dig into the changing world of IT and how open source fits into all of that are our analyst guests this week. We're joined by Tony Baer, senior analyst at Ovum. Hey, Tony.

Tony Baer: Hey, Dana. How are you doing today?

Gardner: Doing great. Jim Kobielus, senior analyst at Forrester Research.

Jim Kobielus: Hi, everybody. Hi, Dana.

Gardner: JP Morgenthal, independent analyst and IT consultant.

JP Morgenthal: Hi, Dana, glad to be here.

Gardner: David A. Kelly, President of Upside Research.

David A. Kelly: Hey, Dana. Hello again.

Gardner: We're also joined by several guests this week. I'd like to introduce Paul Fremantle, the chief technology officer at WSO2 and a vice president with the Apache Software Foundation. Welcome, Paul. [Disclosure: WSO2 is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

Paul Fremantle: Hi, Dana. Hi, everyone.

Gardner: We're also joined by Miko Matsumura, vice president and deputy CTO at Software AG. Welcome, Miko.

Miko Matsumura: Hi, everybody.

Gardner: And, Richard Seibt, the former CEO at SUSE Linux, and, in 2006, the founder of the Open Source Business Foundation. He also serves on the board of several software companies. Welcome, Richard.

Richard Seibt: Hi, Dana. Hi, everybody. Glad to be here.

Gardner: Great. Let's dig right in. JP, let's start with you. You mentioned in a past show that you detected some downside to free open source and open-source software, particularly in the implementation in the real world. I wonder if you could take the opportunity now to fill out what it is about open source that, from your perspective, provides risk.

Short-term thinking

Morgenthal: Sure, Dana. The issue, as I've been following it, is one of unexpected consequences. I don't believe we're accounting for more of the short-term thinking that has placed us in the situation we're in now in the United States or even probably worldwide, and less of the long-term thinking about how things impact everything else.

For the record, so that I don't end up Slashdot fodder, let me say that I believe that open source and noncommercial licensing is a good thing and has been very positive for the industry as a whole.

My concern is for the proliferation of free software, that is, the commercial software that businesses use without paying any license and, optionally, only have to pay maintenance for to run their business. They earn their profit using that software to run their business, and yet nothing is given back to the software industry.

In my opinion, it's like a flower that's not getting fed through its roots, and eventually that flower will wither and die. To me, it’s almost parasitic, in that there are good parasites and bad parasites. Right now, it's proving itself to be a little bit on the good parasite side, but with a slight permutation, this thing can turn around and kill the host.

Gardner: So, your concern is that there might be short-term gain, but in the long term, without a good commercial, viable, vibrant commercial software market and industry, innovation and ultimately the capabilities of software will deteriorate.

Morgenthal: Exactly.

Gardner: Let’s take that over to Jim Kobielus. Jim, you've been tracking software for many years. Do you share concerns that commercial industry will wither and die as a result of open source?

Kobielus: I have to respectfully disagree with JP on that. What's important is to sustain innovation in the software world, and open source has accelerated innovation. The whole open-source phenomenon across all market segments, where open source has invaded parasitically, has stepped up competition, stepped up innovation, and expanded the range of options for enterprise customers -- options in terms of software components to address a broader range of requirements.

Also, there's a broader range of options for the buyer in terms of how they can acquire this functionality through open-source or commercial licenses, appliances, cloud, and so forth.

So, it's been a good parasite. I agree with JP, though, that the issue is that the open-source phenomenon is causing a hollowing out of all the traditional software solution providers' business models. It's causing a deconstruction and a destruction of formerly viable companies all across the board.

What's happening though is that as more organizations license open-source programs, and with or without premium maintenance, a lot of the understanding of the guts of this software is now migrating to the user organizations. The user themselves understand the guts of these open-source packages, as well or better than the vendors who are supporting them. So, the expertise in software is being privatized out to both the IT groups within enterprises and also out to the world of open-source devotees.

So, innovation is going like gangbusters, but the business model of being a pure software vendor based on pure commercial licensing is dying out.

A growing conundrum

Gardner: Tony Baer, there's a conundrum, if you will, where software seems to be innovative and growing, but the business model is perhaps weakening. What about the advent of cloud and software-as-a-service (SaaS), hosted services, and co-location?

It seems like just at the time we are concerned that enterprises won't be buying software commercially and therefore reducing the innovation in the field, they might, at the same time, be going to outside hosts that can, in fact, really focus on the software combination of commercial and open source and offer services, rather than software. How do these two things fit together?

Baer: I was just running down a couple of things during Jim's response and during what JP was talking about with the hollowing out. In terms of dealing with the cloud, it’s part of a larger trend toward commoditizing -- I'm going to sound very redundant here -- the commodity aspects of the software market.

Part of this is, "I'm not necessarily in the business of trying to provide myself, as a business, unlimited computing capacity. Therefore, I'll rely on the cloud for that." The other side of the coin is that, in general, there's been a commoditization as a result of several factors.

Part of it is open source, but you have to take into context what's been going on in this decade. There was a popping of the IT bubble back around the 2000-2001 time frame. It's been called dot-com, but it also happened the same time that everybody got finished with their Y2K work. At that time IT could no longer just demand infinite pay rates.

That happened along with the globalization of IT, where we had offshore, which provided much cheaper alternative. SaaS, with its subscription model, changed the business model for software companies. Forget about open source for a moment. Just consider the fact that subscription was a major disruption to any existing software company whose business model was predicated on licenses.

Cloud is just one of many commoditizing factors. I just concluded a study for Ovum on application lifecycle management (ALM) tools and looked at which tools seemed to be best suited for the cloud. The fact is, and I will say the same thing with regard to open source, certain areas are better suited for the cloud and certain areas are better suited for open source than others.

In terms of just ALM, I found that collaborative tools are well suited, whereas tools that required lots of maintenance of intellectual property, such as coding, you really didn't see in the cloud. There's a new Mozilla project that just came out, but that doesn't necessarily disprove the theory.

With regard to open source, I agree with Jim that it has hollowed out the enterprise software market. On the other hand, where open source has made its maximal impact is in areas that are commodity, for example open operating systems. Where Unix was supposed to be open, Linux made it very open.

Look at content management. Unless your content management is part of an enterprise middleware platform, chances are you're using open-source content management. Anything that does not require extensive domain expertise is fair game for open source.

Gardner: Let's go to Miko. Miko, we're hearing that the enterprise software business is hollowed out. The last time I looked, some of the major players in enterprise software were holding up quite well. They're actually growing in the last quarter of recorded earnings and results, even though there is a recession. You're at a software company that's commercially viable and is happy to sell software. What gives? Is open source really hurting the big vendors like Software AG?

The power of complexity

Matsumura: Well, Software AG is characterized as being a medium-sized vendor. We just crossed $1 billion in revenue, and we're growing at a pretty healthy clip.

There's a thing that's interesting from our side. You mentioned a real interesting word, complexity. Complexity is a really powerful force in the economy and in enterprise software in general. One of the things that open source is doing is helping to simplify some of the infrastructural components and to decrease the overall condition of heterogeneity.

One of the things that we have learned in the business from service-oriented architecture (SOA) and then business process management (BPM) -- which are called middleware businesses -- is that chaos is perpetual, in the sense that there are two major driving forces in the economy: competition and consolidation.

As people contract from the downturn, they start buying other companies and this creates heterogeneity in the local enterprise. It's what people in complexity theory would call a hold-on. Then, the notion that there is complexity within that local domain is just the function of consolidation. As soon as you start to see economic expansion, then you start to see more heterogeneity in terms of things like business process and the opportunity to capture information.

Sure, there is commoditization in the IT platform, which is advanced by open source. Contrary to what JP was saying, one of the great things about open source is that it forces IT organizations like Software AG to selectively pick where they make their investment. They will put their investments in at the leading edge of complexity, as opposed to where things have slowed down and are not changing quite as fast.

Gardner: Paul Fremantle, you've seen this progression. We've seen a lot of use of open source earlier on with Linux and Apache Web Server, and it's progressed into databases, middleware, and SOA infrastructure. Do you see this as a progression, and how far does open-source software move up the stack before it does what JP fears, which is to undercut a commercial software marketplace?

Fremantle: This is a really interesting subject and it's something I think about a lot, obviously, running an open-source company. One of our main questions is, how many people will pay us for what they use of our technology that we spend a lot of money and effort writing?

There's a change in the marketplace, if you look back to the traditional open-source model. A traditional open-source model is to come along with something that doesn't exist in open-source and costs a lot. Build an open-source version of it. Be the first of a kind. Therefore, everyone who wants an open-source version downloads your software, uses it, and you get a very small monetization out of that.

It was typical in early open-source projects like MySQL and so forth to have incredibly small percentages of people paying you for that software, but to have such a large volume that it still worked out.

That's not how I see the open-source model moving. What I see is what you might call "managed commoditization." In a way we've had commoditization of all sorts of things. No one pays money for the TCP/IP stack. That's a piece of open-source software that has now become ubiquitous. It's not of interest to anyone. It's just a commodity that's free.

It comes with every operating system and it works. I don't think we need innovation in that space. Yes, there were some companies that were trying to make money out of TCP/IP stacks 20 years ago, and those companies aren't making money out of it. That's tough luck. They have to find something more interesting today.

Interesting and innovative

My experience with customers is that, if you do something interesting and innovative, whether you are open source or not, if you partner with your customers and really add value, then they will pay you, whether or not your license forces them.

The license is a blunt instrument. It's a blunt way of getting people to pay you for stuff you've written. To me, that's something that was abused by software companies for many years. What open source is doing is sorting the wheat from the chaff. It's sorting out, is this something that is a commodity that I don't want to pay for, or is this something that has real value and is innovative, and that I need the support, the subscription, and the help of this company to help me implement?

Gardner: Okay, Richard Seibt. Now, we've heard from some of the analysts the fear that innovation will suffer because of open source, and we have heard from some commercial software people that say, "We'll be happy to go to that bleeding edge of where the complexity is. We'll add value there and we will be able to charge appropriately for it." You are an innovator at the board level in several software companies. Isn't the ability to innovate also quite rich within startups that are focused on an open-source model?

Seibt: It's absolutely true that open-source companies are very innovative. If you look at SaaS or even cloud computing, there are many startups that probably lead the way. For open source, we look at that market from a customer perspective. They use the software because of its innovation, its quality, and its cost, and they wouldn't use it for any other reason. It is the innovation, quality, and cost.

I agree with some of the people who talked before. Open source is moving up the stack and has reached the SOA level. For example, large corporations are using open-source SOA frameworks, because they want to be fully independent from any vendor. They trust themselves to develop this piece of software together with the bigger community, which becomes a community of enterprises.

Therefore, innovation is not only from startups, but it's from large corporations, as well. They jump on the wagon and start to involve themselves in open-source projects, especially as being part of the Eclipse Foundation.

Gardner: Right. We saw a recent announcement of Swordfish, which is an enterprise service bus (ESB), an open-source ESB through Eclipse that was a result of work and coding done at Deutsche Post. Isn't that correct?

Seibt: Yes, it's absolutely right. This is a perfect example. The CIO of Deutsche Post mentioned, when he opened the conference, that large software vendors and the IT system integration companies can't help them anymore, because they don't understand their business as they should. Therefore, they have to do much more from a software development perspective on themselves. They have now joined many logistic companies and are doing a joint effort as part of the Eclipse Foundation, and this is the project, Swordfish.

Gardner: David A. Kelly, we heard that innovation could or couldn't be positively or negatively impacted -- business models also. What gives? What's going on now?

It seems that a lot of the reasons for open source was to prevent lock-in or overly powerful pricing in the market by commercial vendors. In a sense, that's been mitigated, but now we are in a recession where cost becomes even more important. We're also looking at this idea of increasingly having applications and services acquired as a service.

Does that mean that we are now looking at not so much being concerned about lock-in at the code level, but perhaps lock-in at the service-provider level? We also saw this week the announcement of an Open Cloud Manifesto, still rather loose in terms of its details, but which purports to try to keep the cloud from being another abstraction of lock-in.

The most efficient will win

Kelly: I'm not sure that cloud computing necessarily opens up the field for open-source computing. To some extent, it almost shuts it down, because it then becomes cloud as a series of application programming interfaces (APIs) or a series of standardized connections or services out there that could be supported by anything. Open source is one solution. The one that's going to win is going to be the most efficient one, rather than the lowest cost one, which may or may not be open source.

To some extent, as you look at cloud computing, some of the initiative that we saw with original open-source roll out over the past ten years has been almost mitigated from my perspective. The original open-source roll out leveled the table as you said. It mitigated that price difference in terms of the traditional, proprietary software vendors and software models.

It said, "Okay, maybe there isn't as much value in some of that software, whether its TCP/IP software, basic operating system functions, or Web servers, as the large software companies are suggesting there is." That really did help enormously on innovation, but it takes the lower 10 percent or 20 percent of the software infrastructure off the table.

My question really is how far the open-source innovation can go. As organizations move into business processes and business-driven value, all the executives that I talk to don't want to focus on the lower-level infrastructure. They want to focus on what value this software is giving to me as a company in terms of supporting my business processes. They're not allowing me to compete more effectively. They don't want to be in the software-development business, for the most part.

So, how far can open source go up that stack to the business process to support custom applications, or is it always going to be this kind of really lower-level infrastructure component? That's the question that I think about.

Gardner: We'll take that to JP Morgenthal. You've heard a little bit of the back and forth. Dave Kelly's point is that the new era of competition is at the business-process and API level, regardless of how it's supported. We would assume that organizations, be they Amazon, Google, Yahoo, or Microsoft, will be providing services, but with economics in mind, and they might be utilizing open source as best they can. We know that Google, Amazon, and Yahoo already do.

Is that right? Are we talking about a dead horse here? Do we not really need to be concerned about open source, but focus more at the API and business-process level?

Morgenthal: Dave is absolutely correct with regard to the cloud. The cloud actually hides a whole other layer of the "what and the how" from the user and the consumer, which could work in favor of open source or it could work against open source. Nobody really cares. As long as that thing works, it's reliable, and can be proven reliable, it can be put together with chewing gum and toothpicks and no one would know the difference.

Gardner: Well, wouldn't that really be a good thing for open source?

Morgenthal: In what way?

Gardner: Well, if people could choose between free software, were building a data center, had the skills on hand, and knew what their requirements were for the cloud infrastructure, they'd be able to do that and probably focus on the open-source alternative.

Coming full circle

Morgenthal: Again, it takes us full circle back to my initial premise, this concept of free software. There's no such thing as free software. What I see happening is this belief that software should be free. It's actually penetrating the market on many levels. I see that there is a whole concept outside of IT people, who actually understand what it takes to deliver.

Let's take Twitter, for example. What does it take to deliver Twitter infrastructurally, as that thing begins to grow? An IT person understands about scalability and billing, pub-sub engines that have to pump out a single message from a hub to 20,000 spokes, which equate to followers. The amount of infrastructure required to make that happen grows daily.

Not to mention that, there's no plan behind it for monetization right now. It's completely venture backed. It has built this huge community, and it could go away tomorrow, leaving a complete vacuum. There is no free lunch. The value of software, and software delivered as a service, extends this even further and diminishes in the eyes of the consumer, when they don't have to pay for something.

Anytime you have a model where something is given away for free, and, at some point, the free stops, it's very difficult to monetize going forth, because every buy is a buyer's remorse. "I could have had that for free."

Today, it happens very easily with software, because it's intangible. We have vendor lock-in in a lot of other industries. If you drive a Toyota, there are proprietary parts in there. The auto parts market didn't say, "Hey, with your oil change, we'll replace all these proprietary parts for you, because we don't want vendor lock in." Your vacuum cleaner has a proprietary bag. A market didn't pop up that says, "Hey, if you let us service your vacuum cleaner, we'll give you a lifetime supply of vacuum bags free."

Gardner: Isn't software different? Software is published. Software is code. Software is something you can change, if you have the permission. It's not the same as a physical part or a wheel?

Morgenthal: Well, a product is a product. Now, you're going on to the edge of the industry that wants to say, "This isn't something I can touch. It's not real, so it doesn't deserve the same protection at the same level of credibility in the marketplace. It's not something that I can physically touch and feel."

I'm not placing judgment on that. Maybe that's the case, or maybe it's not. I'm just pointing out what you said is the opinion a lot of people in the marketplace have, which is, because it's not tangible, because I can't touch it, it doesn't deserve the same level of respect.

What's going to happen with e-books versus physical books? I can't go into Borders and steal a book. Hey, should I pass around that PDF? I can't go into Borders and steal a CD, but hey, can I give that MP3 to my friend? We feel a change in the market.

My only point here is economically long-term, I don't believe anybody has thought about where these changes stop and what they end up cannibalizing. Maybe we end up with a great market, and maybe we don't. I'd just love to see some attention paid to detail before people just willy-nilly go do these things. What is the long-term impact here?

Looking at risk

Gardner: JP brings up an interesting issue. It's about risk. If I go down a fully open-source path as an enterprise or as a service provider, is that going to lead me into a high-risk situation, where I can't get support and innovation? Is it less risky to go in a commercial direction? Perhaps, the best alternative is a hedged approach, where there is a hybrid, where I go commercial with some products and I go open source with others, and I have more choice over time.

Let's go back to Miko. Miko, is that the way the world is shaping up, that we are going to have a hybrid? We're going to have a hybrid of commercial and open source? We are also going to have a hybrid of on-premises and as-a-service or cloud base. Does that make sense?

Matsumura: Absolutely. Frankly, we're already beginning to hybridize. Even with customers who are acquiring our technology, our technology takes advantage of a lot of open-source technologies, and we have built components. As I said, we're very selective about how we choose to make our investments.

We're investing in areas that obviously are not as commoditized, just because a rolling stone doesn't gather any moss. The big sections of the market, where things have cooled off a lot, where open source can kind of create pavement, is somewhat irreversible.

What makes me hopeful for the industry is in, once again, turning to the notion of the fractal component model. Imagine a fractal image. You've got the major portions in the operating system. That whole thing has been commoditized. The thing that's unique is that while a fractal image occupies a finite amount of volume, which you could see as kind of a market share, it has an infinite surface area. As you diversify, the forces of consolidation are mirrored by the forces of competition.

Our customers need to be able to successfully compete in the market, not just on the basis of lowering the cost of operations through free stuff, but really to be able to differentiate themselves and pull away from the pack. There is always going to be a leading edge of competitive capability through technology. Companies that don't invest in that are going to be left behind in an uptick.

Gardner: Suffice it to say that we are really still in the early stages of IT and that there is always going to be for the foreseeable future a great deal of innovation and change, and therefore a growing pie for those companies that are at that adoption edge.

Let's go to Paul Fremantle. Paul, if what we are describing is accepted as the premise -- that we're going to have hybrids of commercial and open source and that we're going to have hybrids of self-supported, on-premises IT functionality, as well as service acquired -- it seems to me that the real differentiator for enterprises is how well you choose.

It's how well you decide. Should you stay with commercial? What should go with open source? What should you keep on-premises, and what should you go to a cloud for? How are those decisions being made now and how should they be made?

Opportunity for frameworks

Fremantle: It's not just how you choose, but what framework you apply to that. There is an opportunity here to build frameworks that really scale out.

For example, you may have an internal cloud based on Eucalyptus and an external cloud based on Amazon. You can scale seamlessly between those two, and you can scale up within your internal cloud till you hit that point. Open-source software offers a more flexible approach to that.

I just want to come back to something about the use of the term "free software." Most open-source software is not free. If you want the same things that you get from a proprietary vendor -- which is support, bug fixes, patches, service packs, those kind of things -- then you pay for them, just as you do with a proprietary vendor. The difference is in the partnerships that you have with that company.

What a lot of this has missed is the partnership you have in an open-source project is not just about code. It's about the roadmap. It's about sharing user stories more openly. It's about sharing the development plan more openly. It's a whole ecosystem of partnership, which is very different from that which you have with a standard commercial vendor.

Gardner: Let's go back to Tony Baer. As we think about what choices to make in terms of how we provision and acquire technology, we might consider a lower risk in terms of what Paul was describing, in being a member of a community of development, rather than just as a customer of technology. How do you view that?

Baer: First, I do agree with Paul, but I want to make a careful differentiation here, which is, there is a difference between an open source, if I am consuming the software and being an active member of the community or being a customer who is basically buying commodity software.

A good example of that is the difference between the Red Hat Enterprise Linux base and the Fedora base. The Red Hat Enterprise Linux customer base is not looking to get on the latest bleeding edge distros or anything like that. They want stable, supported software. They'll pay for that, and there is a viable business model for that as commodity software.

If you're in the Fedora base, that's where you want to be. That's where basically you don't have a life, you work at 3 a.m., and you're working on trying to improve the distro or trying to mess around with it.

Therefore, in terms of the level of risk, if I'm a commercial customer, I'm going to want software that is essentially release supported. I'll want to lower my risk. Where I'm willing to take risks is the same as I would do with normal commercial software. I'll take, let's say, an early beta release or take some of the community technology previews and I'll have some of my developers work with it in a sandbox. So, I don't think it really changes that equation at all.

I agree with Paul and I disagree with JP. I don't think that open source will be the death of the commercial software market, because the other thing that open source requires to be viable is skill. You need enough of a developer base, enough of a community, to innovate the software. Otherwise, the whole model crashes down.

By definition, what that will not include will be software that is not commodity. It may be, as I said before, where that requires domain knowledge or where there is a huge cost of switching.

I don't think you're going to see any enterprise customers pull out their SAP systems tomorrow for an open-source equivalent. That's just not going to happen. On the other hand, they might move their SAP systems to Linux instead of Unix. So, you need to take this whole question about risk in context.

Monetizing in a different way

Gardner: Jim Kobielus, we're talking about how code, intellectual property, and research and development get developed, monetized, and then brought back into a market. We have these powerful cloud providers, and they monetize in an entirely different way. They sell advertising, subscription services, or retail goods and have a margin. They can monetize their infrastructure in another way.

If they use open source and contribute back to the community, then in fact we have a richer monetization ecology of how software is developed. How do you view that? Look at Yahoo and Hadoop, as an example, where a MapReduce technology has been brought to the open-source environment because it was cultivated at a company that makes money from advertising. [UPDATE: Amazon gets on the MapReduce bandwagen.]

Kobielus: That's a very interesting observation, Dana. Basically, everything you said is exactly right. The whole cloud community, the public cloud provider, is attempting to build their business models based on subscription revenues. It's not so much from advertising. It's the monthly charge for access to the Google or the Amazon cloud. To a great degree, many of them are relying on various open-source components to build up their infrastructure.

To the degree that the cloud providers are active participants in open-source communities and essentially contributing their personnel's time to further develop and extend open-source software that's then available for free, essentially that is the whole open-source community being funded or subsidized by the cloud community.

In many ways, the cloud community, as it grows and establishes itself as a viable business model, will increasingly be funding and subsidizing various open-source efforts that we probably haven't even put on the drawing board yet. That will be in a lot of areas, such as possibly an open-source distribution of a shared-nothing, massively parallel processing, data warehousing platform for example. Things like that are absolutely critical for the ongoing development of a scale for cloud architecture.

If there is going to be a truly universal cloud, there is going to have to be a truly universal open-source scale-out of software.

Gardner: Let me pause you there. Let's take that to Richard Seibt. Richard, you mentioned that it's a very rich and fertile way for software to get developed when a large enterprise like Deutsche Post does work and then contributes it back to the community. Wouldn't the same be the case for large cloud providers, such as Yahoo, Amazon, and Google?

Lack of contributions

Seibt: I think it would help, but I don't believe that they want to do that. They see themselves as a kind of proprietary open-source development shops, and, as you know, they don't contribute back a lot.

But, from a large enterprise perspective, it would absolutely make sense to do a lot of contributions, to be able to move their application and their complex infrastructure to the cloud, because you have to solve cloud security, cloud storage, and cloud systems management, and this is not available yet. This needs to be developed to solve their issues. This is possible in a cooperation between open-source projects or commercial open-source companies and large enterprises, and I am sure they will do it, because they get the value out of it.

As one of my colleagues just said, it's about how you work together, and this is the value of open source. You have influence on the roadmap. You have influence to get what you need, and this makes you agile and more flexible. At the end of the day, software is too important, because all of your business is running on software. Every part is running on software, and that's the reason people want to use software that is open and can be influenced. It's not only about cost.

Morgenthal: Dana, do I get one counterpoint, since somebody said that they don't agree with JP that it's going to be the death of the commercial vendors. I never said that. I just want to clarify. I never claimed that it was the death of commercial. I think you summarized it well with the risk factor. All I pointed out is that there is a long-term risk potential here that nobody is talking about.

Gardner: Well, let's talk about that. In the context of on-premises or private clouds, as I mentioned, there was a rumor -- and something might happen by the time this show airs, we don't know -- that IBM and Sun are in some kind of a merger discussion.

One of the rationales that was theorized for that was that Sun has a great deal of open-source software that could be used to create a cloud, an on-premises cloud infrastructure of some sort. That could for IBM be an opportunity to enter that market more quickly, or it could be an opportunity for IBM to stop development in that direction in order to preserve its own ideas about how a private cloud might be constructed -- perhaps of a System Z mainframe platform.

So what do you think JP? Is this whole potential for an on-premises cloud market a new battleground for commercial versus open source?

Morgenthal: I see it more as breathing new life into platforms that were getting harder and harder to justify, because you had commoditization. Commoditization is a real market thing that we've got to deal with. We've had commoditization in hardware to the point where it is relatively inexpensive to get very powerful server architectures, and that reduces the need for some of the larger processing machines that are offered by the likes of IBM and Sun.

So for them, it's being able to target some of this existing investment into a new direction, to build some sort of coherence around how this makes sense to a buy-side community, in building out this compute infrastructure that is easily oriented towards different applications and different uses, allowing for scalable demand, taking advantage of things that they've already built and never really had a model for selling. It actually puts the ball back into their court where its been taken away for them for so long.

Gardner: Okay. So, from your vantage point, the notion of an on-premises cloud infrastructure is great news for commercial providers.

Morgenthal: I think so.

Gardner: David Kelly, how do you see it? Do you see that the open-source versus commercial risk continuum is now being placed at this on-premises cloud market that's just only very nascent? It's really not even off the ground. How do you see that tension?

Services not hardware

Kelly: Just talking about the IBM-Sun deal is great for a services company, which is where IBM is making a huge amount of money -- services. They don't care so much about the hardware anymore. This plays right into the direction that they want to go, because open source is all about the services. There is no revenue in the upfront. So, there is opportunity there.

I don't know how fast that market, in terms of on-premises cloud, is going to develop. That's where my hesitation would be. But, it makes sense from that shifting traditional software model that was pushed off the cliff perhaps 10 years ago by this kind of change that we are seeing across the economy. But, organizations still need services. They need the software. We're just going to be paying for the services and the software as we go forward.

Kobielus: I want to add a quick comment here. In terms of the risk for software vendors from the whole cloud phenomenon, the issue on business models is, what is the razor and what are the blades in the old Gillette model? Well, the razor and blades used to be just the commercial software licenses themselves, and then primarily the razor has always been the maintenance and support service, as well.

Open source has made that the dominant revenue model for a growing range of software vendors. But now, professional services are, in many ways in this new world, becoming the blades.

Professional services are now able to deploy like a global services organization to help customers put together their private clouds, leverage all the SOA and the virtualization technologies, and to really pour deep business domain content into building custom services. That's becoming, in many ways, the blades in this new world. The risk factor for vendors is that we don't have that.

Gardner: Hold on, Jim. If that's the case, what about these external cloud services, where the APIs and the business process are the differentiator? The blades and the razors are really about not professional services involved with creating the infrastructure, but with, how you leverage these business processes in innovative new ways across markets, across ecologies of participants, cutting your IT costs while improving your ability to develop products without upfront capital and without professional services.

Isn't there another side to this, which is the shift from the concern about creating infrastructure into, how do I leverage someone else's infrastructure?

Kobielus: It comes down to either you, as a vendor, bring your professional services to bear on integrating all of that, or you bring your partner ecosystem in to handle that integration and tweak those business processes. So, in many ways, you rely on your partner ecosystem to build the blades.

Gardner: Miko, let's take this to you. It seems to me that if you're building complex event-processing infrastructures and you're creating fabrics of SOA support, you might want to create the enticement of the business-process benefits, while at the same time, monetizing around the infrastructure. Is that a viable go-to market in this new year?

Matsumura: Absolutely. The areas that you describe are the areas where the stones are rolling and there is not a lot of moss. If you look at the rolling stone gathering no moss theory, IBM services would be the moss, in a way. They are just trying to grow over anything that's kind of stabilized and cooled off sufficiently to build their own ecosystems.

The 'uncommons'

It's the thing that I see happening with the Sun acquisition. It's kind of funny. Sun actually had a lot of fairly speculative ventures in different kinds of models for leadership, standards, and open source -- things like JCP, NetBeans, these hybridized models and complexities. The thing I think IBM is trying to prove with this acquisition is basically that professional services are the way that they provide what I would call the "uncommons."

One of the things that I've seen as a pattern in open source is that open source tends to be driven by the needs of the commons, in the sense that the more community, the more common infrastructure, one has, the more you can drive towards an open-source model.

The remaining question for commercial providers is, where are the uncommons? What are the forces that drive organizations to differentiate? Where can you find those differentiation points? The IBM answer to that is, pour in a bunch of consultants. There is plenty of room for other models.

Kobielus: The uncommons is actually the solution provider's ongoing relationship with the customer, the ongoing engagements whereby the solution provider has the expertise to solve the customer's problems and continues to bring that expertise to bear in engagement after engagement after engagement. That is the lock-in. You know your customer better than any other potential provider.

Baer: It's all about relationships.

Kobielus: Yeah, relationships.

Gardner: Paul Fremantle, how about that last word on relationships versus code? You were talking about the community. Isn't that, in effect, a different kind of relationship, perhaps even a lower risk relationship member of a community than simply a buyer from a large seller?

Fremantle: I hate to use jargon, but if you look at where the free and open-source business model is going, if you were going to have a 2.0 business model, it would be all about relationships, and no longer about just being the only open-source project in a space and then everyone jumping on it.

The community is the key to that. The key to using open source to be more powerful than a proprietary model is completely about building a community in which your customers participate. At WSO2, we have some amazing customers, who really participate in the roadmap of the products, in helping out other customers, in working together and building a shared community. That is what's powerful, and that's what's much harder to do as a proprietary vendor. You own the source code, and that ownership is kind of a weapon against your customers. In open-source models, that isn't true.

Gardner: We'll have to leave it there. We're out of time. I want to thank our panel. I also want to thank our charter sponsor for the BriefingsDirect Analyst Insights Edition Podcast series, and that's Active Endpoints, maker of the ActiveVOS, visual orchestration system. We also want to thank TIBCO Software.

This is Dana Gardner, principal analyst at Interarbor Solutions. Thanks for listening and come back next time.

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Edited transcript of BriefingsDirect Analyst Insights Edition podcast, Vol. 39 on open source software and whether it has hidden risks or undercuts viability of commercial software models. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2009. All rights reserved.