Sunday, May 03, 2009

BriefingsDirect Analysts Unpack Platform as a Service and Measure Future Impact on Enterprises

Edited transcript of BriefingsDirect Analyst Insights Edition podcast, Vol. 40 on the promises of platform as a service and its apparent lack of traction among enterprise managers.

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Dana Gardner: Hello, and welcome to the latest BriefingsDirect Analyst Insights Edition, Volume 40. 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 April 13, 2009, centers on platform as a service (PaaS). This is the part of the cloud taxonomy that pertains to software and services development over the Internet.

Developers can use tools and testing apparatus as a service on someone else's data center, building and refining their applications and services, and even putting them through some real world performance testing, before going into production and use.

Where these services finally find a home or a runtime platform of some kind can come in a number of ways. Perhaps they run on the same cloud they were developed on. Perhaps they move to other clouds, on-premises servers or data center, or even other kinds of hosting models -- or maybe all of the above options in some form.

We've seen a great deal of interest by the developers in using Amazon's Web services for PaaS. We've also seen a lot of action and interest from the likes of Google, Microsoft, and even IBM. Of course, there are quite a few ecology players that have been out there for sometime as well.

PaaS is not passé. Yet a lot of enterprise operators and mangers that I speak to don't even see PaaS on their radar. They're much more interested in the infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) components of cloud computing and software as a service (SaaS) to a certain degree, but they're not quite sure about PaaS.

So, what is PaaS good for and how will it impact enterprises? That's the question we're here to help you understand. What is the reality and where will we end up in regard to PaaS? We're joined by a panel of guests and analysts to help dig into the enterprise role of PaaS.

Please join me in welcoming our analyst guests this week, Jim Kobielus, senior analyst at Forrester Research. Hey, Jim.

Jim Kobielus: Hi, everybody.

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

David A. Kelly: Hey, Dana. Glad to be here.

Gardner: And Mike Meehan, senior analyst at Current Analysis.

Mike Meehan: How you're doing, Dana?

Gardner: I'm doing well. I also have several guests I'd like to introduce. Joining us today is Jonathan Bryce, co-founder of Mosso at Rackspace. Welcome to the show, Jonathan.

Jonathan Bryce: Thanks for having me, Dana.

Gardner: And Rourke McNamara, product marketing director at TIBCO Software. Welcome.

Rourke McNamara: Good morning, Dana.

Gardner: Let's start with Jonathan Bryce at Mosso. You saw what was possible in terms of development of websites and web applications quite sometime ago. Tell us something about Mosso, what you do, how you developed the notion of PaaS, and where you think it's heading.

Bryce: I started Mosso with a co-worker, Todd Morey, and we started developing it in 2005. We were working at Rackspace hosting, which is a large traditional managed hosting company, and they agreed to fund this idea and help us get it off the ground. We started Mosso out of a need that we had. I'm a developer. Todd is a designer and a marketer. We realized that what we really enjoyed working on, and where we really felt like we could add value, was in building applications.

If you built an application of any complexity or significance at all, then you ended up having to take on the hosting burden as well. That required server and network administration, and making sure that you were on top of the security, the patching, the backup, and all those things that come along with it.

We really wanted to find a way to create a technology offering that took care of all of the headaches around hosting an application, so that developers could focus just on writing the code. That was the premise that we started Mosso with.

Gardner: That seems to have attracted developers, but is this something that you see a wider embrace of, or understanding of, the inside of enterprises?

Bryce: When we started out, we definitely were targeting people who were similar to us, who were independent or small development and design shops. Over time, we found that this is a more general-purpose tool that did appeal to a broader audience.

We also realized that when you're working at the PaaS layer, you have to productize. So, you have to standardize on technology and on what's

We also realized that when you're working at the PaaS layer, you have to productize.

possible to do in the environment. Within the last year, we've expanded our product portfolio to include a couple of IaaS offerings as well.

One is called Cloud Files, and it's cloud storage. Another is Cloud Servers, and it's virtual computing. Within the enterprise -- it may be a marketing site for major a sporting event that's doing some special promotion -- we're seeing people who don't want to have to run all that infrastructure. They don't know how popular it's going to be, so they'll use it for a small piece.

We're not seeing a lot of enterprises moving wholesale their SAP systems and all of these big enterprise software packages to the platform. We do see them using PaaS to augment their existing technology for new projects that they're working on.

Signs of movement?

Gardner: These new projects, are they typically a certain type of development environment -- a scripting environment, for example -- or are you seeing more movement out towards some of the more major development frameworks?

Bryce: It varies. It depends on which company it is. Some of them want to build it themselves from scratch, and they will write it in .NET and start without any type of a framework. But, we've also seen a lot of pickup in the open-source content management frameworks like Drupal. Wordpress is now used for a lot more than just blogging. We've seen a lot of times where people have started with a framework like that and then gone from there.

Gardner: Okay. Let's go to Jim Kobielus. Jim, we've seen this many times in the past, where developers grasp something quickly and early and end up driving it into much more mainstream adoption. Do you expect that that's going to also be the case with PaaS?

Kobielus: I think so. It's the early adopters who are looking for
a platform where, first of all, they don't have the internal resources to go out and acquire the hardware and all the infrastructure, and license the application servers, the tools and everything they need to get up and running out a new project.

Just as important, from the very start they want 24x7 reliability from whatever platform they plan to execute this code on. So, they're looking for a strategic partner who can handle all the hosting and, to a great degree, can also provide them with the tooling they need, both for the development and ongoing management of the code.

The early adopters have big plans, but small resources. The public-cloud hosting of these applications is important for those applications, where, as a previous speaker indicated, there might be a strong orientation toward business-to-business (B2B) applications, or delivering it out to the broader Internet as a service. They want something that's already out there on the cloud that will be immediately available and accessible worldwide, and with the reliability to back it up.

Gardner: Do you see an opportunity for these tools and services to play a role in how data warehouses are being utilized, perhaps some mining or some additional tooling that you might use across different domains -- a data set within your organization, perhaps something you've leased or rented for a period of time, maybe some publicly available metadata. Wouldn't PaaS make sense, when you're doing these data chores that involve multiple data sources?

Kobielus: Very much so. In fact, a lot of data mining projects are like that. First and foremost, data mining projects depend on discovering sources of data, both internal and external -- customer data, market intelligence data -- and then being able to extract, transform, load, cleanse, and consolidate the data into an analytical data mart.

I am using that term in a logical sense. The analytical data mart then can be mined to do rational analysis and scoring. So, the analytical data mart

All that clickstream mining is happening. That's a core of the Web 2.0 business model

for data mining projects can become fairly large fairly quickly, with all of the different sources of data being brought into it.

With the whole Web 2.0 phenomenon, more and more organizations and businesses are making their entire business model dependent on their Web presence and on their ability as a business to continue to mine the clickstream data user sessions to be able to identify patterns related to the customer experience and preferences, so that they can then up-sell customers, or hold onto the customers.

All that clickstream mining is happening. That's a core of the Web 2.0 business model, and that depends on a big, old clickstream data mart being maintained. As I indicated earlier, small businesses that are going down this road are looking increasingly for a clickstream data mart in the cloud that can be managed -- and it might be hundreds of terabytes or even petabytes -- that can be provided to them fairly inexpensively, and fairly quickly through the cloud model.

That's an example where PaaS is the underlying platform for the analytical data mart in the cloud for clickstream analysis for the whole Web 2.0 business model.

Gardner: Interesting. Let's go to David A. Kelly. David, you look at business process management (BPM) quite a bit. Are there any aspects of business process, putting them together processes that are going to hop across multiple services with multiple sources? Does PaaS relate to that?

Role for process automation

Kelly: Absolutely. There's a big role for business process, process management, and process automation that will be able to cross boundaries here and access different processes across cloud. So, there is an opportunity for PaaS to incorporate those types of capabilities. We're just seeing the beginning of that in terms of what's out there, and over the next couple of years, we're going to see more focus on that, as organizations start to deploy more applications, and develop more cloud-focused and cloud-based applications.

The need will be to manage and automate those processes across different boundaries. Just as Jim said on the data warehouse, business-intelligence side, we have the same thing on the process side. We're going to see development of more tools in that area and capabilities and services that allow organizations to do that.

Gardner: What's interesting about what you're saying and what Jim said is that these aren't necessarily cost-saving measures. We think about cloud as being a way to reduce cost and waste, increase utilization, take advantage of virtualized fabric of infrastructure services, and so on.

You've got to talk about being able to do something quite different that hadn't been able to be done before, because you have elevated yourself to the cloud. Doesn't this whole development in the cloud smack of that as well -- not just cost savings, but being able to do things that hadn't been possible before?

Kobielus: It's rapid, cheap provisioning in the cloud. It's the bubble phenomena, and quickly the bubble grows large like a data mart, because it can grow quickly in the cloud, and then it quickly gets de-provisioned.

Gardner: Dave?

Kelly: I agree with that. Dana, what you bring up is this idea of more nimble processes, and more nimble response -- faster, more agile response to changes. In that regard, from the process standpoint, it's like you're looking at more nimble process management or nimble BPM solutions that we're going to see down the road in order to be able to respond more quickly to business changes.

Gardner: What about that Mike Meehan -- this idea of nimble activities as a result of moving some or significant portion of what you are doing to the cloud? Does that make sense to you?

Meehan: It does, but it depends on what you are talking about as what you want to enable the nimbleness for. We're really talking about business processes that involve third parties and outside parties here. When you're still behind the firewall, it's not going to have as much of immediate impact. What we're really talking about is that we've got a cloud-based runtime out there.

Now, we're talking about taking the functions that we do in-house -- development, business process management, business intelligence (BI) -- and moving those out into that cloud, where we can interact with the rest of the world, which is where companies make their money. You don't make money by selling your own bellybutton. You make money by going out and interacting with the rest of the world. That's where the opportunities are.

We're defining those right now, but it's what can I develop that I can push out to other people and what sort of process can I create to incorporate business partners? That's where the exciting stuff is, and we're really just wrapping a rope around that right now, and trying to tighten it up. There's a big loop right now, and we're still trying to squeeze value out of it.

Bifurcation in the market

Gardner: Do you see this bifurcation in the market, as I do, that developers grok this, and are into it, particularly the ones who are doing green-field and Web development, but that behind that partition, where operations and runtime environments are being closely monitored, they don't quite get this or not interested?

Meehan: Oh, absolutely. First, developers are always interested in doing new stuff. They're naturally curious that way. It's one of the good things about developers. They'll go out and try new things. Operations people are type A. They're not going to be into adding chaos to the mix.

That's always the natural tension you've got there. A lot of the PaaS vendors -- I'll mention one that's not on this call, but I know the folks at WaveMaker -- constantly talk about how you've got to have management tools.

That's being done to throw something back to those operations folks saying, "Okay, we can manage it. If we go in there, we use this platform, and it's not just pure chaos for you." Whether or not that's an essential part of the platform, there's an argument to be made that maybe it isn't, but it's being done as a sop to the people who are going to be naturally nervous about this.

Bryce: One thing I would add is that we've definitely seen with some of our enterprise customers is that development teams have come to us, because they are looking for that provisioning flexibility that we were talking about earlier. Their IT department can't get them the equipment that they need fast enough.

For example, last year we had a customer that had an application they were running that ended up needing a lot of capacity really quickly. In

The interesting thing is that once we've been able to build a relationship with a company's development department, we're starting to see IT departments embracing this

about a week, it went from running on a couple of servers to having 10x the amount of load and traffic that they were handling a week before. They said there was no way they could have gotten this many servers up and configured from the IT department.

The interesting thing is that once we've been able to build a relationship with a company's development department, we're starting to see IT departments embracing this, not as something to fear outside their walled garden, but actually a tool that's helpful for them.

There are a lot of things that we have to go through. We have to engage with them and, as Mike was saying, we have to help them feel comfortable about how the system is set up, how it's managed, what the process is all around, deployment, security and all of those kinds of things. Then, they can look at it as another resource, not something that's dangerous.

Gardner: So, comfort with resources. Let's go to Rourke McNamara at TIBCO. This is yet another element to integrate into the larger apparatus of the enterprise, something that the middleware vendors are designed to do. Do you at TIBCO view PaaS as an important new component that needs to be brought into a managed integration process of some kind?

Managed integration

McNamara: We absolutely do. Given that one of our strengths and a lot of our history is in integration software and large-scale platforms for developing distributed systems, TIBCO has a lot of experience with very large companies, and very large companies that develop a huge number of internal facing applications.

I'd totally agree that, up until this point, almost all of the work done in the cloud by enterprises has been Internet-facing, outwardly facing, or partner- or customer-facing applications. There's a huge interest in leveraging this technology and making use of the cloud for internal-facing applications.

And that said, the issue with the purely public cloud is that it's very complex and difficult to set up the security required to bring online an internal-facing application. You need a secure connection to your internal resources to integrate this with the rest of your infrastructure. You need a secure connection for your users to be able to access this. You need integration with directories and things like that, and all of that presents something of a barrier to entry.

We still know customers that have experimented with infrastructure as a service and PaaS for those types of applications, because they've heard all this hype. They've heard everything people said about cloud, and they want to make sure they understand what's going on. They're planning appropriately around these new developments. There's a lot of talk about some of the things that folks can use to mitigate those concerns.

"Private cloud" is a term that's been tossed around, but not clearly defined. There's a lot of confusion around it, because it's not clear.

. . . the issue with the purely public cloud is that it's very complex and difficult to set up the security required to bring online an internal-facing application.

Some folks just use it to mean a virtualization technology, and some use it more to refer to a full-on utility model for delivering compute power and computing resources.

Then there's the term that I think was first used about a year ago by a blogger -- "virtual private cloud" -- the notion that the resources exist outside your enterprise, but when you provision them, when you generate use for them, they are your resources. They're not connected to the public Internet. They're connected via some, sort of virtual private network connection to your internal network.

As you add to that collection of machines, those virtual resources are yours, and yours alone, fully secured, and effectively behind your firewall. Right now, it's just something folks are talking about. When that becomes a reality, it's going to be a huge influence in the way large enterprises look at cloud computing.

Gardner: Now, Rourke, wouldn't it be possible with this vision that you might create applications in the cloud and then you might want to host them in different places, depending upon how you would use that application.

Perhaps the application would be internal facing -- say, a business-to-employee (B2E) application, which you might put on one of those virtual private clouds. Or, you might have the same application that you use in the context of an ecology of business processes that we discussed with David Kelly.

You might want to have that in some respects in a cloud, but controlled with access, governance, and privilege policies and so forth. Then you might even want a very similar or a version of that application to be wide open, customer facing, the more the merrier. This all also sounds like a need for management policy governance and integration.

Exciting and scary

McNamara: Absolutely. That notion of a hybrid cloud, made up of all those different pieces and ones we haven't even thought of yet, is something that's both very exciting and very scary for large IT organizations.

It gives them an enormous range of flexibility, and it gives them an enormous range of power, but at the same time they're all worried about how they're going to be able to control. They worried about how they'll make sure that all of the stuff deployed in those environments is in compliance and talks together, make sure the right people can get into those different environments to change the appropriate applications and adjust the business logic, and that corporate standards are adhered too.

That's one of the things that we're looking very deeply at TIBCO Software. That's cloud governance, how we can expand the technology and experience we already have in service governance out to cloud governance, and to really take a look at that holistic hybrid cloud picture. We're trying to figure out how we can tie it all together for IT organizations, take away some of the complexity, and make it so that they can be very productive with those technologies.

Gardner: Mike Meehan, just as the world is becoming, apparently to some people, unsafe for service-oriented architecture (SOA), suddenly it's safer

Well, to knock a recent public fear on its backside, SOA is not dead.

for cloud governance. Are we talking about the same capabilities? Where companies may have been leery about horizontally applying SOA internally, they're going to have to resort to it anyway, because they are going to have to deal with these hybrid cloud issues.

Meehan: Well, to knock a recent public fear on its backside, SOA is not dead. All the things that we were doing inside of service orientation are still going on. I don't think you can move out to the cloud unless you service orient. One doesn't exist without the other. Of course, you're going to have to govern what comes in through the cloud, and that's a whole new layer of governance. We're seeing companies that are putting tools out there to help you do that.

Just recently, Vordel has an edge-networking device to help you govern your consumption of cloud-based resources. Appistry also has created some management tools along those lines.

We're seeing these companies taking what we were calling SOA management software and devices and pushing them out to the cloud. It's a fairly natural progression. TIBCO is absolutely right to be thinking in terms of this is the infrastructure you have to manage. You can't just suddenly grab things from outside and let them run wild internally. There has to be some adult supervision, and there's a huge business opportunity that comes with that.

As you use SaaS, as you bring in infrastructure and as you have your applications get infrastructure from cloud vendors, those are all going to be things that you're going to have to monitor and take care of as a business. You can't just say, "Well, that touches somebody else. Therefore, I can't care about it." This is your business. You have to care about it.

'Rogue' activities

Gardner: Let's take this to Jonathan Bryce. If you have developers that are perhaps doing rogue activities vis-à-vis your services, you would want to be a good partner with that enterprise in terms of its more official -- for lack of a better word -- IT activities. How do you bridge the gap, or do you leave that to somebody else?

Bryce: Developers come to us from larger companies. It's completely automated to get started. So, sometimes they come, and we don't even realize that they're using the system, until they're well into it.

Even these “rogue developers” are pretty diligent about making sure they inform us what they are doing. If they have special compliance requirements or governance needs, a lot of times they'll have questionnaires, security questionnaires, or operational questionnaires. We engage with different groups within our organization to complete those and help them get all that that information filled out.

Generally, the developers come here because they're trying to get some flexibility, speed, and capacity that they're not able to get internally. Most of them are fairly professional and straightforward about their organization. That's definitely what we prefer, because we want to build relationships with all of these enterprises over the long term, so that we can help them with more and more of their needs.

Gardner: What about the pace of this in the market? It seems to me that Amazon is moving very quickly. In fact, when they came up

Generally, the developers come here because they're trying to get some flexibility, speed, and capacity that they're not able to get internally.

with Amazon Web services, I don't think they anticipated that their test and dev portion of the business would become predominant. But that's okay, because where developers go the runtime usually follows.

We're starting to hear more about Java in this cloud. We're hearing more about .NET at Microsoft with Azure. We're hearing more about data crunching, vis-à-vis MapReduce-type technologies. What's your sense, Jonathan, given that you're a vendor in the business? Is Amazon in a sort of a mad dash to get out in front on this, and in a sense of dragging the other players along, and, as a result, they have to be there too?

Bryce: Amazon has created a great set of products. They've created infrastructure products that really are very similar to what people are already used to running. They also are kind of at a lower level. The lower level you go to, the more flexibility you have to customize it, and the more responsibility you have as well.

You can set up Amazon infrastructure and lock down network access. You can remove software from the system. You can have a lot of control over it. That's been a big part of their rapid growth. It's something that that's pretty similar to what people are already used to working with, but you can get it a lot faster and you can pay in a more utility manner.

Now, Microsoft is coming out with Azure, which is built around .NET. App Engine announced Java support. Our products have already been built around standard frameworks. To move that rapid adoption from infrastructure up to the higher levels, one of the keys is to try to work within the frameworks and the technology stacks that people are used to working with.

App Engine will see more rapid adoption of Java where they have implemented a lot of Java standards, the data API, the messaging API. Some of those things that they are adopting are official parts of the Java stack. I think that there will be more rapid adoption of that, versus the Python offering, which was a little bit nonstandard and a little bit out of the norm of what companies were used to dealing with.

This is what you see in every part of technology. Operating systems over time have standardized even desktop processing applications. You have a word processer, a spreadsheet, and presentation software. These things all standardize in technology, and that's when the adoption really spreads. That's what we're seeing right now as the PaaS offerings mature across the board.

Java in the cloud

Gardner: Now, Rourke McNamara, more Java in the cloud -- whether it's at Google or somewhere else -- means more enterprise-caliber, more transactional applications, and perhaps baseline business services coming across the cloud, all of which is probably good news for an integration vendor.

McNamara: Definitely. We've gotten a lot of interest from our customers in standards-based or normal frameworks and normal technologies in the cloud. The big barrier that we've seen with a lot of our customers to adopting PaaS has been that, up until very recently, just about none of them were standards based. They were a completely new and proprietary language or technology that was visual, something like Python with a custom API for Google App Engine or some sort of JavaScript for the other folks out there.

Our customers are scared enough of moving to this brand-new technology and taking that leap, but to do so in a way that they are building an application that can never run anywhere but in the cloud doesn't make sense for them. Dana, as you mentioned a couple of times, folks are more and more trying to build stuff that is reusable. If they build it for one particular application, they can re-purpose it for another application, or reuse parts of it for yet another application.

By using standards-based technologies -- Java or Spring, for example -- folks are able to build applications that are a bit more portable, a bit more reusable, and that aren't a giant leap into the cloud with something that they're not going to be able to bring back in house if the cloud thing doesn't work out for them.

Gardner: To this issue of cloud portability or cloud neutrality, we recently saw something called the Open Cloud Manifesto. I believe TIBCO was a signatory in support of that. Weren't they?

McNamara: No, we were not.

Gardner: You are not. How come?

McNamara: We got notice of that a little bit late in the game, and we just didn't have enough time to evaluate whether or not it makes sense.

By using standards-based technologies -- Java or Spring, for example -- folks are able to build applications that are a bit more portable, a bit more reusable

We didn't want to just rubber-stamp it, without really understanding what was going on, and there was a bit of a blowup there between, I think, Microsoft and Google over that.

Gardner: Right. But the general concepts of openness, neutrality, and portability, these are all important aspects from where you stand?

McNamara: They absolutely are, and as long as there is some sort of a manifesto, or some sort of set of standards and principles that are developed in an open fashion with everyone working together, we would definitely support that.

Gardner: Let's go around our group of analysts. Jim Kobielus, how do you feel about open standards? I guess it's like mom and apple pie, but how important is it for the total cloud ecology thing to develop and become a productivity and value to enterprise?

Kobielus: Very important. People often refer to "the cloud" by that phrase, as if this is a one unified platform, and it's the exact opposite. Every public cloud is essentially its own silo or stovepipe right now with its own standards and interfaces.

Gardner: Like the early Unix days, right?

Against the grain of SOA

Kobielus: Yup. As I pointed out in a recent article I wrote, right now the current state of cloud computing sort of goes against the grain of SOA. SOA is all about platform agnosticity and be able to port services flexibly and transparently from one operating platform to another, because they are all implementing these common SOA standards.

Then, when you talk about exporting them to the so-called cloud or the atmosphere full of clouds that's out there right now, the turbulent atmosphere, it becomes kind of absurd. Even a vendor like Microsoft who's both in the SOA world, and now increasingly with Azure in the cloud world, would have a disconnect between those two platforms.

They haven't really done a good job of closing the gap. If you've written applications to .NET and to their whole SOA platform, are they portable as is to Azure? No. Just by itself, a single vendor not getting its full SOA act together between the premises-based, and the cloud strategies should set off warning bells in every IT shop that has standardized with Microsoft, for example.

Gardner: It must be tempting though. If you could really lock up and create the "de-facto industry standard for cloud implementation and runtime, wow, that would be a really nice place to be. Just like it is if you can rack up the "de-facto standard" in on-premises runtime.

Kobielus: Right.

Gardner: Shall we expect them to try?

Kobielus: Of course they're going to try to dominate the cloud, just like they try to dominate the whole application server world, and they are not going to succeed.

Gardner: Jonathan Bryce, are you guys Baskin-Robbins when it comes to clouds -- 31 flavors, anybody's cloud will host it for you? What's your position on this openness?

Bryce: We mentioned earlier the Open Cloud Manifesto, which we were a signatory to. It was interesting the way that evolved. It was an idea among just a small group of people. It wasn't ever intended to really be, "This is the mandate." Then, a few of other companies started talking about it. The goal was really to put something out there that says there should be some sort of a real effort to standardize all these things.

Ironically, the process was not as open as it should have been, but the idea behind it is pretty valid. We definitely support the idea of standards, interoperability, and portability.

Rackspace has always been a supporter of various technologies. We always supported Windows, we always supported different distributions of Linux. We want to add value on top of the technology, versus being a technology vendor. So, we are not always going to be the cheapest option. We are not always going to be the commodity provider for something.

In terms of vendor lock-in, and requiring a specific deployment steps or development languages, that's not the stance that we take, because we would prefer to allow people to be able to run different applications in the environment that works best for them. Sometimes, that may not be us, but a lot of times we can add extra value on top of just the technology.

Part of the issue right now with all of these standards is that the providers and the vendors are all still developing our basic products lines. We're still developing what our niche is going to be and what our special sauce is? So, there hasn't been a lot time stick our heads up and say, "Okay, this is what they're doing, and this is what we're doing, and it makes sense for us to tie these together."

Picking one flavor

Gardner: Mike Meehan, do you think there is a temptation for enterprises to say, "We're a Java shop," or "We're a .NET shop? We only need to pick one flavor of cloud. As long as their services are loosely coupled, and we can interoperate, then maybe we're not too concerned about the underlying runtime. We'll look for the best synergy between the tools and the platform, the automation, and the plumbing." Does that make sense, and do you expect that we're going to see a rerun of the platform wars, but now at the cloud abstraction?

Meehan: Some shops will initially do what you just described. I don't think it makes sense. They'll do that because they haven't really thought it through. Openness is going to overrun that sort of thought. Hopefully, enough users have figured out that you need to be so far beyond Java vs .NET at this point in your life that this really shouldn't be the discussion that’s front of mind anymore.

Obviously, there are programmers who know one versus the other, but it's not what's driving your business, and there are larger concerns. The cloud allows you to get to different layers of abstraction and larger concerns, and you shouldn't just necessarily be Java and .NET.

So, this whole notion that somebody has to roll this whole thing up is wrong -- I'm just going to go right to Microsoft and get it from them. I

What we've seen from Microsoft to date hasn’t made a lot of sense. That's why Google hasn't really taken off yet, because it hasn't done something quite elastic enough yet.

agree with Jim. If they try that, they are going to fail, and they're going to fail hard. I hope they have a sense of that, and I hope they're looking at this as a more inclusive universe, rather than a more exclusive universe. Amazon is doing really well right now with EC2, because it is most generic. For example, Sun can put Rails 2 on top of Solaris, and put that up in EC2.

Gardner: We also have Red Hat Enterprise Linux available is a runtime environment?

Meehan: Exactly, and that's all just in there. You can throw anything in there. It really is elastic. Elasticity is what's got traction for Amazon right now. It's not that Amazon has the most unified, elegant platform offering out there. What we've seen from Microsoft to date hasn’t made a lot of sense. That's why Google hasn't really taken off yet, because it hasn't done something quite elastic enough yet.

Gardner: We haven't mentioned Salesforce.com, but they came from the SaaS side, and they have an interesting balance between proprietary and open. They've tried to create an ecology, but they also certainly want to be a destination that makes more sense to stay than go. “How do you view what Salesforce has done, and is that the model that we will see -- that "cloud of clouds" model.

Meehan: What's interesting about Salesforce is that, as you said, they just started doing stuff, and it gained traction. Now, you're thinking of them as platform. You're not going to go pick and grade various pieces of SaaS.

Gardner: More than just one application as a service.

Meehan: Exactly. There's something to just getting out there and doing stuff. I don't think they've bottled the way they to do it, but they have come up with a nifty process for getting there, which is, get involved, start getting stuff out there, and you'll find out what sticks. We're all theorizing about what's going to happen? Salesforce is an example. What's going to happen is going to be a function of what we do, and we are just not going to know until we do it. So let's start getting working.

The pain of transition

Gardner: Dave Kelly, it's a little easier for someone like Amazon that's got a retail business to draw on and to monetize on its investment for infrastructure. It's another thing for Google that come in with its advertising base to create these services. They can make these services in the business models that they have dovetail, with this new cloud model.

For somebody like Microsoft, coming from an older licensed software business and trying to re-orient and re-factor that into a pay-as-you-go service, doesn't that involve some significant pain making that transition?

Kelly: It should. This a real challenge for Microsoft. It's like the open systems discussion we had a little while ago. It makes more sense for players that actually earn their revenue in a different form than traditional operators, because someone like Amazon has a core business.

Someone like Microsoft is kind of painted into the corner at the moment. That's a challenge not just for Microsoft, but for other traditional vendors.

They can expand into this new area by offering low-cost services that take away from competitors, but don't hurt their core business.

Someone like Microsoft is kind of painted into the corner at the moment. That's a challenge not just for Microsoft, but for other traditional vendors. I think there are opportunities. With Salesforce, you can make that same kind of argument. That's more an environment for that sort of solution specific type scenarios related to Salesforce. I don't see it growing into a broader, more common application platform. It could, but I don't see that.

Gardner: Okay, we're just about out of time. Let's go to Jonathan. Is that what we were seeing now -- a bunch of barbarians at the gate in the form Salesforce, Google, and perhaps Mosso as well?

Bryce: Perhaps. Maybe it's something friendlier than barbarians, but there's one thing that's important to add to the discussion of openness, standards, and the point about Amazon being very flexible and something that you can adapt in a lot of ways. We aren't seeing the potential of cloud yet. We're going to see the real potential of cloud, when there's some interoperability and portability that allows just amazing applications and systems of systems to be built on top of all of these clouds.

That's when we're going to see how this shift in computing is going to change the world. When you can develop against multiple clouds, when you can get storage in multiple occasions, when you can get as much compute as you need to run a simulation or a model, and have thousand of servers, and all of these kinds of things together, that's when it's really going to be amazing.

To do that, you will see vendors building businesses on top of the cloud. We're not going to build every feature that's going to be implemented on our infrastructure. There are ecosystems that have developed around Amazon, us, and the other providers. And we know that ecosystems will start to join together, and we'll come up with some really great tools, some really great new technologies, that harness all this power. That's when this is going to be a very exciting space.

Gardner: Okay, Rourke, last comment to you. How do you view these cloud, permutations, particularly PaaS? Are they barbarians at the gate or liberators?

PaaS as 'liberator'

McNamara: I definitely view PaaS and some of these other permutations of cloud service as liberators. If you look at what PaaS really does for developers and IT organizations, it frees them from having to worry about a bunch of details that have nothing to do with their core business and don't even have anything to do with the application that they are writing.

It frees them from having to install platform software on a bunch of machines, putting those machines into racks, connecting them up to the management and monitoring infrastructure, and getting everything set-up so that those machines are fault-tolerant and the loads distributing appropriately. It frees them from making sure that they have the right machines to handle the load, and making sure that they are predicting load increases and capacity increase or requirement increases, and far enough in advance that they're able to buy new machines.

All that stuff has nothing to do with delivering new functionality to their business users. That's really what their job is, delivering new functionality to their business users. PaaS lets them focus ideally on delivering new functionality, and lets someone else worry about all of those of details.

Gardner: Picks and shovels, to the liberators, right?

McNamara: Exactly.

Kobielus: I second that. It's liberation, because, to carry forward the scenario that I described a little while ago, you should be able to develop your analytical data mart and test it inside an Amazon cloud. But, if the Google cloud gives you a cheaper hosting, then you should be able to flexibly migrate that entire analytical data mart after production to the Google cloud where it is hosted for X number of months and years, until you're ready to deploy your premises-based data warehousing cloud, a petabyte-scale cloud.

It should be migrated from Google to your premises, and back and forth, depending on your changing operational and performance needs. For this kind of a project, a data mart for data mining, the PaaS model should give you that flexibility and freedom of not having to worry excessively about the hosting issues.

Gardner: Well, we'll have to leave it there for today. Please allow me to thank our guests. Jim Kobielus, senior analyst at Forrester. I appreciate your time, Jim.

Kobielus: Sure.

Gardner: David A Kelly, president of Upside Research. I appreciate it, Dave.

Kelly: Always fun to be here.

Gardner: Mike Meehan, senior analyst at Current Analysis. Always a pleasure Mike.

Meehan: Thank you, Dana. I just want to add that Paas, is, as far as I know, a maker of Easter egg color dyes.

Gardner: It's rubbing off this time of year. There's another pun for you.

Bryce: It's full of PaaS-abilities.

Gardner: Jonathan, PaaS is not passé either. Jonathan Bryce, co-founder of Mosso at Rackspace. Thanks for joining us.

Bryce: Thanks for having me.

Gardner: And, Rourke McNamara, product marketing director at TIBCO Software. Thank you, Rourke.

McNamara: Thank you, Dana.

Gardner: I also want to thank our charter sponsor for the BriefingsDirect Analyst Insights Edition Podcast series, Active Endpoints, maker of the ActiveVos visual orchestration system, as well as continued underwriting from TIBCO Software.

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

Listen to the podcast. Download the podcast. Find it on iTunes 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.

Edited transcript of BriefingsDirect Analyst Insights Edition podcast, Vol. 40 on the promises of platform as a service and its apparent lack of traction among enterprise managers. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2009. All rights reserved.

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.