Bailing Out Your Business with Open Source

Bailing Out Your Business with Open Source Open Source Forum 2009 Matt Asay VP, Business Development Alfresco www.alfresco.com

First, the Bad News

Times are tough

Moats to clean...
Duck houses to be maintained...
Horse manure to buy...
Helipad hedges to cut...
Dogs to feed...
Christmas trees to trim...
Second home payments to make...
And more....

2008 was bad; 2009 may be worse Getting worse (Gartner 2009)

46% of CIOs chopped their Q1 budgets

90% of these cut by at least 7%
Mostly head-count reductions and vendor renegotiations to achieve cost targets

Server sales dropped 25% in Q1 2009

But all is not as it seems...

The economy’s silver lining

Open source interest is growing 69% maintaining or increasing open source investments.

Less money (means more open source) Source: Gartner Number of respondents = 274; Mean summary: Three responses allowed. Survey Question: Select your organization’s top three most important reasons for using open-source software.

Why? Because open source works as advertised 87% 92% 86% 82% 84% 82% 91%

But Isn’t Open Source a Fad?

Open source is now a question of how , not whether The question is: What will you do with it? Whether measured in terms of lines of code added or new projects, open-source growth is phenomenal Source: Dirk Riehle, SAP

Open source is mainstream Source: Gartner 2008 Number of respondents = 274; Multiple responses allowed. Survey Question: Do you use, or plan to use in the next budget year, an open-source project or product as an alternative to commercial software? Across product segments, 100% of enterprises will use open source by 2010.

Better quality, more innovative software at a much lower price

“ Open source software solutions will directly compete with closed-source products in all …markets.”

85% of enterprises currently use OSS (The rest are lying)
45% use OSS for mission-critical applications (Continues to grow)

Why?

65% say open source has sparked innovation inside their companies
67% … for lowered costs

“ Lower TCO and flexibility to launch and develop cost-prohibitive projects continue to be top reasons for using OSS”

81% … for better quality software

Sources: Gartner (2008), CIO Insight (2006), IDC (2006)‏ “ Open source produces better software.”

Open source handles the important workloads Open source is becoming the heart of enterprise computing

This Is Open Source's Market

Open-source business models are right for 2009

Global support (24/7/365)

We handle serious mission-critical applications and scale

We respect customers' time

Only ECM experts in support

We respect customers' money

We deliver value or you don’t pay

1/10 th the cost of Documentum;
1/3 rd the cost of SharePoint

Simple per-CPU pricing

We fairly allocate risk

Subscription model
Try before you buy
Benefits of open source without the obligations

The open-source model lowers risk

Most IT projects fail
Open source de-risks software acquisition:

Try before you buy
Stop your subscription if the vendor stops providing value
Dramatically lower cost

Worst case:

Project dies and you’re out $xx,xxx or $xxx,xxx, not $x,xxx,xxx

IT project failure becomes less probabilistic and less painful

This isn't to say you're on your own

Time

Who has time to write (lots of) free software?
Answer: Those that are employed to do so

Interest

Who will take out the trash?

Aptitude

The higher up the stack you go, the fewer the developers

Familiarity with project

Poor documentation makes it hard to understand a project
Monolithic code base takes time to learn (M o st won’t bother)

So what will this do to your proprietary vendors?

Their response? L ess choice IBM acquires FileNet Oracle acquires Stellent Sun aquires MySQL (…only to be acquired by Oracle) Autonomy acquires Interwoven

email | matt.asay@alfresco.com twitter | twitter.com/mjasay blog | cnet.com/openroad