Saving Someone’s Day

Well it “It’s a dog eat dog world” for sure. But I guess this one would be best described as “Its a dog eat another dog alive, world”. Well everyone of aware of one of the biggest buy out story of this year. Oracle bought PeopleSoft for $10 b . and Oracle is proposing this one as a one of the strategic moves for their future. This is not one of the only attempt of Oracle to acquire big leaders, but this is the successful attempt to wipe out, such a big company and its people with a smart planning. Oracle tried to acquire players like Siebel and BEA in past also.

Now its someone should take an advantage of this whole situation, Big 3 did. Yes!. Its Microsoft , SAP and IBM.

• Microsoft discounted migration services,This will migrate customers from Peoplesoft application. So their 25% discount program will be over by end of mid this year. So customers will rush and there goes Microsoft revenue, up again. As they reported revenue growth for their 3rd quarter already up by 13%
• SAP buys TomorrowNow [1+]; Huge benefit for SAP going forward. Now they have their own way of spinning the wheel. with this deal, 75% credit towards mySAP ERP, discount for Netweaver integration platform
• IBM to buy Corio; Corio is one of the leading ASP for PeopleSoft and Oracle ERP, IBM will kill two stones with this, first it will strengthen its own Hosted ASP business. Second slowly go after customers like PeopleSoft and Oracle, as IBM has its own small business application initiative, to go on CRM market.

interestingly this will go on because its a race but with advantage to your competitors sometimes, whoever wins they need to maintain the reputation, but people who loose or who are watching winners closely, they keep an eye on next revolution and run for it.

is this good or bad for Open source and its forgoing future

Good from perspective of

Open source will be treated right from legal aspects, There will be a better open source adoption policy, chances for Open source compliance to become more formal

Bad from perspective of

Now enterprises will be skeptical about use of Open source technology inside the organization, because of possible legal threat with following loosing of millions of $$.

Bottom line, that brings up a point, Open source governance and right policy implementation to have a healthy environment going between open source vendors/legal experts/CIO’s

Open source initiative (OSI), approved Sun Microsystems’s CDDL, What does that mean in short?.

• Open Solaris
• Create a unhappiness in Linux community and other fellow open source people.
• Open source Patent giveaway war; With CDDL, Sun gives away all of its patents to dev community as compared to 500 IBM patents, Now there starts one more round of tug-of-war between these 2 big players.
• Open source Operating system group will be more happening, with 2 distinct groups (Solaris and Linux) forming to run against each other.
  

Torvalds says

“It will be hard for Sun to build a community like Linux. Looks like Sun is trying to play the same track as they did with Java, where they tried to control the whole evolving to maturing process of Java, So they loose real advantage of Open source”

Is this annoying or “Minority Report” age for customers ?.

Circuit City’s new approach to Customer Service. This changes how customers interact with products in a real store. Circuit City’s CIO Mike Jones, want to sell products, infer products and sales to customers. Reminds me of Minority report and presentation of the technology in that movie. Remember guy walking on the subway train station, Camera/Screen on the side of the platform identifies the person and gives the personal advertisements for that person. I knew this will be a future, but did not think it will be this fast.

Optimist will say ?

• Revolutionary idea, no representative needed. It is On Demand World.

Pessimist will say?

• Are you crazy!, it is annoying, I do not want headphone hanging on my head and screaming at my ear, picthing me about products wherever I focus my eye sight.

Well its a give and take world, Got to loose something to gain. Its a matter of preference.

Here are list of scenario summaries, which Circuit city wants to present to customer.

• Personal Thank you from the CEO to the customer who makes big buck purchase.
• Personal delivery of the product to customer’s home, based on availability of product in customer’s home address area.
• MP3 Player preloaded with customer’s favorite music
• Promotions based on customer’s interaction with the products and his intrest, RFID based smart cards.

How will competitors react to this infrastructure revolution. We will see it sooner than later.

This is amazing. Audioblogging From Kilimanjaro via satellite phone, that too as a memorial for another late officer. Truly remarkable job!. As they were audio blogging MP3 on to the site, they reached the summit.

Needless to say, How powerful this information age is, with tomorrow’s social engineering tools like Blogging(Audio/Video)/Wiki/Tagging it is all reachable within few seconds.

As Mitch Kapor said

“I think that for people who use software, in the long run, open-source products are going to be less expensive and of higher quality. Also, open-source products put more control into the hands of people and organizations that use the software, which is a good thing.”; in this recent article.

It is true, it takes a considerable amount of time for revolution, Open source products started growing from developers heart to CIO’s heart. It is a long transition from late 90’s till date.

As fundamental idea behind open source , Companies have lesser burdern from software cost and more of long term maintenance/service work. Infact it is not only with open source , even with commercial product vendors are facing this problem. There is no “new license” money, its all about Subscription/maintenance model ,
” “subscription” maintenance business as “an extremely high-margin business.” mentioned by Larry Ellison’s earlier this year in a earnings call, Have a look at this graph (from Forrester Research) of New licenses/Maintenance/Services. It shows Maintenance is a constant growth and reaches close to 40% of total revenue, following that Services superseded New licenses during 2001 to 2003.

So How is open source players are taking this trend?. By proposing services as business model for open source companies, building open source specialists; soon to become evangelists, Who will

• Promote and implement open source technologies around different stacks like LAMP/LAMJ and other components
• Provide support for existing open source platform and components for different customers.

Companies are taking this real seriously, We currently seeing following service trend for open source industry.

• New wave in Global Open source software services, Companies like SourceLabs, Spikesource; providing whole LAMP/LAMJ stack certification. Then Optaros, doing system integration and consulting.
• Big players support for established open source prdoducts. (HP’s support for JBoss/MySQL, which intern gives competitive edge against IBM/BEA)
• Open source vendors (JBoss/MySQL) driving services as one of the key business factors.
• Offshore SI/service providers developing open source services practices and expertise.

And there are companies like Apptility who wants to make open source adoption/compliance easier, along with services/support, Blackduck on compliance management.

Following diagram will show the transition of a concept to enterprise value element.

In a true sense it is redefining typical software services model, with the help of open source advocates and evangelists.

A true The Geronimo Effect will be felt soon. It makes me believe that it is highly possible, when Geronimo finally matures to the level of full blown J2EE deployment, probably it will be the first open source J2EE application server, which will be loved by the community. Apart from JBoss beating big player like IBM, Oracle and BEA in Enterprise market, which establishes the recognition and liking for strong open source reliable product. Reasons are numerous on why this happens, simplicity and $$ are key factors.

Geronimo has already started making waves back in late 2004 and already eating Web sphere/Weblogic’s breakfast.



Why Geronimo ?

• ASF ’s (Apache Software Foundation) License is more lenient as compared LGPL (JBoss) or GPL.
• Solid stack of previously popular enterprise products, e.g.Tomcat, the best Servlet container ever written. The tiniest few Kilobytes kernel, JBoss’s service driven kernel architecture.
• Full blown J2EE application server for enterprise wide service on open source platform.
• Huge community supporting Apache software Foundation products.
• Possible commercial support on service basis like JBoss.

After IBM gave away 100’s of patents to open source development community, suddenly patents and Intellectual Property becomes one of the key attributes for open source licensing domain.

A great move from IBM, after sitting on top of tons of open source projects, what a smart way to utilize one of the largest patent list under their umbrella.

It is true shared open source innovation, makes true senses when IP is respected and followed in a right direction.

That’s why FSF(Free Software Foundation)/Richard Stallman working on GPL next version, one of the most prominent and popular license in whole open source community. This rewrite is focused more for Patent and IP.

This one is a real nice blog about How to Blog and details about other blog leaders, comparisons

By the way, why blogger team can not push this basic and useful “Categories” feature?. There are some hacks/workarounds at OldCola. But I would love a true feature than doing all playing around with the code. I will wait and see.

This is the future of open source, when it gets to government arena, it have to have a potential to stir the vendor dominated nation.

Brazil government is going open source, They want to start right from the bottom of the stack. Javali is one of the initiative in this direction. They want to get java language itself under open source umbrella, and probably go from there.

Is this going to be the future trend, with government organizations, in selecting IT / Business infrastructure components ?. Is this how big enterprises are going to follow thru.

These enterprises and organizations do not mind paying for the services at all. As long as there is good value for money, they will be overwhelmed with the idea of free software(I mean it!), paid services.