Enterprise Initiatives

Introduction

Over the past two decades, most companies have embraced the World Wide Web as a standard platform for delivering applications to consumers, partners, customers, and even internal end users. The web offers companies easier deployments, a standard browser interface that requires minimal training, and access anywhere in the world at anytime and on any device. The downside of web applications is the limitations of HTML and the ability to deliver rich content that compares to desktop applications. Enter RIA (rich internet applications) which gives web applications the richness of desktop applications with all the benefits of web. Adobe has been the leader in the space for years. Flex was first released in 2004. They have dominated the market place against various competitors, both commercial and open source. In 2007, Microsoft introduced their Silverlight product. Silverlight is the first real threat to Adobe’s Flex. The rest of this document will focus on the pros and cons of these technologies, possible outcomes, and what the impact of this RIA race will mean to vendors, companies, and consumers.

History of Flex and Silverlight

To provide a fair comparison of these two products, it is important to become familiar with the history of the Adobe Flex and Microsoft Silverlight products. Without understanding the different releases and product roadmaps, it becomes extremely challenging to perform an apples to apples comparison.

Flex version 1.0 was first released in March of 2004. Flex requires Macromedia’s Flash runtime which is a virtual machine that runs on any operating system. In 2006, Adobe released three Beta versions of Flex 2.0 before delivering the final 2.0 version in June of the same year. The new version was based on Eclipse, an open source development platform that is popular among most Java development environments. Coinciding with this release was a new release of ActionScript 3. ActionScript is the core development language of the popular Flash Player. In 2007, Adobe released three Beta versions of Flex 3.0 with the final production 3.0 release delivered on February 25, 2008. The most significant change in this release was to make the Flex SDK an open source product. Now developers were free to contribute to the SDK which was well received by the developer community. In addition to major enhancements including integration with Adobe’s Creative Suites products, Adobe also released the first version of their own runtime called Adobe Air (formerly called Apollo). The next version (4.0) is scheduled for release in 2009. We can expect a Beta release late this year. The features have not yet been announced but one can assume that they will be addressing some of the areas that Silverlight has an advantage, including better integration with .Net.

Silverlight is a web browser plug-in that marks the first Microsoft product that is truly cross platform and cross browser compatible. The first release of Silverlight was delivered in April 2007. The focus in this release was more geared towards multimedia and lacked many features that Flex 2.0 and the 3.0 Beta version had at that time. Silverlight 1.0 depends on XAML as the underlying development language. XAML is an extendable XML language that was created by Microsoft and used extensively with the Windows .Net 3.0 framework. The next version of Silverlight, version 2.0 is targeted for late summer/early fall of 2008. The first Beta version was released in March of this year. The big news for 2.0 is the integration with Visual Studio. Now developers can use development languages that they are familiar with like C# and Visual Basic. Another much needed feature is the addition of robust debugging functionality and full set of controls for developers.

It is important to understand the major feature sets of each release. There is heavy debate on which product is best. Many Adobe fans compare Flex 3.0 to Silverlight 1.0. There is no comparison. Silverlight 1.0 was focused on getting a product out in the market place while the development team focused on creating a more robust version (now named 2.0). The Microsoft supporters, however, talk about the features in 2.0 that do not exist yet. This is not a fair comparison either since Flex also has a very promising feature set in their future release. For the remainder of this document, I will focus on Flex 3.0 versus Silverlight 2.0.

Strengths and weaknesses of Flex

Adobe Flex has a huge advantage over Microsoft Silverlight in product maturity, developer community following, and production deployments. The biggest advantage, however, is that the Flash runtime is installed on well over 90% of all PCs and laptops across the world (see Figure 1).

Figure 1

The Flash runtime also works on a variety of platforms (Windows, Mac, Linux, Solaris, HP-UX, Pocket PC, OS/2, and several others). Flash is viewable in over 85% of all browsers. Since Flex runs on the Flash Player, it is truly a cross platform, cross browser product with world wide acceptance. There is also a strong developer community and the Flex products are mature since they have been through three major release cycles. Another advantage that Flex has is that many major vendors are using Flex to deliver rich content. Microstrategy leverages Flex to deliver robust, drillable result sets and even Flash based emails to end users. Google (Google Maps), Yahoo (Messenger), IBM, SAP, E-Trade, and Business Objects are just a few of the major vendors and service providers who rely on Flex to deliver rich user experiences to their customers.

Another big benefit of Flex is that the SDK is now open source. This creates several benefits. First, testing of Flex now has thousands more eyes that can find bugs and submit them back into the community. Going open source also allows the Flex community to help drive the products direction and feature sets. Making Flex open source is also a good way to combat Microsoft, who is the nemesis of most open source advocates.

One of the biggest complaints I have heard about Flex is the learning curve required for developers. Flex uses ActionScript 3 which is a proprietary language that is required for running on the Flash Player. This is yet another language that developers must learn and is not as intuitive as Java and C#. This can lead to high costs for hiring companies and must be considered when calculating the total cost of ownership.

Strengths and weaknesses of Silverlight

Microsoft is putting together a great product to compete with Flex. In my opinion, they are still a couple of years away from matching Flex in features and community strength. However, Microsoft’s marketing capabilities coupled with their ability to target developers can help Microsoft make major gains in market share in the near future. Silverlight 2.0 allows developers to code in C# and VB which greatly reduces the learning curve. This can be a major selling point to companies that are planning to invest in RIA technologies in the future. Many companies already rely heavily on Microsoft technologies and may see Silverlight as a natural extension to their existing development stack. Microsoft also has an incredible amount of cash available to them to steer this product in whatever direction they see fit. They have already partnered with Major League Baseball and the Olympics which has created a tremendous amount of positive marketing and brand recognition.

The weaknesses of Silverlight are plenty, but when put into perspective of how long they have been in the RIA space (first release in April 2007) they have made tremendous strides in this area. First of all, Microsoft is the new kid on the block and does not have the track record of stability, performance, and maturity of the well established Flex product line. The biggest challenge Microsoft faces is trying to get the Silverlight plug-in installed on at least 80% of the PCs and laptops in the market place. If you look at Figure 1 above, you will see that the top Microsoft product installed on PCs is Windows Media Player which is slightly over 80%. This product has been out for several years so it would be unrealistic to expect the Silverlight plug-in to reach critical mass any time soon.

Silverlight currently only runs on Windows and the Mac, although an open source project called Moonlight is underway to allow it to run on Linux. Back in May of this year, Roger Magoulas from O’Reilly shared this chart (Figure 2).

Figure 2

This chart shows that book sales of Flash are selling 6-7 times higher then Silverlight. In March of this year, Eric Lai of Computerworld wrote an article comparing job postings for Flash versus Silverlight on the major job boards. His study showed that Flash skills were in demand about 41 times higher than Silverlight. Both the study on books and jobs are not extremely scientific by any means, but what they do show is that Silverlight has a long way to go to become mainstream.

Another problem Microsoft is facing is consumer trust. Many consumers have heard all of Microsoft’s promises of cross platform capabilities before only to see them not deliver on their promise. Microsoft’s cash cow for years has been their operating system. Many consumers simply can’t trust any message from Microsoft which goes against their core strategy of tying customers to their platform. Security is another issue. Microsoft does not have the greatest reputation for secure software. How many corporations are willing to roll out another Microsoft product to all of their desktops? Some may argue that Flash is no more secure, but it is already on almost every machine out there.

Possible Outcomes

There are four possible outcomes that I see. The first is that Flex will continue to dominate the market place due to the maturity of their existing products, the widespread use and acceptance of Flash, and the large investments made by major software vendors in Flex technology. Microsoft will steal some market share but in the end it will be another failed attempt to conquer the web. I feel that this is the most likely scenario. Microsoft is already losing market share in the browser war and the operating system war, although they still have a tremendous lead over their competitors. Google is becoming a dominant force on the web and open source technologies are dominating the Web 2.0 world. In every aspect of computing, Microsoft is dealing with stronger competition then they have ever seen before. RIA will be even more challenging because they are not the leader in this space.

The second most likely option that I see is that Silverlight matches Flex’s market share. The big advantage that Microsoft has is the development environment and the fact that Flex currently does not integrate with .Net backends (although they are working on it). Microsoft already has a huge developer community and many of these people can easily be persuaded to adopt Silverlight as their RIA of choice. For companies that produce consumer facing content or control the end user client machines, the Silverlight plug-in issue is not that big of a deal. Many consumers are willing to download Silverlight plug-in just as well as they will download Flash, QuickTime, and others. It is the companies that deliver applications to other enterprises that will have the challenge. As a chief architect for a medium size company, one of our criteria for selecting vendor tools is that the tool is zero-footprint or requires no installation of software on client PCs. Many other IT shops will have the same constraint because of the B2B nature of their applications. If you have no control over the client’s desktop, forcing clients to push software out on their network can be a huge show stopper.

A third possible outcome is Silverlight will fail to gain any significant market share. I find this highly unlikely. Microsoft has a ton of money and smart people behind this product. Their product vision appears to be very solid on the surface and their initial product offering is impressive for the short amount of time that they have been in the RIA space. They should easily capitalize on the numerous loyal Microsoft shops that are already in place today and I expect them to strike several more big partnerships similar to the MLB deal. I think that over the next 2-3 years Silverlight will capture about 20-30% of the market share but no more.

A fourth possible outcome is that more competition will flood the market and other products will also compete heavily for market share. JavaFx and open source project Open Laszlo are already competing, but I believe this will be a two horse race between Flex and Silverlight.

What is the impact?

This fierce competition means different things to different constituents. First let’s look at the impact to the vendors. Software vendors must keep a close eye on this RIA race. Those supporting Flex today need to make a decision whether or not they want to add support for Silverlight as well. Supporting both obviously increases the cost of developing and supporting their products. Since Flash is everywhere, they need to consider how strategic it will be to support Silverlight. Some vendors are already making the jump but others will wait and see how widely accepted Silverlight is before they assign resources to making their products support Silverlight.

Non-software companies also have a big decision to make. For companies already using Flex, there must be some compelling reasons to switch. For those evaluating RIA for the first time, they have a tough decision to make. Do they play it safe and go with the proven product in Flex, or do they buy into the marketing hype and go with the promises of Silverlight. Silverlight does have a compelling TCO by enabling developers to leverage Visual Studio as opposed to having to learn ActionScript 3.

The consumer is the least impacted. For consumers it is simply a matter of downloading the plug-in or not. The people that won’t download the plug-in are typically anti Microsoft anyway. So Microsoft will continue to target popular providers of rich content for partnerships to get more installs of the Silverlight plug-in throughout the world.

Conclusion

I expect Silverlight to gain market share over the next two to three years but still see Flex prevailing as the industry leader in the long run. The best news is that the competition will force both products to be more innovative. Both products will aggressively address their weaknesses and combat any new features that their competitor offers. This is great news for vendors, companies, and consumers. We should expect to see huge advancements of features and functionality from both of these products over the next few years. We should also expect to see improvements in speed, security, ease of use as both Flex and Silverlight battle for the RIA throne.

I recently wrote a post called Microsoft Free - One year later that spoke about my experience using all open source products in a corporate environment with mainly Microsoft products. The guys at Gustygeeks.com invited me to be their guest on their weekly show. I recorded a portion of the show which you can hear by clicking play on the media player below. Enjoy!

Get your own playlist at snapdrive.net!

In May of 2007 I wrote a post called Open Source and Microsoft Free. Little did I know that this post would show up on Digg, Slashdot, Craigslist, and several other popular web sites and become a platform for both the Linux and Microsoft camps to wage yet another flame war.

This whole "Microsoft free" experiment started when a colleague of mine challenged me to eat my own dog food after reading many of my posts about my dabbling with open source technologies. The next day, after a few blue screens of death and various issues with Outlook, I grabbed a Ubuntu CD and installed it on my laptop....at work! From that day forward, I have not used a single Microsoft product at work. It has been one year now and I have survived with Thunderbird and Evolution, Open Office, Firefox, and many other open source replacements for Microsoft products.

I put "Microsoft free" in quotes because there are a few exceptions. First, I did install IE 6.0 under wine for that rare occasion that I stumble across a website that only works on IE. Second, there is no answer for Visio. Most of the Visio diagrams that I needed to read were embedded in design documents in Word which I can read with Open Office Writer. But for those that I needed Visio for, I opened them at home on my XP box (I have 1 XP, 1 Vista, and 5 Linux boxes at home). I also used Visio at home when I had to create Visio diagrams. The issue is Visio's proprietary format is not available for developers to write a translation utility for.

With those two issues aside, which represents about 1% of my overall usage on my laptop, my Open Source experience was nearly flawless. Open Office worked remarkably well both receiving Microsoft Office files and creating files in Office format. I exchanged literally thousands of documents between Microsoft Office and Open Office. I never encountered a single issue with Word and Excel and occasionally encountered minor formatting issues with Power Point files. The formatting issues where nothing more then some minor placement issues which probably occurred less then 5% of the time.

Over the course of the year I experimented with Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Freespire, Mepis, and PCLinuxOS. I settled on Kubuntu and recently upgraded with ease to the latest version, Hardy Heron. Here is my analysis of the different Linux distros from last fall. With this "Microsoft free" laptop I have coexisted with 1000+ employees who use XP and various verions of Office including 2007 (the 2007 compatibility add-on works fine). I also delivered presentations at conferences using Open Office Impress and traveled across the country and internationally with no issues with wireless connectivity.

I am not in any camps. I use XP and Linux at home and like both. I gave Outlook the boot years ago at home and do just fine with Thunderbird. It has every feature I need. I do however have problems with Vista. But my message here is not about recommending what tools that my readers should use. My message is that I performed at a high level at work while using Linux, Open Office, and other open source products. These tools did not hinder my ability to do my job and did not impact anyone else at my job. I was able to productively coexist with no Microsoft tools in a Microsoft shop. That is all I am trying to say.

I am not going to recommend to anybody that they change their company standards away from Microsoft. What I will tell you is that open source is a viable alternative that can be used in a production environment. So when you see flame wars where the two camps argue back and forth about their favorite technology, you can point to this post when people claim that Linux and Open Office just won't work in the work place. I have validated that they do work for over 365 days now. Whether we should use these tools at work is a whole different story that really depends on factors like corporate culture, skill sets, budgets, user base, executive support, and many others.

All I can say is that for the last year, I have been using Open Source exclusively and I am loving it!

On the ITToolbox community, we have some very passionate bloggers both for and against open source software (OSS). I am a proponent of both OSS and proprietary software. As an architect, I view both of these as tools in my toolbox. The trick is to know when to use the right tool for the right job. It is unfortunate that some people think there is no place for OSS. Here are a few of the myths (FUD) that I continue to hear from people who insist on depriving their company from leveraging OSS tools even when it may be the best solution for a given problem.

1. OSS is bad for the economy and defies the values of capitalism
   
2. OSS support is bad, slow, and/or non-existent
3. OSS products are second rate ("created in the garage" mentality)
   
4. OSS can't be good because it is free
   

Myth #1 - OSS is bad for the economy
This could not be further from the truth. Here is a real life scenario from my trip to France last week.

One of our business partners is in the software development business. They are a small company with small IT budgets whose customers are primarily in the retail industry, mainly grocery chains. The retail grocery industry is a very low margin business and one where companies are in real danger of being crushed by the likes of Walmart and Carrefour. These companies are extremely frugal and the big boys have a major say in the price of goods and services. One of our partner's core strategies is to leverage open source technologies to keep both their costs down and to keep the cost of their solutions down. Due to privacy concerns, some of these retailers are demanding that solutions providers shift from the current ASP or SAAS models to a shrink-wrapped model (buying the software and running it locally). This is currently not feasible for companies heavily invested in proprietary software due to the licensing costs of vendor software that is involved. The retailer would have to pay for the operating system, the database, the application server, the BPM tools, the middleware, etc. This would add up to a hefty bill. Using OSS like the LAMP suite (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PhP) and Intalio for BPM, this solution becomes affordable and a competitive advantage to sell to the hundreds of retailers in this space.

Please read this article from Wired called Free! Why $0.00 is the Future of Business so you will understand my next point. Here is an excerpt from the article.

Technology is giving companies greater flexibility in how broadly they can define their markets, allowing them more freedom to give away products or services to one set of customers while selling to another set.

Let's look at this blog for starters. I use free tools to publish my lessons learned and ideas on both Blogspot and ITToolbox. In both cases, a software product and a service was offered to me for free. In return, Google and ITToolbox get value by increasing traffic which increases advertising revenue. I paid nothing for the software or the services. I dedicate a lot of my personal time and expertise to my blogs because I get recognition, increase my network, and I learn from others. So in this case, "Free" is actually a revenue generator and is good for the economy. In the example above, free software allows my company and our business partner to compete by controlling our costs. These OSS products allow us to generate revenue and allows the retailers to improve their products and services by leveraging our loyalty marketing solutions. Once again, "Free" is generating revenue.

The anti-OSS folks argue that OSS is taking food off the plates of developers and giants like Microsoft. Yes this is not good news for Microsoft but there is more to the world's economy then the market share of software giants. Without OSS, this new surge in Social Networking would not be what it is today. Look at all of these new startup companies that have emerged over the last few years. Starting a Internet company from the ground up has never been more affordable. Look at tools like Twitter, Facebook, Wordpress, MediWiki, Joomla and others. These tools are changing the way the world communicates and they are all free. The more collaborative the world is, the stronger the global economy gets. These are all good for the economy.

I believe if people would stop thinking of OSS as Linux versus Windows, we could look past our "religious" beliefs about our favorite operating system and start focusing on things like controlling costs, share holder value, flexibility, negotiating power against vendors, and more. In part two I will discuss the myth about support for OSS. Until then, I look forward to the debate that follows. I ask that we keep it professional!

As I mentioned in the past, I contribute to the Open Office project in the area of marketing. I found this great post today about switching to Office and I thought I'd pass it along.

read more | digg story

I am doing an experiment at home. I recently purchased two new laptops from Dell for my wife and daughter for their birthday. As I wrote in a previous article, these laptops came loaded with Vista. Vista has completely frustrated my family because of the poor performance, the bugs, and the interface. My wife refuses to use her new laptop so I gave it to my son. I took my daughter's old PC (Dell 4300s with 1.7 GHz, 256MB memory, 40GB disk) that was performing poorly on XP and installed Kubuntu 7.04 on it. The install was incredibly simple despite the myth that Linux is hard to install. The total install took about 70 minutes. Most of that was due to the time it took to partition a very old hard drive. Once the install completed I plugged the PC into my Linksys access point and just like that I was up and running. I was able to see my shared folders on my XP machine and print to my Lexmark x73 scanner/printer.

As I have written in the past, I use Ubuntu at work. A friend of mine recommended Kubuntu so I tested it out at home. Kubuntu has a very nice user friendly interface. It's desktop manager is actually similar to Vista's. Kubuntu comes preloaded with Open Office, chat, dvd burning software, graphics software, the Konquerer browser, and many more open source software packages. This is the first time I used Konquerer and I found it to be equal to if not better then Firefox.

Like Ubuntu's package manager, Kubuntu has the Adept Manager which provides a simple user interface for installing software. For those users who are not hardcore Linux geeks and don't want to mess around with tar files and the like, Adept Manager is the tool for you. There are literally thousands of open source products listed by category and completely searchable. I added Wine, Thunderbird, Firefox, Gimp, and a hand full of other popular tools. I simply clicked the check box next to the desired software, clicked apply, and the Adept Manager did the rest. Who says Linux is hard to install?



So now that I have this up and running on my slowest and oldest machine, I am going to have my wife and kids test it out to see if it meets their needs. If they are comfortable using Kubuntu, which I expect they will be, I will be kicking Vista out of my house. I will always have my Dell XPS gaming machine with XP on it for the rare times where they can't get their needs met on Linux. So far the only thing I can come up with is some of the games we play. Most of the PC usage in my house is internet surfing, email, and office. We have been using Open Office, Firefox, and Thunderbird for years, so this should be a simple transition.

The next experiment will be my parents. I still have to reset the clock on their VCR everytime I go to their house. All they do is read email, surf a few web sites, and play Spades and Mahjong. I am giving them my son's old computer, which is a very good machine, and taking back their old PC. I will mess around with Mepis on that PC. Once I get that installed I will give it back to them with a wireless USB adapter and see how they adapt to Linux. They already struggle with XP so anything will be a challenge for them. If my parents are able to use Linux, then anyone can use it. I'll provide an update on their Linux experience in the next few weeks, assuming that I find time to get them set up.

I wrote Vista first impressions a few weeks ago and shared my less then happy initial experiences with Vista on the new laptop I bought for my wife. It has been two weeks now and my wife, a typical non-technical user, refuses to use the new laptop. She no longer thinks her four year old laptop running XP is slow because it is twice as fast as her brand spanking new laptop with the resource gobbling Vista on it. So my kids share this laptop and I constantly hear screams of "it's shutting down again!", "why is this so slow?", and "can we trade it in?". This is not what I had in mind when I dropped a grand on the new Dell.

So I keep searching the web to see if anyone is happy with Vista. I go to Microsoft friendly websites like eWeek and PCMag.com and find articles like these:

Night of the Living Vista

The Vista Irrelevancy

Ok, so it's not just me, a pro-Linux guy who is feeling the pain. Popular blogger and pro-Microsoft fan Chris Perillo is not a big fan of Vista either. The more I search the more complaining I encounter. I realize that some of this is people's resistance to change. But I don't recall an all out revolt like this when XP came out. When XP came out, it was a significant improvement over the blue screen, crashing Win95 & Win98 operating systems. Those two versions were absolutely pitiful from a reliability and performance standpoint.

So what the heck was Ballmer and the boys thinking when they spent years developing this bloated resource consuming beast they call Vista? Were they seriously targeting business? Any IT shop that would buy all new computers to upgrade to Vista definitely does not understand the economics of business. Where is the ROI? What do the users get for the investment? Are they ready for the increase in support calls? I've said it before and I'll say it again, the majority of business users spend most of their time using email, browsers, or a third party application (CRM, ERP, etc.). Most users don't need a ton of hardware to perform their daily tasks. Doesn't Microsoft understand this?

For me, I have two options. First is to call Dell and beg for an XP license so I can get off of Vista or second, move to Linux. With the new laptop, we now have five machines in the house. I am moving three to Ubuntu and keeping two on XP. My wife doesn't play any games so she will be fine on Ubuntu. She has been using Firefox, Open Office, and Thunderbird on XP for years so the switch to Linux will be simple for her. My kids play a few Microsoft games like Zoo Tycoon so they will need XP. For me, the only thing I need XP for is Battlefield 2. I have been using Ubuntu at work for six months now and don't miss the constant rebooting, messed up registries, and blue screens.

Yesterday I was on the new laptop and I dragged the Open Office install and setup icon on the desktop to the recycle bin and I got a status bar that went on for over a minute. I finally canceled it, highlighted the icon, and hit the delete key and it deleted it. Little annoyances like this are becoming so common in Vista that I start to question Microsoft's ability to test. We are talking about a new laptop with next to no new software installed on it and minimal usage thus far. What the heck is the user experience going to be like after my kids mess with the laptop for the next few months? All I now is that if my team at work wrote software this bad we would be out of a job.

I'll leave you with this funny Vista installation video on YouTube.

Both Adobe and Microsoft are fighting hard to be the preferred vendor for RIA development. They both are awesome tools that will change the way we use the web in years to come. But when it comes to deployment, there is only one option for me and that is Flex. The main reason, 99% of all PCs and laptops have Flash installed on it.
If you look at this chart you don't even see the Silverlight plugin. That is because it is so new that it will take a while to penetrate the market. But even Microsoft's most popular desktop add-on, Microsoft Windows Media Player, only reaches 83.6% of the desktops.

Silverlight will struggle to get widely adopted just like Winforms did. The problem with Winforms is it requires the .Net framework to be installed on the client PC. According to Microsoft's own website, the .Net framework is at about a 58% penetration rate. Keep in mind that the framework only comes into play on Windows operating systems. I don't know about you, but I won't have any success convincing all of my 500 manufacturer and retailer clients to install the framework on all of their desktops. But my Flash applications will work fine since they all already have Flash installed, regardless of which operating system they run.

Microsoft did learn from the failed approach with Winforms and addresses this issue with the Silverlight plugin. The problem now for Microsoft is how will they get the necessary penetration that customers like me require. Microsoft is also working with the open source community so Silverlight will work on Linux (see Moonlight). This is a great strategy. But I can't wait 2-3 years until Silverlight penetrates over 90% of the laptops and PCs across all operating systems.

Don't get me wrong, I like what I have seen (download plugin at own risk) from Silverlight as far as ease of use and functionality. If you are building applications for users that you have total control of their desktop, then Silverlight is an awesome choice for you. But for those of us who have no control over the client, Adobe Flex beats Silverlight every time.

1. Reduce dependency on closed source vendors. Stop being dragged through constant product upgrades that you are forced to do to stay on a supported version of the product. Aren't you tired of telling your customers to wait because you have to spend a month or two upgrading to version 7.01G of Product X and following it up with an incremental hot fix?
   
2. Your annual budget does not keep up with increases in software maintenance costs and increased costs of employee health care. Your budget remains flat, you bought five new tools last year with new annual costs in the range of 18-20% of the original purchase price for "gold support", and your employees' health care costs shot up 25% again. What gives?
   
3. More access to tools. You can get your hands a variety of development and testing tools, project and portfolio management tools, network monitoring, security, content management, etc. without having to ask the boss man for a few hundred thousand green backs.
   
4. Try before you buy. Are you getting ready to invest in SOA, BPM, or ECM? Why not do a prototype with out spending huge sums of money? First of all, it allows you to get familiar with the tools so you can be educated when you go through the vendor evaluation process. Second of all, you might find that the tool can do the job and you don't need to lock yourself in to another vendor.
   
5. Great support and a 24/7 online community that responds quickly. Despite the myths that you can't get support for open source software, the leading communities provide support far superior to most closed source vendors. Most communities have a great knowledgebase or wiki for self service support. You can also post a question and one of the hundreds of community members throughout the world will most likely respond in minutes. Make sure you chose software with strong community backing.
   
6. Access to source code and the ability to customize if you desire. You can see the code, change the code, and even submit your enhancements and/or fixes back to the community to be peer reviewed and possibly added to the next build. No longer do you need to wait for a vendor roadmap that doesn't have the feature you need until their Excalibur release in the Fall of 2009.
   
7. Great negotiating power when dealing with closed source vendors. Tired of vendors pushing you around because you don't have options? I wonder if companies like Microsoft would be more willing to be flexible with their pricing if you have 20 desktops running Ubuntu as an alternative desktop pilot initiative.
   
8. Feature set is not bloated and is driven by collaboration amongst the community. Tired of products that consume huge amounts of memory and CPU power for the 2000 eye candy features that you will never use? With open source software, most features are driven by community demand. Closed vendors have to create one more feature then their competitors to get the edge in the marketplace.
   
9. More secure then most closed source vendors. This topic is highly debated, but studies like this one from Trend Micro show that open source software is typically more secure.
   
10. Bug fixes are implemented faster then closed source vendors. Actually, many bugs are fixed by the community before they are even reported by the users.

Oh, and #11.....it's Free!

A few months ago, I wrote an article called Open Source and Microsoft Free which discussed my switch from Microsoft XP to Ubuntu at work. In that article I discussed how after seven weeks, I was able to do my job with next to no issues. At the end of the article I recommended a small Linux pilot:

The worst thing that can happen with a small pilot is that you discover that Linux won't work for your organization. At least then you can sleep at night knowing you did your homework and made a strategic decision based on real information.

I have now been Microsoft free at work for almost five months. We had our Linux pilot kickoff meeting yesterday and are preparing to pilot Linux, Open Office, Evolution email client (not replacing Exchange), and Firefox as the standard Open Source image. We have not yet selected which distribution of Linux we want to pilot (we have some more research to do here). For applications that require a Microsoft operating system we have two options. First, we will use Wine to install applications like Visio and IE for those drawings or activeX enabled web sites that don't have Open Source solutions at this time. The second option is to leverage one of our Citrix servers to host applications that will not work well without Microsoft products. We can simply consolidate all of these applications on a single Citrix server and install the Citrix client on each Linux user's desktop.

An important requirement of this pilot is to make sure we address all of the desktop standards that are enforced on our Windows desktops. That means we must address desktop lockdowns, patch management, data encryption and cryptography, virus scanning, and many other security and management features. Our current action item is to review all of these standards and present how we will address each one on our Linux desktops.

For this first pilot we agreed to keep it simple. We will select one Linux distribution, chose a small group of 5-6 users within IT, create a standard image for all pilot users, and create a self sufficient support plan so we don't interfere with the desktop team's day to day commitments. One thing I learned from all of the feedback I received from the last article and from talking to the management team of the desktop group is that doing this in stealth mode can be disruptive and a breach of security. Although the stealth mode initiative got us to this point, I regret not taking a more formal and open approach to a pilot. What I found is that my world is not so anti open source after all. In fact, having an Open Source strategy with an active Linux pilot gives you great leverage the next time you negotiate with Microsoft for Vista and Office 2007 licensing!

Our immediate goal is to collect information to understand the potential usability and support challenges of an enterprise Linux desktop solution. Do I think that we will ever replace Windows at work? Heck no. Do I think we have a substantial amount of users who can be fully functional without the costs of a Microsoft computing environment? Heck yes. The majority of PC and laptop users barely utilize the power of their hardware. They spend most of their time in email, a browser, and in Office. There is always the power users who have much more advanced requirements. But for the average computer user, the basic usage can easily be replaced with Open Source solutions.

I will continue to write periodic updates about our lessons learned over the next several months. I would welcome constructive feedback and would love to hear your experiences if you have been down this road before.

I was on Microsoft's website trying to understand the business benefits of upgrading to Vista. I found this article called Key reasons to upgrade to Windows Vista. To sum it up, here are the four reasons from Microsoft that justify this expensive upgrade:

1. Empowering users to find and use information
2. Enabling mobile workers to stay connected and productive in and out of office
3. Helping companies to make corporate systems and information more secure
4. Making it easier to deploy and manage company PCs

That's it. I would think that corporations would like more business value to justify the cost of hardware upgrades and PC purchases that will be required to run Vista. I can only think of two reasons to upgrade to Vista.

1. XP will eventually not be supported by Microsoft (currently targeted for 2014).
2. As other businesses upgrade, your company will not be able to open Office 2007 documents unless you install the Office Compatibility Pack.

Now let's discuss Microsoft's four reasons to upgrade. First, the improvements in searching for data. I use Google Desktop which gives me Google's world class search functionality across all my files and emails. The cost...Zero! It runs great on XP. No need to upgrade for this.

Second, enable mobile workforce. A lot of nice to have's here. Most companies already have tools that address the security and the collaboration. These features do not justify upgrading all of the hardware in your enterprise, especially when most of your hardware is not mobile.

Third, security. Wasn't this one of the selling points for going to XP. I feel like Bill Murray in Ground Hog's Day. Security is one of the main reasons why people are looking at alternative operating systems. Yes we need better security. Do I think that Vista is the answer? The jury is still out.

And finally, easier desktop management. These are commendable features. Many companies already have enterprise tools for managing their desktops and others are already moving to a desktop server approach that centrally manages desktop images and automatically updates client PCs when they connect to the network. I think the advancements in desktop management in Vista are great, but it does not justify the upgrade by itself.

So of the four reasons to upgrade to Vista giving to us by Microsoft, only security is compelling enough for me to even consider it. The shelf life of XP is the real business driver. We can argue all day long whether Vista is more secure then XP or any other OS for that matter, but other then a few reports from Microsoft's own Jeff Jones, I haven't seen any compelling facts to make me want to start an upgrade tomorrow.

I did stumble across a good article from Kelly Martin from SecurityFocus called The New Vista Waiting Game. He predicts that XP will be the corporate standard for years to come. Here is a quote from the article:

“ Despite all the coming advertising and sales pitches about early Vista installations, most businesses would be foolish to upgrade to Vista in the coming year. Businesses want stable, reliable environments. They want to see service packs that address problems even before they encounter them. They want secure environments as well, but to senior executives and other decision makers, this is still a function of Security Risk Management that can be mitigated in various different ways. ”

The good news is that XP will be supported for several more years. That gives corporations time to wait for Vista to become more stable and mature. It also gives corporations time to test different distributions of Linux and have an alternative to Vista once XP gets put out to pasture.

According to opensource.org:

the promise of open source is better quality, higher reliability, more flexibility, lower cost, and an end to predatory vendor lock-in.

But that it is not the biggest driver for our Open Source strategy at my shop. One of our biggest drivers is budget constraints. Every year our IT budget remains flat or increases modestly. When you throw in merit increases, promotions, rising health care costs, and maintenance on software and services acquired during the year, you must get creative to stay within budget. With the exception of Linux on some of our back end servers, most of our enterprise software comes from the major vendors like IBM, Microsoft, BEA, Oracle and many other big names. But when it comes to developing software, it is hard to justify spending big dollars on the large numbers of tools we need to do our job when there are cost effective alternatives.

Our Open Source strategy that we are putting together addresses this. The purpose of our strategy is two-fold. First, we must educate our peers in the enterprise about Open Source. There are many myths that must be addressed to get everyone on board and feeling comfortable when leveraging Open Source. Tim O'Reilly listed 10 myths about Open Source in this 1999 article that still prevails today. Here are a few myths that we will address in our strategy:

Myth #1. It's all about Linux versus Windows.

Myth #2. Open Source Software Isn't Reliable or Supported.

Myth #3. Open Source projects are written by a small group of amateurs in their friend's garage.

Myth #4. The Open Source movement isn't sustainable, since people will stop developing free software once they see others making lots of money from their efforts.

Debunking Myth 1
Go to this page on Sourceforge.net and you will see the wide range of software categories that have active and established Open Source projects. If you wanted to, you could run your entire enterprise on Open Source. There is more to Open Source then Linux on the desktop.

Debunking Myth 2
For well established Open Source projects, it is not uncommon that you can get faster and better support in forums then from the expensive "Gold Support" that the major software providers charge you an arm and a leg for each year. It is not uncommon for small and medium customers to see unacceptable levels of support despite being a paying customer. The less money you spend with a vendor the less pull you have escalating support issues. There are plenty of Open Source service providers who provide support for a suite of Open Source products which is an extremely cost effective way of doing business. Traditionally, we pay vendors 18-20% of the cost of the original purchase price of each product. Support and maintenance can take up a huge chunk of an IT budget. With the service provider approach, we can pay the provider one flat fee and get support for several products at a much cheaper rate. What is even better is that the service providers core competency is support. That's all they do and their mission is to do it well. For purchased software, support is pure overhead and usually not the strength of the company.

Debunking Myth 3
Some of the most popular Open Source projects have hundreds or even thousands of developers world wide contributing to the overall code base. Scores of people respond to questions and support issues often within minutes after posting on the forums.

Debunking Myth 4
I wrote an article called Still Afraid of Open Source a while back that discussed how companies like Google and Yahoo are leveraging Open Source while the big guns like IBM, BEA, and Sun are investing big money in support of open source initiatives

The second purpose of our strategy is to identify software needs that we currently can't fulfill with our existing budgets. There are many development, testing, and software development lifecycle tools that we could benefit from but never have the funds to acquire. We need additional testing tools for our SOA initiative, a new defect tracking system, a portfolio management suite, and many others.

By putting a strategy together that identifies needs while addressing the concerns that people might have with Open Source products, we stand a better chance of fulfilling our team's needs with the support of our management.

Once we create a culture that sees value in Open Source, then we can start talking about evaluating Linux as an alternative to Windows when Microsoft drops support of XP in the future. I wrote this article called Open Source and Microsoft Free that discussed why I believe it is important to at least test Linux to understand what the issues would be in a production environment.

The worst thing that can happen with a small pilot is that you discover that Linux won't work for your organization. At least then you can sleep at night knowing you did your homework and made a strategic decision based on real information.

So what is your Open Source strategy? When you evaluate software, are Open Source products even considered? If it was your money, would you think differently or do you always buy the biggest and most expensive toys? As IT professionals, our job is to bring value to the organization. If you are not even considering Open Source alternatives for any solution, are you really looking out for the best interests of your company?

I stumbled across this webcast that contains a 26 minute video explaining Microsoft's virtual licensing. When you need to spend a half hour just trying to figure out how you are getting shafted on licensing then it is time to look for alternatives.


Video: Licensing Microsoft Servers for Virtualization

Oh, and by the way, there are nice alternatives to VMWare also.

A few weeks ago I posted a few articles about Open Source (Still afraid of Open Source?, Eating my own dog food, and Open Source and loving it!). I have now been Microsoft-Free at work for about 7 weeks. I have also found solutions for almost all of the initial hurdles I encountered in the first week. Here is the list:

1. Email - I now have Thunderbird working flawlessly as my email client in sync with Exchange. I do need to talk to the Exchange admin to change a setting on the Exchange Server so I can use the Calendar functionality with Sunbird. I am currently use Webmail for my calendar.
   
2. Office - Open Office has worked well with Word, Power Point, Excel, and Adobe documents. I can use Wine to install Visio on my Ubuntu desktop. This doesn't allow me to be totally Microsoft-Free but there is no answer for Visio's proprietary format that I am aware of. This is not an issue with Open Source, the problem is that Microsoft doesn't use an open standard for their Visio product. Open Office Draw works fine for creating new drawings but can't import Visio documents saved in Visio format. I also downloaded OxygenOffice Professional that gives me the much needed templates and clip art that Open Office was missing.
3. Browser - I have been using Firefox at work for years so this a no brainer.
4. Printer - I do have one unresolved issue. I have an old HP Laserjet (about 8 years old). Although I can see the driver I can't get the printer to work. I have not invested a ton of time trying to fix it.

Before all of the Microsoft defenders start slamming me, let me put my disclaimers out. My goal of this article is to prove that people can be productive at work without the need of Microsoft software. I am not saying that because I can be productive that everyone should abandon Microsoft and start a project to implement Linux corporate wide. However, I do recommend to those who are open to exploring alternatives that they should start a small pilot project with a handful of desktop users. I think a 5-10 person pilot with Ubuntu or Mepis would be a great way to learn about the opportunities and challenges that an Open Source OS presents. This is low risk and high return. A pilot like this will give your IT shop an opportunity to try out alternatives without disrupting the day to day business.

When I first started my experiment I was trying to keep it a secret out of fear of attacks from angry Microsoft worshipers (especially from the admins and desktop support). What I am finding out is that most of the folks that I was hiding from are sick and tired of supporting Windows and are proponents of Linux. Several of them are using Linux at home. One of the guys I talked to has Vista and XP installed on his laptop. He swaps out the hard drive when switching between OS's. He is less then impressed with Vista and complains about the slow boot time (2 times slower then XP). I recently moved to a new office and a desktop guy saw my Ubuntu desktop when I was moving. I expected an ear full but instead the guy said he fully supports a move to Ubuntu and wished the company would move in that direction. These stories are coming from Microsoft certified engineers who have spent years supporting Microsoft tools. These stories are not coming from anti-Microsoft people who worship Linux.

There is one myth I would like to discuss. I keep hearing how difficult it is to install Linux. I have two comments about this:

1. I found the Ubuntu install to be quite simple. Maybe some of the older versions of Linux where cumbersome but the recent versions are very straightforward.
2. If an organization chooses to go with Linux on the desktop, trained professionals will be responsible for installing Linux. This is how Windows gets installed today. People tend to accept that fact that Windows is a simple install because they receive their desktops or laptops already configured. Is the Windows install really all that much easier then the Linux install or is it the fact that most people never have to bother installing Windows?
   

Once again, these are my observations. I have been using Windows for years. I don't hate Windows, although I am not a fan of Microsoft as a company. I do give Microsoft credit for creating a product that has changed computing forever. For companies with huge budgets it might make sense to continue down the Microsoft path. For small and medium sized companies with limited budgets, startups, and educational or government funded operations, I believe they should consider exploring alternatives. The worst thing that can happen with a small pilot is that you discover that Linux won't work for your organization. At least then you can sleep at night knowing you did your homework and made a strategic decision based on real information. One word of caution, though. If you take on a pilot, make sure you have a few people on the team who are not married to Windows or Linux. Get some folks with an open mind who are interested in the overall good of the company and are not married to a certain technology.

The supply and demand for SOA and BPM tools and implementors is way out of wack. On the tool side there are way too many vendors and products and you will continue to see the big guys like IBM, BEA, Oracle, HP, and Microsoft go shopping. The implementor side has a different twist to it. There are many niche players who have staffs that range from 100 to 1000 people. These companies have been implementing SOA and BPM before they became the hottest topic since Paris Hilton's jail sentence. Now that the demand is so high, they are having problems staffing up.

I work at a medium sized company. We have been looking for a partner to help model our current and future state processes for a few areas in our business. The big guys like Accenture, IBM, and Bearing Point turned us down because the contract was too small. The medium sized companies are turning us down because they are out of resources. We had a bad experience with a boutique vendor on our first business process assessment so we are staying away from the small guys.

Our SOA partners are extremely busy and in high demand. We have over 20 projects that we need help with and we want to work on three or four of them at a time. They will soon be out of resources. So where am I going with this?

Everyone already knows that there will be mass consolidation as BPM and SOA pure players get gobbled up by the the billion dollar companies. The pure players are having problems competing against the stack players because more companies are using BPM and SOA together. What is not being talked about is the consolidation of the implementors. Accenture, Bearing Point, and others are going to start buying many of these niche players so they can go after the mid market dollars. The niche players are going to need to expand at rates that they can't manage. I am not a wall street analyst but something tells me that there is a lot of money to be made if you own stock in the right niche player.

Another trend that I am seeing is private equity companies buying up successful companies with plenty of cash flow. Look at Doubleclick. Hellman and Friedman bought them in July '05 and sold them for more then a billion in profits in April of '07. I can see this trend happening in the SOA and BPM consulting space. Private equity firms like H&F can buy these companies at a decent price, cut out the fat, stream line the operations, and flip them to the big industry leaders as they start competing for these types of companies. Look at the crazy shopping sprees that Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft are in the midst of. They are overpaying on many Web 2.0 startups just to beat their competitors to the punch. I believe that this same trend might happen in the next year or two in the SOA/BPM implementation space.

I would like to hear from those of you that work as consultants in BPM and SOA. Am I on to something or am I way off track?

More war of words between giants. Ballmer laughs at the IPhone.

First Ballmer laughs at Google, now he mocks the IPhone. My dad is a long term Microsoft stock holder. Every time I hear Ballmer talk I tell my dad to sell.

It looks like Steve Ballmer's new strategy is if you can't beat 'em, sue 'em (here). Maybe Ballmer has finally seen the writing on the wall. More and more articles keep popping up like this one. Here is an excerpt:

A CIO Insight study of 90 companies with revenues below $500 million finds that 90 percent will use Linux by the end of 2007. Most companies that use Linux plan to expand its use, and are building applications to run on the operating system. What's more, Apache, Firefox, and a broad range of other open source Web and application tools, database systems and development tools are also taking hold. These products are proving so successful at lowering costs and meeting corporate requirements for flexibility, integration and security that four of five companies plan to expand their use, too.


Couple that with the Microsoft's issues with Vista (Microsoft admits Vista failure & Speech recognition demo gone bad) and the future suddenly does not look so bright anymore for Ballmer. Ballmer continues to laugh at the notion that Google is kicking his butt, but instead of becoming innovative, he continues to deliver bloated operating systems that force companies to upgrade or buy new PCs.

So Ballmer's new strategy is to sue the open source community on 235 patents, although he "refuses to identify specific patents or explain how they're being infringed". Maybe his next strategy will be to link Linux to Al Qaeda.