Enterprise Initiatives

I have spent a lot of time recently questioning the leadership of IT organizations who become a cost center due to a "keeping the lights on" mentality and have asked the question Are we Sleeping at the Wheel?. The other day I stumbled across a great article (thanks to some of my pals from Twitter land) that really hits the nail on the head. This is a must read article that brings to light what I think is the main reason why many IT leaders are missing the boat on emerging technology trends. The article is written by Steve Andriole is called Managing IT: Changing Our Minds (About Everything) and discusses how IT leaders who have been around a while have to let go of solutions of the past and totally change the way they think. Here are a few excerpts...

Here’s the deal. The world has changed – forever. First, hierarchical management structures will weaken as we continue to globally decentralize our business units. We have to change the way we think about control, standardization and the overall governance we bring to technology acquisition, deployment and support.

Here is his thoughts on Open Source which I have been championing for quite some time...

Open source is here to stay. Even the established vendors have “embraced” open standards. They have no choice. Do you?

And what about cloud computing?

We need to change how we think about cloud computing from an incremental shift in technology offerings to a whole new way of acquiring, delivering and supporting digital technology

Here is my favorite...

Debating endlessly about whether or not open software, cloud computing or SaaS have any merit is a waste of time – and most likely a diversionary tactic designed to slow – if not outright kill – the pace of change.

Please take the time to read the entire article. I think the message is an important one. If you are an IT leader who is missing the boat, you need to reevaluate your positions on the emerging technologies and solutions. If you don't you are damning your organization to more years of fire fighting and being a bottleneck to the progress of the business. Don't miss the boat!

Dave Linthicum wrote a post today called Open Source SOA provides some major advantages. In his post Dave stated:

When it comes to SOA, I think open source provides two major advantages:

• First, it's typically much less expensive than the tools and the technology that are proprietary.
• Second, they are typically much more simplistic and easier to understand and use.

To the second point, simplicity. The open source SOA vendors seem to take a much more rudimentary approach to SOA, and their tools seem to be much easier to understand and, in some cases, use. While some people want complex, powerful tools, the reality is that most SOAs don't need them. If you're honest with the requirements of the project, you'll see that good enough is, well, good enough.

Great point Dave. I would also add another clear advantage which I learned the hard way. On a previous enterprise wide SOA initiative, I drank the cool-aid that the vendor stack was an integrated stack and was simpler to deploy and manage over a stack of a mix of vendors. What I found out is that the mega vendors (IBM, Oracle, etc.) have bought so many pure play tools (rules engines, BPMs tools, data services and MDM tools, governance tools, etc.) that the smooth integration ends when the Power Point decks are closed. In reality, the mega vendor stacks are a hodge podge of rushed acquisition and integration efforts. The underlying architecture of each tool within the stack are completely different and there are very few people (if any) within the organization who understands the complete stack. In fact, we were dealing with two very different organizations when dealing with support and they were not in sync. Eventually the entire company was consumed by another mega vendor (you can probably guess which acquisition this was) and the whole product roadmap was turned upside down.

Now let's look at some of the well established open source stack vendors like WSO2, MuleSource, and RedHat. These vendors do not suffer from acquisition madness and chaos. If fact, they are all built on a consistent architecture and do offer smooth integration between the various layers of the stack. Do they have all of the features of the commercial products? No. Do they have enough features for most SOA initiatives. Definitely. I wrote a post on CIO.com called Tight Budgets? Try open source SOA. Here is a quick summary of the advantages I discussed (read the article for the details):

1. Try before you buy
2. Lower cost of entry
3. Cost effective support
4. Core competency
5. For the people by the people

So what open source options do I have, you might ask? The following picture shows the open source tools that I prefer for my new SOA initiative. We are using a combination of WSO2, Intalio, Drools, Liferay, and PushToTest.



This is just one example of many. You can mix and match tools from different open source communities or you could standardize on one community. Here is an example of Red Hat's jBoss SOA stack.



And MuleSource has a well known suite of tools as well.


Many organizations are still not very comfortable with open source for mission critical initiatives. I have debunked many of the open source myths in the past (here, here, and here).

If there ever was a time to embrace open source, the time is now in this harsh economy. As commercial SOA vendors continue to get gobbled up by the mega vendors, it is time to seriously consider alternatives.

For those of you who have been reading my blog for the last two years, you might know that after 13 years at my previous job I left the company this summer to pursue multiple opportunities that were available to me. I have been doing some consulting and freelance writing in the mean time but have finally found my new gig. I will be the CTO/Chief Architect for a startup (more details forthcoming in the future) and will have the opportunity to work on some of the newer technology initiatives. So here are some of the future blog topics that I will start covering in 2009 once I get rolling:

1. SOA - can't seem to let it go! As I wrote in a post at CIO.com, I believe SOA is not just for legacy systems and can be the foundation that startups can leverage as a competitive advantage (see the reasons why)
2. Cloud Computing - Startups typically have low budgets and leveraging platform (PaaS) and/or Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) can be a great way to both minimize costs and reduce time to market. As I go through the requirements analysis, risk analysis, vendor analysis, proof of concepts, prototypes, and deal with issues such as stability and privacy, I will share my lessons learned here.
3. Open Source - We will likely leverage many open source solutions and I will discuss those experiences and decision points here.
4. Social Software - The company is based in the North East and I live in Florida. It is highly possible that the team I build will be dispersed all over the country and possibly even the world. There will be great lessons learned discussions as well as evaluations of tools to help enable working remotely (virtual whiteboards, live meetings, SaaS solutions for defect tracking, etc.).
5. Agile - One of our goals is to deliver quickly and at low cost. This involves a lot of the above mentioned topics and will also lead us into the world of Agile Development. I will discuss our challenges and lessons learned in this area as well.
6. C-Level IT topics - In my new role I will be working side by side with other C-Level people within the company as well as with C-Level people of partner and customer companies. I will have to hit the road and sell and/or promote our products/services and will try to shed some light on some of the interesting topics I come across.
7. Misc - Other topics that might be worthy of discussing (examples: impacts of financial crisis, VC funding, selling technology to business people and customers, etc.)

In addition, I still do some freelance writing and blogging from time to time. I have a series of discussions coming up on enterprise mashups and will blog about it in the next week or two. I am attending and speaking at the EDM Summit in Orlando next week and will definitely be sharing my presentation on Business Intelligence as a Service as well as covering topics like business rules management, data warehousing, IT governance, and others. I also have two books from Packt Publishing to review:

• SOA Governance by Todd Biske
• SOA Cookbook by Michael Havey

Once I finish reading these I will post a review on my blog. I am half way through Todd's book so far and really like it.

And finally, I am open to covering any topic that any of my readers would like me to discuss whether it is on this blog, over the phone, or in person. Whenever I travel I send a Tweet on Twitter to let people know where I can be found. I will be in Pittsburgh from Saturday 10/25 through Monday 10/27 if anybody lives there and would like to meet. Don't bug me from 4:15-7:15pm on Sunday because I'll be at Heinz Field pulling for my Giants against a tough Steeler team. The rest of next week I am at the EDM Summit in Orlando.

I look forward to sharing these topics with you all. Over the next two months my focus will be on the business plan and creating a team. We officially launch the company in the December-January time frame. At that point expect to see more discussions on the topics I mentioned above.

Many companies are investing heavily in SOA these days. At the same time, IT is being challenged to reduce its costs. But to provide the technologies to reduce costs, we first must spend tons of money, right? Wrong! Read my post on CIO.com this week called Tight Budgets? Try Open Source SOA.

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!

In part 1 I debunked the "OSS is bad for the economy myth". In part2 I showed six different models for OSS support. In this third and final post on debunking OSS myths, I will address these two statements:

• OSS products are second rate ("created in the garage" mentality)
• OSS can't be good because it is free

There are many OSS products that are highly reliable and run the systems of very successful companies and web sites that have millions of users. Just look at some the names of highest traffic web sites ranked by Alexa that use the LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP, Python, or Perl) stack (the link next to the website shows their underlying architecture):

1. Yahoo (LAMP)
   
2. Google (LAMP)
   
3. Youtube (LAMP)
   
4. Windows Live (Win)
   
5. MSN (Win)
   
6. MySpace (Win)
   
7. Wikipedia (LAMP)
   
8. Facebook (LAMP)
   
9. Blogger.com (LAMP)
   
10. Yahoo JP (LAMP)

Go to this link to look up the architecture of your favorite sites.

Other major companies using LAMP are Amazon, Disney, Boeing to name a few. Read this article called How Linux saved Amazon millions to see the real value in open source software. Twitter is another site that is growing like crazy. Look at the OSS that it uses:
But major websites aren't the only ones leveraging OSS. Most of the major technology companies have an open source strategy now. How about this list (click on the links to see each company's Open Source page):

• IBM
• Sun
• BEA
• Oracle
• HP

All of these companies are using OSS along side their own products to drive costs down. Most non-Microsoft development these days leverage a ton of open source tools. Look at the tools in the J2EE stack:

• JBoss
• Tomcat
• Struts
• Hibernate
• Spring
• PHP
• Perl
• Python and more

So much for the comments "Free means crap" or the ignorant "garbage.com" comments. These tools are the real deal. Are there crappy OSS products? Sure, but no different then the crappy proprietary products. Even Microsoft is starting to pay attention to Open Source. Although they are doing because OSS is a threat while the other companies are leveraging it as a competitive advantage.

So this concludes my 3-part series on debunking OSS myths. Anytime you hear the myths or FUD be spewed by those who refuse to acknowledge reality or just have not done their homework, please forward them these articles so they can learn what most of the rest of the world already know.

In part 1, I highlighted four myths (FUD) that I felt needed to be addressed:

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

In this post I will discuss the myths about open source support. I have heard every quote from "You can't get support for open source" to "Where are you going to get support, in a chat room?" It is obvious that people who make these statements have not done their homework or just choose to dislike OSS because of their long history of snuggling up with their favorite vendor(s).

There are many options for getting OSS support. I will list six that I am aware of.

Single Vendor Support
Many well established open source projects offer support for a fee. Typically these support fees are minimal when compared to proprietary software where they charge 18-21% of the purchase price. Some projects offer a totally free version of their software with a subset of features but offer an enterprise license with full support that has the complete bundle of features. In either case, this model is similar to the normal proprietary model where you pay for the support of your product. Also, many major software vendors like IBM, Sun, and Oracle are leveraging open source products within their software offerings. In cases like this, these vendors provide support for the OSS products. The only downside to this is they are often not certified on the most recent version of the OSS products.

Stack Vendor Support
In this model, a single company provides support services for a suite of products. Companies like SpikeSource & SourceLabs provide support for a suite of products while Redhat provides support for its own "appstack" which includes jBoss, Red Hat Linux, Apache, MySQL, PostgreSQL, and languages like Perl and PHP. The following diagram is from SpikeSource's web site that shows a few different stacks that are supported.


Community
All OSS products have community support. Many people not familiar with OSS believe that this is nothing more then interacting with some hacker in his garage. This might be true if you are betting your business on a product with a development team of three (which is not highly recommended). But most serious OSS contenders have a huge community following which provides 24x7x365 support from people all around the world. This is where I see an advantage of community support over proprietary software support. In the OSS world, it doesn't matter if you are a billion dollar company or a startup, your issues are equally important and addressed. In the proprietary world, top customers typically get priority over others because huge contracts carry a lot of clout. Many critical fixes and security issues are fixed and patched literally overnight. In fact, if you know how to fix the issue, you can make the changes and submit it to the project team to be reviewed and possibly patched. That beats waiting for the next service patch!

Do It Yourself
You also have the option to not pay any support and fully support the OSS yourself. This makes sense for most non-mission critical products like blogging software (WordPress) and wikis (Mediawiki), but is not recommended for mission critical products like server based Linux and ESB's like Mule.



Use consultants
Another option is to use consultants. This can be individuals who are experts with certain OSS products or companies that specialize in installation and/or support services for various products. You can see a huge list of consulting companies on Sourceforge.net who specialize in certain areas. Some companies use consultants for installations and upgrades, but chose the "Do it yourself" method for everything else. Sourceforge also offers support services for several products.

Mix and Match
The sixth model is to mix and match a combination of the five support models above. Many OSS products rely on a LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) stack. A company may already have a stack support vendor it deals with and may choose one of the other models to support the specific product. I'll use my Mediawiki example again. Mediawiki may not be a mission critical application at your company, but a few other applications might rely heavily on LAMP, including the wiki. The LAMP stack may already be covered by a stack vendor so you may chose the community or "Do it yourself" models for the wiki.

So the next time somebody tells you that you can't get support for OSS, forward them this link. This myth is pure FUD. I am not saying the all OSS products have good support, but then again, that is true for proprietary vendors also. Part of the vendor selection process for OSS should include your support requirements. If support is critical, make sure you pick a product that has strong support options in one or more of these models.

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!

I read this post from Stewart Mader's blog on wiki patterns today and it talks about a challenge to the adoption of wiki is the fact that the new tools are too inexpensive or even free (open source).

Here is a key quote:

Sandy Kemsley’s fourth challenge to social media/enterprise 2.0 in organizations:

The fact that these technologies are inexpensive (or even free) and quick to implement causes them to be discounted by executives who are used to spending millions on information management systems.

Isn't it time that executives stopped running their IT shops like it is 1980? Spending millions on large vendors may make it easier for one to sleep at night, but it is not the best use of corporate dollars. I have been in IT for a long time and I have witnessed the same pattern across several companies over the last 20+ years. The pattern that I am talking about is IT puts more weight on "manageability" then they do on customer requirements. Some shops are so married to big vendors that they are not taking advantage of open source solutions or even worse, they are limiting the vendor selection process down to a set of tools that do not meet the customer's needs. When this happens, IT becomes its own worst enemy. First of all, adoption of tools that the users do not want or do not value as high as other tools can be a major challenge. I have seen my share of shelf-ware over the years. Second, forcing customers into solutions does not bode well for customer satisfaction and may cause the customers to look elsewhere next time. Third and maybe the worst case of all, sticking to the major vendors at all costs may prevent IT from selecting any tool due to high costs or lack of a sufficient tool. To put this into perspective, the user suffers because our favorite vendor can't deliver.

Here is an example. If you look at Web 2.0 tools today, most of the top tools are either open source or provided by startups or companies without billions of dollars in revenue. IT shops who still stick to principles from 20 years ago will simply not invest in enterprise blogs, wikis, and social networking tools. The big vendors either do not have the tools or the tools that they have cost a significant sum of money. Trying to justify spending a large amount of money on better collaboration tools is a major challenge. With open source or low cost alternatives, it is much easier to start small and grow adoption over time.

At the end of the day, we should understand that the reason that corporations fund IT departments is so that our internal and external customers have the tools, products, and services they need to do their job. The world is changing and IT must change with it. In addition to the normal technical requirements (manageability, scalability, etc.), the vendor selection process should consider the following:

• Buy vs. Build (is it a core competency?)
  
• Evaluate open source alternatives
• Evaluate SaaS alternatives
• What is the vendor's SOA strategy (integration and agility)

Is your IT shop still stuck in the 1980's? If so, what are you going to do to educate your executive team? Do the research for them and show them where technology is going. The worst thing that can happen is that people will learn something.

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 wrote a post several months ago called Tighter budgets mean more Open Source proclaiming that when budgets tighten up, more people look towards open source to get the tools they need to get their jobs done. Now we are in a recession and IT budgets across the globe are extremely constrained. Meanwhile, the amount of work we are being asked to produce is growing exponentially. We need to deliver faster, with more modern features, yet we have limited resources to meet these expectations. The smart folks who have already been leveraging open source software (OSS) have the edge.

When budgets were good, people who couldn't get over their perceptions of the pitfalls of OSS could easily turn the other way and continue to spend hundreds of thousands if not millions of shareholder dollars on commercial software without even evaluating OSS alternatives. Now, many of these same people are "opening their minds" because their budgets are limiting their ability to cozy up with their favorite vendors.

My company has already replaced a few commercial products with OSS. Recently our version control software was up for maintenance renewal and required an upgrade to a new version. We were already ready to move on to a different tool so we evaluated Microsoft Team Foundation Server and an popular open source alternative called Subversion (we are a Microsoft and Java shop). The Microsoft product was nice but was expensive and very proprietary. Subversion is free and we are able to use it consistently across both development platforms. We also use CruiseControl for the continuous build process that we implemented. These two tools have greatly enhanced our productivity for both the Java and Microsoft developers and did not add a single penny to my budget. No annual maintenance fees, no vendor lock in, no problem!

Last year we purchased a variety of tools in the SOA stack (BPM, ESB, Data Services). This year we needed to add several additional tools to assist the developers and testers. Here is a short list:

• Registry
• Repository
• SOA testing tools
• Run time governance

We have found very impressive open source alternatives to each tool in the list except for the run time governance (although we are still researching this one). It does look like the Mule project will be adding many tools in support of SOA in the near future. Centrasite has a good registry/repository tool and Testmaker is our leading test tool right now. We evaluated commercial products from Mercury, iTKO, BEA, and many others. All of them have outstanding tools but when you add the tools up for these four areas you quickly get a price tag around $1M plus annual maintenance.

We have also implemented some web 2.0 technologies and leveraged two popular OSS solutions. Mediawiki is our enterprise wiki solution. This is the same software that powers Wikipedia. We also use Wordpress for our internal blogging initiative that is starting to draw a lot of traffic. I am also testing Twitter and Bebo to see if social networking/messaging has any value at our corporation. Most of the top Web 2.0 software are open source products. It will be hard to justify spending tons of money on Web 2.0 software when the most popular tools are free and scale to support millions of users.

I believe that as the recession continues, more IT leaders will look at open source then ever before. Many will like what they find when they do their due diligence. Once they have success with one or two tools, they will no longer need a recession to evaluate OSS. For those companies that have a formal vendor evaluation process, make sure you update your process to include open source products. Just because Gartner and Forrester do not have OSS in their Magic Quadrant or Wave, doesn't mean that you shouldn't be evaluating OSS. Many OSS projects have become so dominant that they are being purchased by major vendors. Sun's purchase of MySQL is a recent example of this. As a matter of fact, OSS is becoming so mainstream that Gartner predicts 80% of all commercial apps will leverage open source by 2012. If vendors are leveraging OSS, why are some companies refusing to do so? I'll leave you with a good post from Matt Asay on CNet - Open source and the future of vendor-free IT.

I have written about my wiki implementation in the past. We use Mediawiki, the same open source software that drives the most famous wiki of them all, Wikipedia. Initially loading content into your wiki can be an enormous task, but Open Office, another popular open source tool, makes this task much less cumbersome. The latest version of Open Office Writer 2.3 has the ability to export documents to Mediawiki markup code. We used this to upload hundreds of existing pages of content into our wiki.

If you don't use Mediawiki, have no fear. You can always download an Open Office add-on called Uniwakka to convert your documents to the wiki format of your choice. If you are interesting in launching a wiki in your organization I recommend you read Stewart Mader's 21 Days of Wiki Adoption.

As an every day user of open source products both at work and at home, I feel obligated to give back to those who donate their time and energy for the greater good of computing. I have chosen to join the OpenOffice community and assist in Marketing and Quality Assurance. I have been using OpenOffice for years. I have many computers with various operating systems (Kubuntu, Linux Mint, PCLinuxOS, Mepis, XP, and Vista) and OpenOffice runs flawlessly on all of them. I have written about my experience with Open Office at work in the popular post Open Source and Microsoft Free. Like many corporations, my company uses Windows XP and Microsoft Office. I use Kubuntu and OO and have had very few issues exchanging documents with others both inside and outside the organization. I know that the quality of this product is the direct result of the hard work and dedication of many volunteers throughout the world. Now it's my turn to give back.

I will be working with the volunteers of the Marketing team and sharing information here on my blog from time to time. As a QA volunteer, I will log issues that I find myself or that are sent to me from my readers. So if you have any issues you would like to log please contact me at mkavis@yahoo.com so I can get the details.

In the mean time, let me share some information with all of you. For those of you who are new to OO, I have included some screen shots of the different tools the OO has to offer.



For you bloggers out there who use OO, go here to get banners to add to your blog like I have. I have also encouraged my team to contribute to an open source project of their choice. Not only will that allow my company to give back to communities that we reap benefits from, but it also gives us experience working with a very collaborative project environment. I believe that companies can learn a lot about how to successfully deliver software by experiencing the collaboration that goes into a release of open source software.

For those of you who use open source software on a regular basis, I encourage you to contribute. There are many ways to participate:

• Donate
• Develop
• Test
• Document
• Marketing
• Support
• Translations

What will you do to contribute?

For those of you who have been reading my blog, you know that my company has been working on various projects that leverage BPM and SOA technologies. One of the biggest challenges we have is dealing with culture change and providing the right level of communication to people at all levels. Next week, we plan on implementing a few Enterprise 2.0 technologies to address those challenges.

Enterprise 2.0 is a fancy term that represents a host of web based collaboration tools like blogs, wikis, social networking platforms, RSS readers, bookmarking, tagging, and many others. Dion Hinchcliffe has one of the best blogs that explain Enterprise 2.0 (also called Web 2.0 in Business). His article called Social Media Goes Mainstream does an fantastic job of explaining Enterprise 2.0 and its benefits.



Back to my scenario. On our corporate portal, we are launching an enterprise architecture community which will link to the wiki and our blogs. Members of our architecture team will blog about various topics to share lessons learned, tips and tricks, and various research information as we learn more about the technologies we use. Our project manager will blog about the project, our testing architect will discuss the ins and outs of testing SOA, our configuration management guy will cover his area of expertise, and I will blog about the EA team's vision and strategic direction. All of our governance information will be accessible via our wiki. We are leveraging Mediawiki, the same open source wiki tool that runs Wikipedia. For the blogging software we are using Wordpress, another open source tool. Our next step is to implement a RSS reader so people can subscribe to content that is relevant to them.



Driving traffic to this new community on the portal can be challenging. Our plan is to have our CIO send a biweekly communication to all of IT. He will distribute an email with a URL to his blog which should bring most people to the site. In his blogroll will be links to the EA team's blogs and the enterprise wiki. Our hope is that in addition to keeping people informed about projects and technology, people will start to collaborate on the site. Once the collaboration starts, fresh new ideas should emerge from the staff and knowledge sharing and collective intelligence will prevail.

If this new EA community is successful, we can take it to the next level and start experimenting with tagging and social bookmarking. This will allow people to tag and rank information that is relevant to them which in turn makes popular content easier to find. One of the challenges that many companies, including ours, have with their portal is that it is difficult to find documents. Tagging and ranking solves this problem.

So next week we unleash some of these Enterprise 2.0 technologies to the masses. I expect adoption to be slow since many people are probably not familiar with these tools. But the biweekly CIO communication should be the "killer app" that drives the traffic to the site. Hopefully these tools will improve communications. We will still use all of the other communication mechanisms as well, but the blogs will allow for frequent, short communications that can reach large audiences in a short amount of time.

I will share the lessons learned on this experiment as we encounter them.

I was looking back at my first year of blogging to see what my best posts were. For those of you who have read several of my posts you know that I have two favorite topics: open source and SOA. I started blogging in March of this year and have written 120 posts. The top 10 were all dominated by open source articles. The reason is simple, Windows vs. Linux is a hot topic on sites like Digg, Del.icio.us, and Reddit. There are a lot of flame wars out there and not a lot of facts. Most of my posts were related to real work experience with open source and a few were dedicated to an experiment I did at home with several Linux distributions. So for 2007, here are my top 10 posts:

1. Open Source and Microsoft Free (54,000 hits)
2. Comparing Linux Distributions - Final Results
   
3. Dumping Vista - a Divorce with a Happy Ending
4. Open Source and Loving it!
5. Linux Mint is....Mint!
6. Eating my own Dog Food
7. Another easy Linux Install, Kubuntu Style
8. Review of Linux Distributions - Part 2
9. 10 Reasons why you need an Open Source Strategy
10. Review of Linux Distributions - Part 1

The top post was a hot ticket on Digg, Slashdot, Craigslist, Stumble, Del.icio.ous, and every Linux website known to mankind. Even though I wrote it several months ago, it continues to get a lot of traffic. Obviously, I am a big advocate of Linux. I have been using Kubuntu at work at a Microsoft shop for most of the year now and have been very productive without a single piece of Microsoft software on my laptop. Linux is ready for primetime. People aren't ready for Linux.

As an employee of a small-to-medium sized business (SMB), I find myself constantly questioning how proprietary software vendors are going to be able to compete with Open Source Software in the SMB space over the next few years. I am in the middle of a full blown SOA and BPM initiative. We have spent a few bucks on the SOA stack from a major vendor betting on the fact that there was a lot of value in an integrated stack. The reality is that the big vendors are buying pure play vendors to complete their suite of SOA tools and these products are still 12-18 months away from being fully integrated. In other words, the integration is not there yet.

We are now looking at tools in the areas of SOA Governance, SOA Testing, and registries and repositories. The cost of procuring commercial software products for these tools exceeds the cost of the entire SOA stack (BPM, ESB, and Data Services)! It was hard enough to get the funding to purchase the stack. It will be even harder to get the funds for tools such as these that are transparent to the users. IT must fund these tools. Of course, most SMB IT shops are working on limited budgets that are flat or modestly increased year after year. Salaries and rising health insurance costs eat up the budget and IT must find creative ways to make up the difference. Spending a ton of money on governance tools is not my idea of creative cost reduction.

We have been evaluating several vendor solutions recently. These tools are built with features to satisfy every customer possible. SMB's do not have the resources that can be dedicated to these tools to take advantage of even 50% of the features. In my case, the team that would administer these tools are already responsible for many other tools. What this equates to is paying big bucks for rich features that I can't use. It's like buying an RV for a 5 mile commute to work.

Then there are the open source solutions. There are several viable options like Centrasite for the registry/repository which provides most of the necessary features that we need. For those few features that are lacking we can pay a small fee for the enterprise addition or just add the features to the code ourselves. SOA is just one area where I see SMB's favoring Open Source Software over the big proprietary vendors. Portal, Content Management (ECM), ERP, and CRM are other examples. Like SOA, ERP, CRM, and ECM software is typically way too expensive for SMB's. Open Source allows companies with smaller budgets to take advantage of these technologies. Many people who are anti open source or who just haven't been keeping up with how far Open Source Software has come over the past few years will question the robustness of the feature set, the integration, the support, and the quality of the software. Let me addres each issue one at a time:

1. Feature set - As I stated above, SMB's typically don't need or don't have the resources to even use many of the features in the big vendor enterprise packages. Out of necessity, most SMB's need to keep things simple and manageable and use only what makes sense.
   
2. Integration - I laugh when big vendors raise flags about Open Source and integration. The big vendors' products have so many integration issues amongst their own products because half of their products are the result of pure play purchases. They usually have to bring in sales people from four or five different divisions (former pure play companies) just to answer your basic questions.
   
3. Support - Nothing is more frustrating then paying 20% of the purchase price for maintenance annually to have some college kid from India search a knowledge base article on the web in an attempt to solve your support problems. Even when you get your case escalated to people who actually know the product, SMB's rarely get the necessary priority because the vendors cater to their billion dollar customers. SMB's typically can't afford platinum level support which gets you immediate attention when you have issues. My experience with Open Source support has been extremely responsive. There are also Open Source Service Providers whose core competency is support.
   
4. Quality - This is the myth of myths. How can you beat the global peer review process in the world of Open Source? You literally have hundreds of sets of eyes reviewing and testing code. My colleague Eric Roch will say that commercial software is in the state of "Perpetual Beta". The vendors are in such a rush to get a leg up on the competition that they are sacrificing quality for release dates. I see this with SOA where vendors are pushing product out the door too fast to the extent where I feel like a beta tester instead of a paying customer.

In addition to all of this, you have mass consolidation going on in the industry. Oracle, HP, IBM, and Microsoft continue to gobble up their competition. They then try to sell you a suite of very disjointed and overlapping products. At the same time they are rapidly trying to integrate their new products into a common platform. At the end of the day you have a lot of very expensive technologies that are fragile, complicated, and redundant.

Another advantage of Open Source software is you can try before you buy. I can start using a light weight registry/repository and learn what features are really important to me. This could be a better plan then buying the full blown feature rich six-figure proprietary solution only to find out that I only need 25% of the features.

For those of you with billion dollar budgets, all of this may seem like nonsense. For those of us who have to find creative ways to move IT forward within the constraints of modest budgets, investing in Open Source Software is a great way to stay competitive and deliver modern technology to support your business's goals and objectives.

I just returned from a great vacation and saw that James McGovern had a few questions for me.


Question #1 (after reading Real World Open Source Solutions)

Mike Kavis believes that others should help spread the word that open source isn't just about Linux. Maybe Mike could talk about where folks get their information, such as all those advertising dollars paid by barely open source vendors and their outsourced PR departments otherwise known as industry analysts.

Answer

Getting information for open source software is not much different then getting information from closed source software. Yes, there is less conferences and less marketing/advertising, but those two sources should not be where you find all of your information. Leverage your network, read blogs, search the web for case studies where other companies have leveraged open source software to address specific areas like CRM, project management, database technology, portals, etc. I like to go to sourceforge.net and other popular sites and look at the number of downloads and the size of the community. Those two numbers can clue you in on which products to start researching in greater depth. I also use my Google Reader to follow articles on these sites: OpenSourceCommunity.org, OpenSources, OSS-Biz, NotJustLinux, OpenSourceUnleashed, and LinuxToday to name a few.

Question #2 (after reading Who's Killing SOA?)

I wonder if Mike Kavis understands the simple truth that most enterprise architects don't actually know other enterprise architects in other enterprises. Many of us are insular in nature?

Answer

I do understand and that is one of the main reasons why both James and I have called for more EA Collaboration. EA's need to "get out" more and see what the rest of the world is doing. Why reinvent the wheel from scratch? Throw some ideas out there and see where the conversation leads. Add your two cents to other bloggers' opinions and contribute to the overall good of the community. If you disagree with a viewpoint explain why. Other EA's can read both view points and decide for themselves which approach is best or maybe a combination of the two makes more sense. I know that EA's don't actually know other EAs in other enterprises because I knew none before I started blogging back in March of this year. Now I have a great network comprised of talented individuals who share their thoughts on important topics.

I found a few interesting real world examples of companies leveraging Open Source as a competitive advantage.

PayPal - Linux and open source software pay off for PayPal

In this scenario, PayPal processes millions of secure financial transactions equating to billions of dollars while leveraging a suite of open source products. Despite the myths, open source provides secure and robust solutions for multi billion dollar companies like eBay, the owner of PayPal.

Travelocity - Check out this video on HP's site

In this example, we are not talking about open source as a free solution. Travelocity partnered with HP to implement a Linux-based platform that improved performance while decreasing costs. Parent company, Sabre Holdings also cut costs by 40% switching to open source database solution MySql.

Amazon - Partners with Pingtel to provide open source enterprise class communications platform.

Pingtel bundles a suite of open source communications products and provides support and services. They offer low cost VOIP solutions that are robust enough for huge companies like Amazon.

I could go on for ever with real life examples of open source products making a difference in the corporate world. When hearing the words "open source", many people associate it with the Microsoft vs. Linux religious wars that rage on endlessly. In reality, "open source" software is changing the way we do business. If your company is not looking at how it can leverage open source, it is not doing its shareholders justice. This does not mean your company should replace its operating system, this means that your company should be looking across the enterprise to see where open source could provide cost reduction, flexibility, and a competitive advantage. There are many great white papers that show how enterprises are implementing open source business models and strategies. We need to educate the decision makers that open source is more about the enterprise and not just about Linux.

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.