Open Source Consolidation: Less is More?

The open source startup scene is certainly very vibrant, but it's also clearly still relatively immature. Company histories are short, and turnovers are still quite low compared to traditional players. Another reflection of that immaturity is the fact that there are simply too many players in each sector. That means that consolidation is inevitable, creating fewer but bigger players with more clout in the marketplace, and broader product offerings. Just recently, we have started to see that happening....

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Hyperic Tracks the Cloud

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BPM + ECM = BPP

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Hyperactive Hyperic

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Open Enterprise Interview: Javier Soltero

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Systematising Systems Management

Last year I wrote a review of the open source systems management sector. At that time, it was highly fragmented, symptomatic of the very early days of this area. The market is still fragmented, but there are some clear tectonic movements going on that hint at important consolidations to come.

First we had Hyperic cosying up to Red Hat:

Red Hat, the world's leading provider of open source solutions, and Hyperic Inc., the leader in multi-platform, open source systems management, today announced that they have extended their agreement to collaborate on the development of a common systems management platform. Development will continue under an open source model.

For years, the JBoss Operations Network team has been developing code on the Hyperic platform. Red Hat will be contributing its updates and enhancements to this new open source project. Both companies will work to maintain, govern and extend management capabilities within the new open source systems management platform project. Additionally, Hyperic and Red Hat will work jointly to include this base in both future Hyperic and Red Hat systems management products.

Now we have Nagios Enterprises and GroundWork getting luvvy-duvvy:

Nagios Enterprises (www.nagios.com), the commercial arm of Nagios, the world’s most popular open source host, service and network monitoring program, and GroundWork Open Source, Inc. (www.groundworkopensource.com), the leader in open source IT management software, today announced a joint partnership focused on joint market development and shared delivery of services around open source IT monitoring and management.

...

Under the terms of the joint partnership, Nagios Enterprises will soon offer tier three support for Nagios-related aspects of Groundwork Open Source. In addition, GroundWork Open Source and Nagios Enterprises will engage in various market development activities including cross-promotion via advertising, joint marketing efforts, and business referral opportunities.

It's not really clear how all this going to pan out, but it's seems likely that there will only be one or two main players left in a year or two. My bet is that Red Hat will simply buy up all the companies it needs. As Matthew Aslett pointed out recently, Red Hat is pretty voracious when it comes to swallowing other open source companies.

And whatever happens, I do wonder where this leaves the rather, er, quiescent Open Management Consortium, whose blog last had a posting on 21 May of this year....

Plugging in to Asay Power

I met up with Matt Asay (pronounced "ay-see") recently. I learned from this that he's had what amounts to the perfect career in open source business: training as a lawyer (including some work with Larry Lessig), then stints with Lineo (a pioneering embedded Linux company) and Novell (during which time he founded the Open Source Business Conference) before joining Alfresco, an enterprise content management company that is one of a whole new generation of businesses that collectively make up the open source enterprise stack.

My meeting also confirmed something that I had suspected for a while: that he is the most astute commentator on the open source business scene, bar none.

He has a new outlet for these insights in the form of the blog "The Open Road" on C|net (which means, unfortunately, that the URLs are totally opaque), where he is churning out posts at a rate that puts mere professional writers such as myself to shame. To make matters worse, he's come up with a blindingly obvious and brilliant wheeze for both generating lots of interesting copy and also providing what amounts to a grand conspectus of the entire open source business scene: an emailed survey of top CEOs there. Now, why couldn't I have thought of that?

The results are required reading for anyone who wants to understand the state of free software in the world of business today - and where it's going tomorrow. Here's the list of interviews:

Dave Rosenberg, MuleSource

Javier Soltero, Hyperic

Marten Mickos, MySQL

John Powell, Alfresco

Fabrizio Capobianco, Funambol

Boris Kraft, Magnolia

Kelly Herrell, Vyatta

Satish Dharmaraj, Zimbra

Ranga Rangachari, Groundwork

Dries Buytaert, Drupal

John Roberts, SugarCRM

Toby Oliver, Path Intelligence

Danny Windham, Digium

Bill Karpovich, Zenoss

Mark Brewer, Covalent

Gianugo Rabellini, Sourcesense

Bob Walter, Untangle

Paul Doscher, JasperSoft

Pete Childers, Zmanda

Rod Johnson, Interface 21

Harold Goldberg, Zend Technologies

Eero Teerikorpi, Continuent

Open Solutions Alliance

Another day, another open source organisation:

The Open Solutions Alliance consists of leading companies dedicated to making enterprise-class open source software solutions work together. We help customers put open source solutions to work by enabling application integration, certifying quality solutions, and promoting cooperation among open source developers. Membership is open to organizations that provide high-quality, business-ready open source solutions.

More specifically, it consists of companies like CentricCRM (customer relations management), Hyperic (systems management), JasperSoft (business intelligence) and OpenBravo (enterprise resource management), as well as more general open source players like CollabNet and SpikeSource.

What's striking about these is that together they form pretty much a complete open source enterprise stack of the kind I wrote about half a year ago. This is something we're going to see much more of, as individual open source companies start banding together to present a common front in order to satisfy the demands of large companies who want integrated, working solutions, not a ragtag bunch of codebases.

Selling, the Open Source Way

In one of my random wanders, I came across this neat encapsulation of a key advantage that open source companies enjoy:

I sat in on a sales visit yesterday, and they were wowed by our demo and presentation. In fact, the results are getting so predictable with prospective customers that it’s almost boring - we show them the stuff, and they show us the money. Before coming to Hyperic, I had never seen sales calls this easy.

It's almost a truism that open source software sells itself; the knock-on consequence is that you don't really need salespeople, which in turn means more money for developers and support.