Anthony Gold

Enterprise Open Source magazine just published an article I wrote on business adoption of open source solutions for mission-critical applications. The article analyzes the results of a study that Unisys commissioned from Forrester Consulting. Based on interviews with nearly 500 IT decision-makers worldwide, the research shows that adoption of open source isn’t driven primarily by cost, as many might suppose, but by freedom — freedom to use this powerful technology to solve their most pressing business problems the way they need to, without arbitrary restrictions imposed by any one vendor or self-appointed regulatory body. What are your experiences? I look forward to hearing your feedback.

Many of my blog posts have focused on the business benefits of open source. But perhaps even more significant is how the open source model of “mass collaboration” is changing the way the world works. Some of you know that I’m working on a book on this topic. I’ll reveal the title as soon as the publisher is locked down. In the meantime, I’d like to share some of my thoughts around this topic in various blog entries. I welcome your feedback and continued discussion.

Of course, everyone is familiar with Wikipedia – the “open source encyclopedia”. And, many people have heard about the famous MIT experiment where obscenities were randomly inserted into various Wikipedia entries to see how long it would take the Wikipedia community to “self-police” itself. On average: 1.7 minutes. That’s it! Under two minutes to remove randomly inserted obscenities. It’s the model of mass collaboration where people self-select based on their passions and skills. OK, some may argue that skills don’t play enough of a role, but you’ve got to admit that on average, the “wisdom of crowds” prevails such that the cream rises to the top and the crap gets filtered out. At my last count, there was something close to 6 million articles in Wikipedia. I remember reading a story in Nature a couple years ago that carried out an “expert led” investigation to compare scientific entries in Wikipedia to the Encyclopedia Britannica. Their findings? Factual errors existed in both sources, but “the difference in accuracy was not particularly great.”

Speaking of science, InnoCentive has emerged as an innovative solution to solve scientific conundrums faced by organizations. Established in 2001 (same time as Wikipedia), InnoCentive bills itself as “the first online, incentive-based initiative created specifically for the global R&D community”. It is built on a unique ‘Seeker’ and ‘Solver’ model that brings together scientists from over 175 countries to solve scientific problems. ‘Seekers’ such as Procter & Gamble, Boeing, Pittsburgh Plate & Glass and the Rockefeller Foundation pay annual fees to access InnoCentive’s network of scientists. Scientists (or ‘Solvers’), offer solutions … and the winning solvers are rewarded. A current InnoCentive seeker is Prize4Life, a non-profit group focused on research for Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (Lou Gehrig’s disease), offering $1 million for a biomarker measuring progression of the disease. The InnoCentive advantage is that it opens problem-solving to a global scientific workforce and fuels collaborative problem solving. The power is in numbers – thousands of scientists can participate in the problem solving process, a scale that any one organization can hardly reach with its in-house R&D environment.

I call it the “CIO Conundrum”, and it goes something like this: you are the CIO of a large company and each year, your budget is, on average, decreasing by about 4%. And, most of the money you’re allocated (perhaps 70% of more) is used to maintain your existing environment, with probably a lot of legacy stuff in there. Of course, your users are demanding more and more features with greater accessibility to key data. And, if you are like most Fortune 500 companies, you probably have over 40 different financial systems and three ERP systems*. These systems are obviously each performing similar functions, but perhaps not exactly the same way (think 48 different versions of tax calculation).

To make matters worse, your company’s end-user customers want seamless, consistent access to their information. For example, if you are a brokerage house, your customers want access to their accounts and trading platform from anywhere including their cell phones. And, if the customers have multiple accounts (ie savings, corporate stock plan, 401K, capital growth, etc.), they absolutely want a common interface and “look and feel” into each of their accounts. The customers don’t care what applications are running in your environment, nor do they particularly care which databases, operating systems, and hardware are there. They expect it all to work and to give them what they want, when they want it. And, no doubt that if you don’t meet these user’s needs, your competitors will.

And, if that weren’t challenging enough for our hypothetical CIO, you are also being held more and more accountable for business results. You are no longer just a cost center. You are actually being asked to contribute to the business at the top line as well, and you may even have a seat at the executive committee table.

Hmm. That sounds like a pretty daunting task, and it is. That is the “CIO Conundrum”, and it is what makes the modern-day CIO job a very difficult role. But, the good news is that there is a way to solve this conundrum. And, that was the thrust of my keynote talk at the InterOpen Forum yesterday in Minneapolis. The forum was designed to help senior business executives leverage open solutions and interoperability toward improved business performance.

My talk was titled Harnessing Mass Collaboration for Business Results – How Open Source and Web 2.0 Are Solving the “CIO Conundrum”. We had a full house in the beautiful Wheelock Whitney Hall at the Minneapolis Community & Technical College. We had a great discussion in the hall, and also heard a wonderful presentation from Dominic Sartorio, President of the Open Solutions Alliance (OSA) who presented “A Case for Customer Centricity” and the activities within the OSA. Michael Grove, OpenITWorks CEO, also spoke about collaborative projects to drive business results. My special thanks to Ron Fresquez, CEO TOSTA, for setting up a great event (and also for the great dinner at Brit’s Pub … although we never got around to lawn bowling).

If you are interested in seeing any of the presentations, send me an email and I’ll be happy to forward them to you.

*2006 Bloor Research report

If you’ve never heard Don Tapscott speak, try to do so. Not only is he the author of the world’s number one bestselling business book (Wikinomics), but he is also a fantastic speaker. I had the opportunity to speak with him at a CIO Breakfast meeting in the Club Room at the New York Stock Exchange.

Don presented the Web 2.0 phenomenon and its impact on business. I followed his pitch with specific challenges going on in the world of financial services and how modernization and open source are creating opportunities for dramatic enhancements to business. It was great speaking with some of the executives of the largest financial institutions in the world, discussing their challenges and opportunities for future growth.

After the presentation, the NYSE folks gave us a tour of the stock exchange floor. It was the first time I had ever been on the floor. I walked up to the Unisys market maker and jokingly asked him if I could buy a share of stock. Although the place was packed and scraps of paper were littered all over the floor, they told us that traffic has greatly reduced over the past few years due to electronic trading. Although security to get into the NYSE building was incredibly tight (took me over 15 minutes to get through the security checks), it was worth the wait. Thanks much to Laura Prescuitti and the folks at Ziff-Davis for a great event in NY.

Following this, I hopped a train to Washington DC to present to the General Services Administration (GSA) and Small Business Administration (SBA) folks on the current and future states of mass collaboration and how it can help them. It was a great event setup by my friend and colleague Andy Gordon. And, although the public sector space is a lot different than financial services, many of their underlying challenges are the same: most of their IT dollars spent supporting existing (lot of legacy) stuff, business functions duplicated all over the place in monolithic applications, declining budgets, a need to add new features or enhancements to existing applications, a need to provide better services to end users, and so forth.

In each presentation, I spoke about the Open Solutions Alliance (OSA) and its role in helping drive the interoperability standards and reference architectures required to drive the impact and consumption of open source and open solutions on addressing the business challenges noted above. In the public sector space, you have additional groups such as The Open Group and the OTD. The OTD roadmap is used by the Department of Defense for its future technology strategy. And, check out this quote, lifted straight from the OTD roadmap: “This report recommends shifts in the process of technology acquisition from closed, locked-in black box systems to open and modular approaches. These open approaches are based on open standards, services based architecture, open source collaboration, and reference open source implementations. These shifts, in turn, enable a business process migration from proprietary products that can only be changed by one vendor, towards a marketplace for professional services to extend and adapt capabilities on demand.”

Sean Michael Kerner wrote a nice article on the state of open source business, summarizing findings by 451 and other research firms. Having just attended and presented at the Open Source Business Conference (OSBC), not to mention spending the last twelve months meeting with CIOs and CFOs of Fortune 500 companies discussing open source, much of what Michael discusses rings true.

However, one comment jumped out at me that I felt warranted further discussion. I’m not sure if this quote is Kerner’s or is attributed to Andrew Aiken at Olliance, but in any case, the quote reads, “CIOs apparently feel that proprietary solutions still have an edge over open source solutions when it comes to on [sic] integration and interoperability.”

Certainly if the reference was to proprietary solutions that are built by one vendor as a true end-to-end solution, I would agree. However, I’m sure we’ve all battled with proprietary solutions across the stack from multiple vendors … the data doesn’t integrate, the same service is performed in multiple applications, user interfaces are different, and so forth. The real challenge: how do you leverage the benefits of open solutions (no vendor lock-in, reduced cost, etc. … all the points mentioned by Michael in his article) without suffering from the multi-vendor integration issues that plague our industry?

Enter the Open Solutions Alliance (OSA), and the primary reason that Unisys joined OSA. The OSA is all about helping address those interoperability issues, building reference architectures and customer proof points, driving greater developer involvement in open solutions, and creating increased consumption of open solutions in the business community. The first proof point: a demo at LinuxWorld (August 6th-9th) in San Francisco showing the interoperability of a legacy point-of-sale application tied into a CRM, ERP, and other open solution components. And, there are several other activities going on within OSA including a single sign-on working group. Everything in OSA is transparent to the entire world (members and non-members alike), with the goal of addressing the problem statement noted above.

I think the future of business solutions, whether they are open or proprietary, depends heavily on how well they interoperate across the business … hence the major thrust around Services Oriented Architecture. And, the key to making that work is interoperability standards that allow it all to play together.

What a great show put on by Matt Asay and the rest of the crew. Kicked off by a compelling presentation from Matthew Szulik, the buzz during the first day was wonderful. Just about anyone who is “anyone” in Open Source was there, with a few notable exceptions (I didn’t see any folks from Sun or IBM). During Matt Asay’s welcoming remarks, he commented on the value of the Open Solutions Alliance (OSA) and what we are trying to do there.

I served on one panel session discussing the traction of open source in the channel. My fellow panel members included Ranga Rangachari (CEO, Groundwork), Lars Nordwall (Sales VP, SugarCRM), and Anthony Roby from Accenture. Some great points were raised about the role of the channel and how important it is to optimize heterogeneous environments in order to leverage open source within existing environments.

I also delivered one of the breakout keynotes on Open Source in High-Performance Information Systems. The group asked some good questions around how business executives determine which open source projects are right for their particular strategy and how to go about integrating within legacy environments. I also presented some case studies around Reuters, SHK (largest non-bank financial services company in Hong Kong), and Redmayne-Bentley (largest independent stockbroker in the UK) and how each of those companies is using open source in mission-critical environments to modernize their business.

It was also very nice speaking to many companies about the Open Solutions Alliance (OSA) and the work that organization is doing to drive the development and consumption of open solutions. Plus, with a nice plug from Matt Asay during his kickoff presentation, I received a lot of questions about how to go about joining OSA.

One of the surprising elements was the amount of Microsoft bashing that went on in public presentations. Certainly MSFT has its share of detractors, but they are also doing a lot of work in the open source space (Bill Hilf’s team are top notch with a great vision). I suppose people have a need to identify villains and victimizers (helps make us feel better perhaps). But, in a few cases, the villainous statements directed toward MSFT were flat out wrong. The curse of being big.

Another surprising element (at least to me) was the lack of business users at the conference … you would think with the title of “open source business conference” that there would have been many more customers and potential customers. However, the show seemed to be comprised of vendors, their partners, some VCs, and a lot of lawyers. Interesting, even with so many lawyers there, I did not hear a lot of debate around GPL 3.0 (nor a lot of lawyer jokes).

It was also very nice seeing some old friends there like Tom Costello, CEO UpStreme in Pennsylvania; Derek Rodner, marketing executive for Enterprise DB; and Peter Gallagher, CEO Devis. And, since I’ve gotten in the habit of commenting on the hotels I’ve been living out of over the past year, the Palace Hotel on New Montgomery Street in San Francisco was superb. The rooms were decent and the ambiance was great. My only complaint: they have this air-conditioning system where you can set the temperature to anything you want (down to 65 degrees), but it is controlled by a motion sensor. So, once you stop moving around in the room (ie sitting at the desk working or sleeping in bed), the A/C turns off and the room gets very warm.

A new textbook aimed at universities and researchers deals with how private and public sector institutions evaluate open source software alongside traditional software. The book, Open Source for Knowledge and Learning Management, includes a chapter by Christian Wernberg-Tougaard (Unisys director of Marketing and Communications, Global Public Sector, Continental Europe) entitled, “Evaluating Open Source in Government: Methodological Considerations in Strategizing the Use of Open Source in the Public Sector.” I had the honor of reviewing and editing this chapter, which places particular emphasis on our detailed experiences integrating open source solutions for many clients.

The many benefits of FOSS have made it attractive to public sector institutions, but a successful implementation of FOSS in government, Wernberg counsels, should be based on a solid evaluation of the impact open source will have on an organization. Wernberg presents a well-thought-out and comprehensive methodology (based on the 3D-VE modeling approach) addressing how governments can go about making the best and cheapest choices when facing the challenge of how to gain maximum business value from open source solutions.

Christian and his fellow editors (including Patrice Emmanuel Schmitz, director EU Consultancy Practice) included much of the Unisys knowledge expertise in this area. The result is a wonderful chapter that sheds light on the decision-making factors to be considered when integrating FOSS in government. Check it out today; the book is available at Amazon, as well as other major retailers.

Today Unisys issued the results of a study commissioned from Forrester Consulting. It surveyed European, UK and North American companies that had evaluated or are using open source software. The interviews with nearly 500 senior IT decision makers indicate a growing acceptance of open source in business-critical applications. They also indicate a major need for integrated solutions wrapped around services, including consulting, integration and continued support, to unlock the full potential of open source for mission-critical applications.

Those results indicate a strong and growing role in open source for systems integrators. With proficiency in delivering enterprise solutions and broad – often global – solution delivery capabilities that small software and even service providers lack, SI’s can provide the key to unlocking the full value of open source software, transforming low cost into full business value.

I encourage all of you to check it the results, and I’m hoping we can have some good discussion around this topic. Furthermore, along the lines of open source integration, take a look at the OSA interoperability roadmap and the Common Customer View prototype. There is some really cool work going on there. I look forward to your comments. Thanks for reading.