Opening up source code

Some good pointers to consider making a close source effort to open source. Here is an example of Ingres and how it transition from close source to open source.

Key points – and SCO/Unix fight has contributed to this learning.

• Comb every line of the source before opening it up and remove questionable references/code snippets
• Pick the right open source licence
• It takes some promotion and effort to attract open source community
• Security concerns are not any more vulnerable in Open Source than Close Source (Re-engineering usually attributes to similar security vulnerability than what one may find reviewing the source)

I would probably add following to the list:

• Understand business need. Both Closed Source and Open Source (or a combination) has its merit – so understand what problem is being tackled by opening the source
• Consider what open community suits the need and how it helps the community
• Consider business model and structural changes required 
• Consider the stage of product life cycle

Bootstrapping

Entrepreneurs alike who are either looking to bootstrap their business or work with an investor will find reading “Bootstrapping” book by Greg Gianforte helpful. Greg is a serial entrepreneur and currently the founder, CEO of RightNow – which is a SaaS/CRM play in the enterprise arena. Although the book is written in the context of bootstrapping – but every entrepreneur should find it helpful.

Not having much to spend and being frugal teaches key life lessons. It forces an early startup to focus on the true priorities – taking care of customer, sales, quickly adjusting to the “need”, etc. Also, it takes away the general distraction that comes along with any investors and the need to keep them happy.

Bootstrapping is a harder run and not for the faint of an heart – but so is true about a persistent entrepreneur.

Check it out for yourself…

Data everywhere, Information somewhere, Decisions nowhere

Sometime back, I wrote my thoughts around Enterprise 2.0 and how it is about leveraging social communities within an extended enterprise. I was asked whether Enterprise 2.0 is just another round of attempt to deliver on the promises of better analytics and knowledge management. I have already covered my thoughts on why Enterprise 2.0 is more than that. Regardless, I believe progress within analytics/business intelligence space is key towards achieving Enterprise 2.0.

Relevant data that provides everyday vital information is key to making decisions. And it is a powerful notion that influences people behavior.

Various opportunity areas where much progress is happening within enterprise industry are (this is not a comprehensive list, feel free to add others that you see missing) :-

1. Delay between generation of data and for the corresponding action to take place - How to quickly get to decisions? New analytical models around SOA/Events based architecture paradigm are emerging here. How this system will scale and perform as the trend continues to evolve from batch to realtime for widely available 24×7 system with more internal/external end users will be the testament and tipping point for possible Internet scale adoption.

2. Disjointed analytics from everyday business process - How analytical information get closer or be embedded within business applications like billing, accounting, other ERP applications, CRM, etc. so that users have their transactional and analytical information available side by side to take action when things happen. Much progress is happening here on daily basis by the application, analytics and integration vendors trying to bring analytics closer to business processes. 

3. Automate “most” of the regular tactical decisions - How to overcome or provide additional intelligence needed in the data to be able to identify and isolate bad information generated due to the noise from the actionable good information? Today, much of these interpretation happens manually. I am sure some level of human involvement will be needed but the idea remains how to automate “most” of the regular tactical decisions needed to keep things flowing on everyday basis. SOA/BPEL/Events based architecture has the promise to potentially automate “most” of the tactical decisions. But the challenge will be how to eliminate noise before acting on some information. You don’t want some automatic tactical decision being made due to a noise that result into potentially more bad situations.

4. Meaningful presentation of various analytical knowledge – gleaned from wide variety of information at different level of granularity. Information need to easier for human to read, interpret, drill down and act upon. So much progress has been happening here due to Web 2.0 and touted reverence to the dashboards that demos so well. The need here is also to continue to make it pervasive, available wherever needed, and making it available in wide variety of form factor.

5. Ever increasing size of data - Advent of new technologies like RFID and increasing automation of processes has opened up the flood gate of data (structured/unstructured)that needs to be analyzed and aggregated on daily basis. This is growing data size to manage and analyze by leaps and bounds. Increase bandwidth, much innovation in the storage and other industries for faster access continues to push the limit. One hear terra/peta/exa byte much more often in conversations – something not common just few years back.

6. Quality of data that gets integrated and aggregated from various sources - Maturity of the integration/EAI products, better cleansing and aggregation tools, increase automation, etc. are helping keep data fresh, consistent and actionable.

Analytics future is exciting as the technologies are maturing, business use cases are evolving where market is looking beyond aggregated historical trending information to reflect the current or future needs. Companies are asking for front view (real time, forecast data) beside rear view mirror (historical information) to run business. Continued consolidation of the industry – Reporting, Performance Management, Analytics, Data Warehouse, Knowledge Management, etc…will keep this space exciting and help bring several of these information islands closer.

SOA will kill ERP?

AMR wrote an article sometime back whether evolution of SOA will kill ERP.

I would think, if anything it will spur ERP backbone growth and help unlock various enterprise vendors to build better (and complete) stack for different industries, sub-industries, geographies, emerging markets, etc. that are currently unreachable due to the time and energy needed by the close systems. SOA based ERP system will create far reaching vibrant franchise ecosystem needed on successful ERP backbones to truly scale the business by reaching beyond the current markets/industries thus paying off better margins to the companies who end up having successful SOA enabled ERP backbones. Key will be around how to create and manage successful franchise.

It is all about Business Processess…

There are several upcoming technologies that will have much impact to the enterprise applications like SOA, Web 2.0, etc. Various pundits have already touted the technical advantage of all these technologies. To prove the point, every major software vendor today, has a SOA strategy. So how does all this cool technology will help businesses whose only job is to manufacture, sell and service some simple widgets and not necessarily care about what technology they uses. Infect, they probably don’t care whether it is Web 2.0, SOA or some RPG/Cobol on a green screen terminal.

Business deploying enterprise software (ERP, Supply Chain, CRM, HRMS, etc.) uses technology as a business enabler to help them manufacture the widget cheaper/better/faster or service its customer better, etc. Successful companies proud themselves on their business processes making them unique and differentiating them in their respective market. Technology wow factor is usually not the front runner. Much of enterprise businesses remains slow on the technology adoption curve. At best, it may either be classified as “Early majority” or “Late majority” if not outright “laggard” trying to avoid “Innovator” or “Early adopter” technology adoption curve.

So how would all the upcoming technologies help existing business processes of a company? To do that let’s look at the key components of what makes a business process and understand how these upcoming technologies can be applied to make aspects of business process better. One can certainly add or refine the list here.

• Information – Information is critical to any individual executing a business process successfully. As technology continue it improves it is providing new benefits that were not available before like –
  1. Reliable information that provide deeper visibility into what goes on in a business
  2. Real time information when you want it, where you want it
  3. Information from relationships – multiple degrees apart and from extended sources like partners, suppliers, outsourcers, employees, market places, etc.
  4. Information from unstructured sources – capturing knowledge, increase integration with email, files systems, document management systems, etc.
  5. Vastly improved searches for mining the sea of information and analytical tools to come to deliver what you want and understand Patterns, Metrics, goals, etc.

• Tasks – This has been the frontier as industry has been busy automating much of the human tasks aggressively since more than a decade or so. Also, as existing tasks gets automated – new set of human coordination tasks or extended responsibility appears in the horizon. Some benefits from new technologies here are:-
  1. Extending/changing existing tasks without writing code – STANDARDS is the way to go
  2. Easy creation of new tasks as new processes comes to life
  3. Enabling work-flows easier between automated tasks and human tasks
  4. Quick alignment/training of the team to ever changing processes regardless of location of employees
  5. Enables getting tasks done cost effectively without sacrificing quality or customer satisfaction goals
  6. Enables ramping up new people easily and help extend enterprise frontier to newer geographies

• Interaction – A business is net sum of its people accomplishing their individual tasks and interacting with each other. This is their everyday interaction as they formulate, strategize, decide, work, act with each other to take company ahead one day at a time. Much is based on the foundation of real time visibility, availability and ability to engage everyone needed in a dialogue. Huge benefits from new technologies in this space:-
  1. Collapsing invisible walls that were between the parties/individuals as relationship maps become visible
  2. Continue to make world a small place to live, connect and make interaction real within it larger ecosystem
  3. Assess and establish new relationships quickly – expand ecosystem and extend reach
  4. Increased participation of many in decision making as several new communication channels reaching out to all becomes available – enabling the system to operate on power of many
  5. Capture, track and publish knowledge at determined time to feed into everyday work
  6. Speed up information sharing, decision making and rollout to the ecosystem
  7. Speed up feedback from market on decisions and place effective measure to correct

To sum it up upcoming technologies holds the promise of providing new kind of business processes not possible today or refining existing business processes that can help a company to remain differentiated and successful.

Just as an example – think today we enter more trades every day (couple of billions everyday on NYSE these days) than what we used to do in a week couple of decades (couple of million everyday on NYSE in early 70’s) back. All of this due to technology improvement that leverages the same process of placing, reconciling the trade, clearing the trade, settling the trade, invoicing, paying for the trade, etc. But now these tasks are automated, collapsed various walls that were needed in the past to place a trade, and provide real time information to a trader. New processes have evolved around technologies like real time information, increase self service, automatic trade placement, portfolio analysis, etc… that is changing the scale of business.

There are many examples how leveraging the right technology can help things scale quickly that is otherwise not possible. It is this promise with upcoming technologies like SOA, Web 2.0, etc. for businesses allowing them to unleash new level of accomplishment across its social communities – makes enterprise applications an interesting space for years to come.

Does LAMP need its CASE – Open Source in Enterprise

Much opinions have been floating on each side of the discussion why Open Source is or isn’t a good idea for an enterprise. Usual suspect like long sales cycle, implementation challenges, support concerns, etc. are cited as the barrier to entry. While free/cheap, no lock-in concern, open source benefits, etc. gets cited as the reason to support Open Source in an enterprise.

So as in life there is no perfect answer. This one is no exception to that. It comes down to making choices that suits the organization net positively and help accomplish business goals.

In my opinion, Open Source enterprise offering can have some legs. Companies like Compiere or other upcoming venture stand a good chance to replicate say what Redhat has done to further the cause of Linux. At current level of Open Source Company’s valuation this remains a viable business towards a targeted market. Although, some shrewd venture folks may suggest it is a matter of time before Open Source companies starts to get valued as a Service company given the margins are closer to that than a product company.

I would think certain market say where audience has embraced LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, Perl/PHP) should be supportive of Open Source enterprise product, if it can be successfully packaged, delivered, deployed, implemented and supported at no worse than the leading vendors. Thought process here, in some regard, is extending the open source stack to its preferred constituents and make it available at an acceptable total cost of ownership.

Figuratively speaking, does LAMP need to be in its CASE (CRM, Analytics, SCM, ERP) for a deeper adoption of Open Source within enterprise?

One example of Open Source friendly market is India. Lately, much news has come out suggesting how various state governments are favoring Open Source as the platform of choice.

Some may ask – Does the economic impact of software cost is more to companies in country like India? It all depends on how many companies can really afford $100s of thousands (after discounting) of software when earnings are not in hard currency? Also, different Enterprise structures adds to the discussion – like how many companies have revenue of $250M or more in India; need of larger number of seats (read more scalable software and support needs) as companies have more employees for a typical say $100M company in US; software cost impact to top line revenue depending on whether it hits operational or capital spending; etc. Some of these factors make Open Source more appealing to the market. One can add low implementation cost to this within domestic Indian market to make the overall implementation of Open Source enterprise software rather cheaper to accomplish.

A gating factor for Open Source success stories will be how it extends and matures the eco system beyond development community – to cover every aspect of value delivery. It is vital for the Open Source model to scale and instill confidence in enterprise customers about their investment in Open Source. Like having enough partners who can effectively implement, sell, support Open Source products in various geographies. Time will tell how successful open source will be in an enterprise market.

So what do you think – do you believe LAMP need to be in its CASE to make Open Source successful in enterprise market?

Enterprise 2.0

Much discussion is in progress about Enterprise 2.0 – including a large cry after “Enterprise 2.0″ was deleted from Wikipedia earlier. Here is my simple explanation of Enterprise 2.0.

Model every day enterprise users activity leveraging Web 2.0 based technologies (like Ajax, RSS, Wikis, blogs, IM, etc.) that can provide increased social interaction (like successful models of MySpace, YouTube, eBay, etc.) and enriched personal experience needed to build highly collaborative geographically distributed company/community (including employees, customers, partners, supply chain and other communities). A foundation that can help generate increase level of productivity necessary to manage both top line growth and bottom line control. Consider this along with other technology innovations (like RFID, SOA, etc.) and wider deployment choices(like SaaS, Licenced, BPO, etc.) – if anything enterprise industry is getting into some exciting time for innovation.

Enterprise 2.0 naturally enhances the current web based computing model that forces developers to think abstract application components rather than facilitating user interaction (say with your customer or salesforce) that is needed to provide the social experience of getting a task completed. BTW, this happens today although in a primitive way – today one person enters the info in a form that stores relevant data in one tableset that either a work flow or by some other trigger mechanism notifies other person who then picks the recordset from those tables; do some work; and put the modified recordset in another set of tables for another user to pick and do something about it. One can make this user interaction worse if you consider integrated legacy applications and best of breed suites in today’s IT environment – where users have to jump from one application to other hoping to find the relevent information needed to progress the work flow. Think about how this behavior of user interaction can be enhanced leveraging some of the successful and other upcoming future social interaction with the web when trying to accomplish a task.

Thre are other interesting scenarios as well that can be thought of as Enteprise 2.0 takes some shape. I can see much improvement in the CRM space to improve customer facing functionality. These new models will evolve in the time to come as technology gains wide spread adoption and as enterprise vendor catches on to capture social experince needed for them to continue to retain and grow their customer base.

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