Re: Managing In The Open
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Analyst firm The 451 Group is getting a lot of press this week for their recently released 60-page report "Managing in the Open: The Next Wave of Systems Management." For the record, I love these guys and the report contains a great deal of very useful information. My good friend Raven Zachary, a Senior Analyst at The 451 Group and Practice Head of the company's CAOS (Commercial Adoption of Open Source) research service, created the report, and I highly recommend CAOS to people seeking insight into commercial open source.
With the table set, I must disagree with the following assertions in the executive summary:
"The 'Big Four' systems management vendors (BMC, HP, IBM and CA) are ripe for a shake-up. In the past 12 months, the large-scale, commercially supported application of open source development methods has been applied to systems management software problems. Open source could give potential challengers the cost and scale advantages they need to take on such formidable opponents while offering users a potential avenue for cost reduction. Yet open source vendors and software still face an uphill battle against entrenched players with their existing integrated suites and supportive relationships." |
Hold on a minute. Systems management has needed a shakeup for a while. Anyone familiar with openSIMS, Nagios, or the Open Management Consortium knows where I stand on that. But it's not because of or driven by open sourcing code most customers will never see and few have little if any interest in modifying. It's also not driven as much by price as many would believe.
Users are shaking up the marketplace because they're demanding a more powerful voice in the companies that produce the software that manages their network. Open source facilitates the demand for more relevant products. The pressure for open source systems management companies to "be open" with customers is double or triple that felt by proprietary shops. Companies have forgotten their customer base; what they're delivering no longer addresses their customers' needs. When you look at it from that perspective, open source—mostly openness—is the catalyst for returning to user-driven innovation. It's not about the code, it's about the community.
Color BMC not surprised. Last week we launched our BMC Developer Network to open our community to the world. This week we launched an additional customer council for customers in Australia. Neither of these is a response to the "Little 4" or some threat from open source systems management. They're just a continuation of the community strategy that has our BSM strategy in the pole position in the marketplace. I've always said there are more opportunities to work with the open source community—including the vendors mentioned in the report—than there is competition. We are part of a much larger eco-system and each project, company, and industry titan has a spot on the food chain.
"The category of open source systems management is mostly dominated by systems monitoring, configuration, provisioning and patching, and it lacks the full feature set provided by the leading proprietary systems management vendors. Yet these core features represent some primary demands in the market from IT end users. The cost savings and flexibility can make open source worth trying, particularly when monitoring, configuration and other tasks can be swapped in for other products fairly easily. Granted, many of these open source systems management deployments are being made by smaller organizations, while larger enterprises are not typically using them in production environments yet." |
This is nitpicky, but open source systems management is dominated by monitoring, period. The majority of available offerings are in the monitoring space, and there is little traction in configuration, provisioning, and patching. I also don't think that monitoring products are that interchangeable. Lack of interoperability is one of the biggest complaints I hear from users on both sides of the debate. Just because these other products are open source doesn't mean they work easily with each other. Many of these tools don't work together at all. That's not a criticism; it's a fact.
As far as the comment on who is using open source and who isn't, I submit that companies usually have two resources they can apply to systems management: time and/or money. Rarely can they afford both, though that will surely change in the near future. Companies who have money but not time often opt for proprietary products. Companies who have time but no money see open source as a very viable alternative, and rightfully so.
There're three sides to every story, right? Raven's one of the best in the business. I respect him, and I'm sure the report goes into more detail on these issues. I've ordered a copy and will revisit this post once I've digested it. But right now the press are using these types of quotes from the executive summary to throw fuel on the proprietary vs. open source systems management fire and distracting us from our needs analysis by making these little spats focal points.
Work in systems management? Hear that faint crowd noise like you're one block away from a heavy-weight boxing match that just ended in round one with some chump taking a dive? That would be your customers trying to get your attention. They ain't happy and it ain't because they can't see your code. We are still not working together often enough to solve the basic problems that exacerbate their daily routines. Here's hoping we can stop bickering and start having some open, honest conversations about cooperation and customer satisfaction.
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Interoperability is the key
Applications that ran on UNIX had hooks so that one could process saved data with the UNIX shell tools into formats that other applications could handle.
With the multitude of foreign formats that OSS can handle this is still the case, especially on platforms like Linux, Solaris and FreeBDS.
Coupled with standard XML now used by many OSS applications, the interoperability feature is part of the culture of *Nix.
The GNU shell contains all sorts of tools that can be used as translating filters, even on binary data, and being a non formal end user language, it lends itself readily to these tasks.
The stacked application suites promoted by Microsoft and other proprietary software producers make interoperability as hard as they can for marketing reasons, but OSS is gradually changing that, as even those with fundamental programming skills can modify the source to include hooks to take advantage of the shell interoperability tools, or with a little more skill, formats that specifically fit the interoperating application.
For example, look at the easy methods that SUN used to add an ODF translator plugin to MS Office.
With OSS and *Nix there is always a way to solve interoperability and as the skill base grows companies will be able to employ contractors to solve their problems.
Proprietary companies may retaliate by changing their application formats, but in this day and age this tends to lose rather than gain custom.
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I think that the most interesting point is about interoperability. There is a huge disincentive for commercial organisations to promote standards and hence interoperability. This is not that their products become interchangeable and hence remove 'lock in'. Whilst that is an issue, it is not THE issue.
The issue is that once standards arise the open source community write code that complies with it (why not). Then open source becomes 'good enough' [ http://nerds-central.blogspot.com/2007/05/solaris-better-than-linux-thats-missing.html ] and the products commoditized. Once that happens, the money goes out of the market for providing software and moves over to supporting and installing it.
In the end then, the debate is not Open Source vs Commerical (you are 100% correct there) it is standards vs no standards.
AJ