VMworld: Open up to open source
VMware urged partners to move away from traditional applications at VMworld this year. Caroline Donnelly finds out why
Citrix's Kevin Bland
While cloud inevitably dominated many of the discussions at this year's VMworld Europe event, it was VMware's opinions on open source that perhaps provided the most food for thought.
The vendor's chief executive, Paul Maritz, told delegates that the open-source community will be setting the tone of the IT industry in the future. He praised the great strides being made by developers creating applications using the Java, Ruby on Rails and Scala software development frameworks, claiming their innovation is outstripping those of the proprietary software giants.
Fundamental change
"There is a fundamental change happening in the industry," says Maritz. "The way things are organised is changing. A lot of the interesting stuff is now outside the realm of the traditional vendors."
To accommodate this anticipated shift in power, the vendor has taken steps to align itself with the open-source community so it can tap into this pool of innovation.
"Every time there is a shift like this, there are winners and losers and we are doing everything we can to position ourselves and our partners as winners," says Maritz.
Tom Schuster, vice president for EMEA at open-source vendor SugarÂCRM, says VMware has chosen a good time to nail its flag to the open-source mast, adding that the past year has seen the market really come of age.
"We have resellers coming to us that used to sell Sage and Microsoft products, but have switched because the partner network has become too crowded or their solutions too antiquated," he says.
Schuster adds that the size and profile of companies now relying on open source is proof of how the market has matured.
This is a view shared by Phil AnÂdrews, regional director for Northern and Eastern Europe at open-source giant Red Hat.
"Half the world's stock exchanges and the London Underground Oyster card system are run on open source," he says. "We are very close to becoming a billion-dollar company. That is how mainstream open source is."
Both Schuster and Andrews cite the recession and the low cost of open-source software as important factors in its adoption.
"There have been some big changes in the buying behaviour of government departments and large enterprises over the past two years because they need to cut costs," says Andrews. "With open source you can take the cost of the product out of the equation and free up significant amounts of budget."
The way open source is adopted within companies is changing too, adds Schuster.
"In the larger organisations, it used to be a department-by-department process, but now open source is very much a top-down sell," he says.
Open-minded consumers
Kevin Bland, channel director for the UK, Ireland and South Africa at Citrix, thinks that the consumerisation of IT has also played a part.
"Enterprises have not always been willing to rely on free open-source applications as they view them as unstable and a risk to their business," he says. "The majority of iPad or iPhone users have many applications on their device, which help them to do their job. They bring this device into the workplace and access company information and applications in a secure way."
However, while the appeal of open source appears to be growing, it has not always been an area the channel has been keen to embrace. And whether or not VMware's
partner base is receptive to its attempts to align them with open source could depend on their background and other vendor partnerships.
Red Hat's Andrews says myths about the security and functionality of open-source software have put off the channel in the past.
"Certain types of reseller have a negative, distorted view of open source and a lot of that comes from the messages that are put out by the proprietary vendors they deal with," he says.
But as end-user awareness and demand for open source has grown, the number of resellers that hold these views has died down, he adds.
Adding value
Simon Phipps, a director of industry trade body the Open Source Initiative (OSI), says the lack of licensing revenue can also prove a sticking point for some resellers.
"Traditional, box-shifting resellers associate it with not paying for products and struggle to understand what is in open source for them," he says. "What they sometimes fail to realise is that end users are willing to pay if partners are adding value through services."
Karl Van den Bergh, vice president of product strategy at business intelligence open-source vendor Jaspersoft, says: "Open source allows partners to develop good, healthy margins because the cost of the product is so low and they can charge what they want for it and any services they add."
The defining characteristic of the open-source community is its willingness to share software codes and information that allow functionality and bugs to be fixed in their products. And that makes it very well suited to system integrators and VARs, who are accustomed to bundling products and services, says SugarCRM's Schuster.
"The functionality point is the most significant one because it allows partners to alter processes and integrate products with other applications, as requested by the customer," he says. "It adds value to that relationship because they are able to give the customer greater control over their IT."