Unlocking the enterprise for open source
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the enterprise application software arena, with open-source entrepreneurs and their venture capital backers rapidly trying to carve out positions in different enterprise application segments such as CRM and ERP.
And companies are buying. Robert Frances Group, a Westport, Conn.-based IT consulting firm, found in a recent survey of its customers that the uptake of open-source software of all sorts in the past 12 months has more than doubled. Indeed, large players such as IBM and Sun Microsystems, midsize companies such as Novell and Red Hat, or the venture-capital-backed start-ups such as MySQL and JBoss, are all taking open-source software deeper into the enterprise.
If open-source enterprise application start-ups in particular can make their business models work, then the lower costs that corporations already enjoy by using open-source software infrastructure will be extended to other areas of their IT infrastructures as the licensed software providers are forced to lower the price of their products and services. It could usher in a new era of cheap software that will be a boon to companies across the planet--and costly indeed for license-driven software companies such as Microsoft and even on-demand software vendors such as Salesforce.com.
But it's not that easy to embrace open-source business application software. Integrating the applications to customers' existing proprietary software can be challenging, and reliability can be spotty. In many cases, corporations need internal developers to install the software themselves. And if something goes wrong, there may not be a vendor to rely on for support.
Equally important, open source does not mean the licensing of software is no longer an issue. In fact, it can be more confusing and potentially very costly if a company unknowingly uses code that the owner of that code--out there somewhere in the world--is charging for.
To help clear these hurdles, open-source devotees have emerged in recent years to deal with these integration, licensing and support issues. This, in turn, is helping open-source business software vendors crack the corporate marketplace. To understand how the open-source vendors, services companies and consultancies do this, however, requires a brief step back into the history of the open-source movement.
Companies and governments have been using open-source software to replace Microsoft's server software with some version of Linux for more than a decade. Initially, they were attracted by the cost savings associated with switching from Windows server software or Sun's Solaris server system to Linux.
Linux was first released in part by Linus Torvalds in 1991. His open-source code in time began to challenge the grip of licensed software on corporations' IT infrastructure. By 1995, open-source Web server software programs called Tomcat and Apache first appeared, and the next year MySQL, an Uppsala, Sweden-based start-up, released its first open-source database software.
MySQL is now used by 5,000 companies worldwide and competes with other relational databases produced by Computer Associates International, Microsoft and Oracle. In what has become a common business model in the open-source community, MySQL users pay nothing unless they embed the database into their own proprietary code and then sell that product or unless they would like support and maintenance.
Together, Linux, Apache, MySQL and the so-called Perl and PHP scripting languages that together are referred to by the acronym LAMP (which stands for Linux, Apache, MySQL and Perl), have come together to form a free stack of open-source technologies. "The LAMP stack is extraordinarily widespread," says Robin Bloor, a partner at Hurwitz Associates, a technology research firm in Waltham, Mass.
Competing stacks include Microsoft's .Net and Sun's Java/J2EE, two proprietary software technologies that over the past few years have battled to become the de facto standard for Web server software
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