Open Sources | Rodrigues & Urlocker » Open source's biggest services gun?

July 17, 2006 | Comments: (0)

Open source's biggest services gun?

TAGS: Open Source

Bet you didn't think "Unisys" when you read that subject line, but it's true, all the same. Unisys has done a great job reinventing itself and extending its brand and expertise into new territory, most recently open source software. The firm has strong and growing relationships with MySQL and JBoss, and will increasingly be seen as one of the primary go-to partners for open source.

Julie Giera of Forrester has an interesting report on Unisys' open source services. The report deals primarily with Unisys, but also has interesting things to say about the larger open source services market.

On Unisys she says:

Unisys has announced a set of service offerings, called OASIS, for companies with open source platforms. It is the first time that a major IT service provider has offered a fully integrated set of services - including installation, configuration, maintenance, and enhancement - for a predefined open source stack. Competitors like HP and IBM have long had a menu of open source services that customers could choose from, but they have been reluctant to put a stake in the ground around a specific set of open source components. The OASIS announcement is an early indication that the open source services market is starting to mature. Through the OASIS offerings, open source customers can expect to achieve some of the same benefits as commercial software customers - predictability, cost savings, and strong service-level guarantees. With the OASIS set of services offerings, Forrester believes that Unisys should be on the shortlist of vendors for open source services.

Fine and interesting. But Giera also takes the analysis a step further, identifying key requirements underpinning the open source services broker:

• Open source choices delight, and confound, the CIO. Companies have many more software choices available to them today, in the form of both commercial software products and open source projects. Forrester believes that in the next two years entire enterprise application suites targeted to specific vertical industries will be available in the open source community. But since open source can be changed by anyone, the version control and feature/function planning that IT managers have come to depend on in commercial software markets doesn't necessarily exist. Of course, distributors like Red Hat are trying to dampen some of that unpredictability by applying change and release management processes to some of the more popular open source components. But the rigidity that comes with standardization flies in the face of some of the core tenets of open source - namely freedom and choice.

• IT service providers have tried to be all things to all people. It has proven difficult for IT services vendors like IBM to appear supportive of customer choice and freedom on the one hand, while at the same time driving standardization. In a recent discussion with IBM, Forrester was told "we don't want to alienate the open source community" by creating a standard services offering around one specific open source stack. IBM, like its rival HP, is concerned that if it creates a standard set of services around a predefined stack, it will be accused of forcing open source customers into an IBM-defined set of choices. IBM wants to avoid even the perception that it might be limiting customer options for software; especially since it has long been a cheerleader for open source, and it's been a proprietary software vendor for even longer.

This sort of ambivalence - born of the best intentions, I have no doubt - can't persist in services companies. As Giera notes, "[S]ervice providers have to standardize the platform they're supporting. In fact, the differences between supporting a standard platform and supporting a nonstandard platform are as high as 40% over the life of the code. That's a huge number, especially if you consider that some IT applications can live for 10 years or more." This is the route Unisys is taking, and it's the same route taken by several of the smaller (but still highly successful) open source SIs like Cignex, Enomaly, Rivet Logic, Novacoast, etc.

To be successful in services (and software), you must pick your battles. Or, in open source terms, you must pick your packages/projects. You can't be all things to all people. I know, because I tried once. When at Novell, we struggled with the decision to support KDE or GNOME, and ended up straddling both (unsuccessfully, in my opinion). It burned development cycles, caused wasteful internal debate, and confused customers. Ultimately, GNOME won out by executive fiat. It should have happened much sooner, as at Red Hat.

So, you need to figure out how to be a few significant things to a decent swath of the buying population. That's where the money is, and Unisys is going about open source services in an optimal way.

Posted by Matt Asay on July 17, 2006 10:11 AM

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