Open Sources | Rodrigues & Urlocker » Open source franchising (Robert Galoppini)

December 28, 2006 | Comments: (0)

Open source franchising (Robert Galoppini)

TAGS: Open Source

Roberto Galoppini sent me his paper on a potentially interesting business model for open source: franchising. I've written on the topic before, but hadn't thought about it for some time. (Thanks for being patient and persistent, Roberto!)

Roberto cites IDC and Forrester reports that indicate that the vast majority of enterprises want basic IT services (support, installation, maintenance). Even so, IDC found that 38% of enterprises hire outside consultants to do their migration services and 39% hire outside consultants to do implementation services. For these same services, 59% and 66%, respectively, do the work themselves, internally.

This means that either a) this sort of work is best/cheapest done internally or b) no one has created a viable model to do these basic services better/cheaper/faster.

Roberto's contention - and in my experience it's a very plausible one - is that a franchising model could serve to provide such basic services at better price and quality than could the enterprise's IT staff. The vendor could take this services work itself, of course, but would achieve greater scale by setting up franchises to manage the work.

This makes sense to me. At Alfresco, we already use system integrators to perform all of our implementation services. What we have yet to do, however, is put into place the sort of hardened certification system that Roberto envisions. Roberto highlights Sun as a perfect company to trial a franchising program. The ingredients are certainly there: great software (Solaris, Star Office, Java, etc.), great brand, great channel. What it's lacking is a strong certification program.

For this reason I think Novell, with its experience with its YES! certification program, might be in the pole position to deliver a robust franchising program. It, too, has a strong open source desktop offering (better than Sun's, in my opinion), Linux, etc. And since a big swath of enterprises (44%, according to data cited by Roberto) use Linux for web/email services, as well as file/print, where Novell has good experience, it might be a good product fit, too.

Your thoughts?

Posted by Matt Asay on December 28, 2006 09:55 AM

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