Open Sources | Rodrigues & Urlocker » Building ubiquity into your business

April 27, 2007 | Comments: (0)

Building ubiquity into your business

TAGS: Open Source

I was talking with Jason Maynard (CSFB) today about Alfresco, MuleSource, and other open source businesses, and how we're managing to break our way into enterprise accounts. The short answer is "ease of distribution."

To that Jason replied that while effective through open source mechanisms, open source does not have a lock on ubiquity plays. He brought up BEA, Salesforce.com, and Adobe as other companies that have successfully created ubiquitity strategies.

Salesforce.com is interesting. As Jason noted, Personal Edition" is the company's ubiquity play. You want to try it out? Do so...for free. You want to grow a little? Do so...for cheap. Salesforce.com undoubtedly hopes that there are lots of little pockets of use within an enterprise, so that it can come in a year later and cut an enterprise-wide license. Pricing (at least initially) for ubiquity. By the time the price matters, ubiquity (within the company) matters more. Very smart.

Adobe plays it differently. Adobe is a master at ubiquity, with Flash, Acrobat Reader/PDF, and now Flex permeating the industry...so that the company can sell value around these technologies.

IBM's ubiquity play is arguably its services arm. Not as cheap as a free download, but very effective.

Microsoft? It has several, not the least being the significantly lower prices, on average, than its proprietary peers charge. It hasn't made Office free, but it makes it pretty competitively priced.

To compete in the 21st Century, I think having an ubiquity play is critical. You need some way to seep in under the doors of big enterprises. Competing head to head with Incumbent Vendor X for the CIO's attention is a losing proposition for newbie vendors...unless you're already everywhere within her enterprise (through free downloads or a free online service). You can't afford the sales team and marketing necessary to take a top-down approach to displace an incumbent.

Ubiquity, oddly enough, is the easiest route. Not easy, of course, but much easier than dumping a mountain of cash to get entree to an enterprise through a direct sales model.

Posted by Matt Asay on April 27, 2007 07:00 AM

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