Open Channels

The Boston Big Data Summit will be held on September 20th from 6:00 PM to 9:00 PM EST at the Foley Hoag Emerging Enterprise Center in Waltham, MA. The meeting will put the spotlight on four emerging Big Data management technologies – Columnar, NoSQL, Hadoop and OLTP – and explore targeted use cases for each class of solution. I will be hosting a panel discussion with representatives from Infobright, MongoDB, Cloudera and VoltDB. The event is free and we expect all of the 100 seats to book quickly.  Details are available here. Read the rest of this entry »

A while back I was doing some research for a client and came across an apparent GPL slight of hand engineered by Sun and IBM.  Time constraints and competing priorities kept me from writing about this until now, and Oracle’s acquisition of Sun has taken Sun off of the hot seat (see in particular paragraph 2, Non Assertion), but it’s still a pretty juicy story.  What’s more, I think it’s healthy to expose vendor behaviors that cut against the spirit of open source, creating unfair advantages for a privileged few at the expense of everyone else. Read the rest of this entry »

Although I’ve read many articles about open source licensing, I’m continually surprised by the amount of confusion and disinformation I find related to the GNU General Public License (GPL).  This post is written by a lay person for other lay persons.  I’m not a lawyer, but I do a fair amount of IP strategy consulting with open source companies and have had the benefit of working  with some of the best open source attorneys in the world.  So I know enough to be dangerous and have an (more or less) informed point of view. Read the rest of this post with the understanding that I am offering my own views of the GPL, not legal advice. Read the rest of this entry »

Everyone understands the concepts of a market funnel – leads are loaded into the top from various sources; they go through some level of qualification and scoring before being passed to sales; and the sales team then develops them further into pipeline opportunities and deals.  In traditional enterprise markets, demand creation and low-touch selling are subordinate to the rolodex-driven, four-legged sales process.  In volume markets, frictionless marketing and sales are the process.  Where enterprise sales is an artful pursuit, volume marketing and selling is all about math. Read the rest of this entry »

Leads come from many different sources – inbound marketing, community cross-over, raw website registrations, integrated media programs, email campaigns and other promotional activities. While it’s important to track and measure leads from each source, it’s also vital to understand lead momentum – the velocity at which leads progress through marketing and sales. Read the rest of this entry »

Software downloads are a key metric for all open source vendors, as well as for proprietary vendors who offer freemium versions of their products.  Tracking the volume of software downloads provides management with a good benchmark of anonymous community interest and momentum.  Although I’d argue that it’s critical to track all downloadable assets (including white papers, webcast archives, various marketing collaterals, etc.), product downloads are an important community signaling device – they indicate an intention on the part of the downloader to commit time to explore, test and use your product. Read the rest of this entry »

June 30, 2010.  Today LoopFuse, Inc. launched FreeView, a freemium edition of the company’s OneView marketing automation application.  In LoopFuse’s words, “FreeView is a fully-functional marketing automation platform designed to meet the needs of SMB marketers” and includes core marketing automation functionality such as lead scoring, visitor analytics and multi-level email campaigning.

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I’ve been doing research on open source licensing strategies and community interactions for an upcoming report.  My research brought me to the Ingres Community Forum, where I hoped to gain some insight about Ingres’ traction as an open source player.  Ingres uses a dual-license model (GPL v2 with FLOSS exception) and runs a vendor-managed community.

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You are the Marketing Programs Manager for an open source software company.  Your job is to spin flax into gold.  You must progressively engage hundreds of thousands of website visitors, integrate registered contacts with lead lists you’ve sourced from 3rd party providers, drive audience-specific email campaigns to contacts in your target markets, and pass qualified leads to your CRM system for follow-up by your sales team.  On the back end of all this activity, you need to provide your boss with weekly metrics that correlate pipeline and bookings to campaigns and lead sources.

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EnterpriseDB announced a new program today aimed squarely at Oracle users who are fed up with Oracle’s drumbeat of price increases.  Oracle recently announced a 40% hike in the price of its database tools on the heels of a 20% increase in the price its core database product in 2008.

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Open Channels kicks off a series of vendor reports with Bluenog Corporation, a venture capital funded start-up in the web application development space.  Bluenog’s solutions aim to help organizations develop, integrate and deliver high value Web content, positioning the company to play a vital role in the progressive engagement lifecycle.

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Stimulated in part by a controversial Eric Raymond blog post, open source thought leaders like Matt Asay are publicly questioning the contemporary merits of the GNU General Public License (GPL).  In fairness, Matt has long been a GPL advocate.  And it’s never bad to question whether past practices make sense going forward.  All that said, the notion that open source vendors should simply abandon the GPL in favor of liberal licenses like BSD/Apache is myopic and wrong-headed, in my opinion.
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O’Reilly Radar published an interesting interview with Jeffrey Hammond, a veteran analyst at Forrester Research, on the organic infiltration of open source technologies into enterprises.  Hammond’s primary research audiences include developers, enterprise architects and development managers, and his research domains include Web 2.0, rich internet application development, software change and configuration management, application life cycle management, software modeling, mobile development, IDEs and programming languages.  I’m not quite sure how one guy covers such a broad patch, but Hammond has been around for a long time and is a respected analyst.

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As disclosed by Peter Galli, a Microsoft open source community spokesperson, Microsoft intends to include C# and the Common Language Infrastructure (CLI) in Microsoft’s Community Promise, a public commitment not to assert patent claims or other rights related to the implementation of those standards.  According to Galli:

Under the Community Promise, Microsoft provides assurance that it will not assert its Necessary Claims against anyone who makes, uses, sells, offers for sale, imports, or distributes any Covered Implementation under any type of development or distribution model, including open-source licensing models such as the LGPL or GPL.

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Some open source vendors are preoccupied with counting community downloads.  Why?  They believe that downloads are a leading indicator of commercial sales pipeline.  The theory is that a meaningful percentage of community relationships will develop into commercial relationships, and sooner rather than later.  While it’s certainly true that some community relationships will cross over, the percentages are small, the durations are tortuously long, and the consistency (i.e., repeatability) of that cross-over motion is low.  Thus, revenue models based on the premise of community monetization are, with few exceptions, doomed from the get-go. Read the rest of this entry »

Bruce Byfield takes a rational position in his Datamation article about the ongoing Mono controversy.  For those new to the subject, Mono is a “free” implementation of Microsoft’s .NET framework.  The crux of the issue is that Mono shares a core of intellectual property with .NET, and that core is covered by Microsoft patents.  The free software community fears that, if Mono becomes integral to popular open source distros (i.e., that wish to offer compatibility and interoperability with .NET), Microsoft will some day assert its patent rights.  Read the rest of this entry »

Whether you are using a pure open source strategy or a hybrid approach such as “open core” (open source foundation with high-value closed source add-ons), a significant component of your bookings is tied to support subscriptions.  Too often, early stage open source companies put a significant amount of thought into attracting community downloads and not enough thought into what they should be doing between the download event and the production deployment of applications based on their solutions.  Impending deployment, of course, signals to an open source sales rep that his chances of selling a support subscription are pretty good. Read the rest of this entry »

Many software companies are operating in the dark ages of marketing.  Their notions of demand generation are to drop hundreds of thousands of emails on cold, externally-sourced contact lists, watch for activity on their landing pages, and shoot at whatever moves. Read the rest of this entry »

After a cacophony of issues associated with its 5.0 and 5.1 releases, including those documented during the vocal departure of Monty Widenius, Sun is rejigging MySQL’s development model.  According to Robin Schumacher, MySQL’s Director of Product Management, the new release process will be comprised of the following: Read the rest of this entry »

You’ve been there; so have I.  Slaved into the night to write that killer white paper, staged the archive of an informative webcast, or made a very cool gizmo available for download from the website.  And all we asked for in return was a registration.  To quote a Chinese curse, “May your wishes come true”. Read the rest of this entry »