Eric Leach's Weblog

Back with a Bang... or OpenSSO goes LIVE!

Ok, so it has been a while. I guess I needed something huge to prod me back into action. So here goes.

OpenSSO went live today. Finally. Phew.
OpenSSO Announcement

I think this is one of those moments that I will be able to look back on years later and say, wow, I was a part of that. (A small part.)

I am extremely proud to be a part of the tireless, hardworking team that made this huge task possible. It is always nice to witness talented people making hard things look easy.

Posted at 04:07PM Aug 17, 2006 by carlericleach in Open Source  |  Comments[1]

Cultural Lag, Open Source, and the power of community

If you believe the theorists and pundits, it takes a human society about one hundred years to catch up with significant technological advances - you know, things like the plow, the stirruped saddle, the balloon tire, electric lights, and iPods. Which means that most of us are stranded somewhere on the historical ebb and flow between agrarian society and the "super information highway". I think I'm personally stuck on history's timeline just to the right of the bicycle (which incidentally has not changed its fundamental design or characterizing features in over 100 years - don't believe me? check out the brilliant full suspension designs from the 1880s and 1890s in Pryor Dodge's excellent book The Bicycle).

Where am I going with all this? I think its safe to say that things are evolving, uh, rapidly these days. The pace and breadth at which change is distributed is unprecedented - hah, global even. But within this staggering pace of innovation, technologies continue to commoditize. Why is this? One reason is because we continue to emphasize the value of technology based on features and functionality. Except, this isn't the real value provided by technology. Technology is valuable because it changes the way we interact, improves our understanding of one another, creates a bridge between what is merely passable and what is interesting and innovative.

I recently read Joe Trippi's book The Revolution Will Not be Televised, his account of transforming presidential politics using the Internet, blogs, and the power of social networking. The message was simple - even when the features and functions of your product are compelling, there is nothing more valuable than a vibrant and dedicated community.

The software industry is undergoing a similar change - value is emerging through participation, innovation, and the development of communities, not the development of features. If you have ten products, all the same, the one with the biggest or strongest community is clearly the one that will emerge above the rest. This is why open source is the preeminent transformational force in the software industry today. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem the industry has realized it is undergoing such drastic changes. (Ah, I knew we'd make it back to cultural lag eventually.)

The really important fact is that people are empowered by involvement, participation, and the sense of satisfaction engendered by contribution. This is an old feeling, an old phenomenon, which gains power and significance when applied in new and interesting ways to new and interesting problems. Like software.

It's not a trend, it's a movement. (Listen to me, full of the enthusiasm of the newly converted...)

Posted at 09:40PM May 04, 2006 by carlericleach in Open Source  |  Comments[0]

How to buy "free" enterprise software...

Last July I spent a lot of time thinking about open source, "free" software, and how enterprises buy software. I did this mainly to prepare for our announcement that we would be open sourcing some of our identity management software. (See: OpenSSO)

Then last November Sun announced no cost access to our software portfolio through something we call the Solaris Enterprise System. This got me to thinking again.

I started to wonder, who is satisfied with the process of selling and buying enterprise software? Enterprises? Vendors? SIs? Developers? Architects? CIOs? CEOs? Wall Street analysts?

Today, the typical enterprise follows what might be described as an obfuscating process when selecting software. This process includes defining a scope for the project and outlining required functionality, drafting an RFI reflecting that scope, using the responses from individual vendors to narrow the field of potential solutions, drafting an RFP that asks vendors to better define how their technology meets the specific solution requirements, selecting a shortlist of vendors to participate in one or more proofs of concept, selecting a vendor (and possibly a services partner) to deliver the solution, defining the solution implementation and project plan based on the selected vendor's technology capabilities, designing and deploying a pilot, and finally, rolling the desired solution components into production.

Whew.

While this process describes “how it's always been done”, what usually unfolds is a cat and mouse game to get vendors to reveal the true capabilities of their products. After yet more thinking, I concluded that there simply isn't enough real transparency in the software selection process.

Then last week, I had a very interesting conversation with Stephen O'Grady, James Governor, and Michael Cote - the very smart analysts from Redmonk. To paraphrase, they contend that the power structure of enterprise technologies has fundamentally shifted from the CIO to developers, architects, and IT. This is happening because real people are using the real technologies they need, not what they are being told to use.

I wholeheartedly agree, and owe them thanks for so concisely stating what I had been mumbling about under my breath for months.

The value of more transparency to developers and architects is obvious: they are selecting software to support security, compliance, enterprise operations, and line of business solutions. Sometimes their customers are impacted directly. These are critical solutions that can make or break their company. As a result, these architects/developers/IT'ers involved in the selection process stake their livelihoods and careers on which solution (identity or otherwise) is right for their enterprise. Architects/developers/IT'ers need to know, without a doubt, whether the products, solutions, and services will perform as advertised (and as we all sometimes too painfully know, often they don't).

And so it goes. If the objective is transparency, I think open source obviously helps. So does no cost access to pre-integrated software. As does integration with developer tools and IDEs. But these are just starting points, Darwinian adpatations of big-ish software stacks. Ultimately what will result from the transparency trend is simpler, easier to use, lighter weight software components that people can actually adopt and use.

And now I'll go think about that some more.

Posted at 08:42PM Apr 25, 2006 by carlericleach in Open Source  |  Comments[3]