Eric Leach's Weblog

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]