Guest Blog spot - Open for Business

One of the great aspects of running the Open Source business at Unisys is the opportunity to meet so many noteworthy people in the open source world. With that in mind, I thought it would be fun to create a “guest blog” spot where some of those people could contribute an article for the benefit of all of us.

So, for the first of such contributions, I’ve asked a friend of mine, John Carrow, who is currently the Senior VP for Strategic Client Development at Unisys, if he would like to submit such an article. John joined Unisys as the CIO and VP of Worldwide IT in 1996 and led the global IT activities of Unisys for ten years. Before joining Unisys, John served as the first CIO for the City of Philadelphia. For his work in that role, he was selected as Public Official of the Year by Governing Magazine. Needless to say, John knows a lot about technology, particularly how it can be leveraged to create business benefits for large organizations. I was very pleased when, within 30 minutes after sending him an email request late on a Friday evening, John responded with his enthusiastic support to write such a posting.


Open for Business
by John C. Carrow

Open Source Déjà Vu


Flashback

It was 1998 and the tech industry was flourishing in the irrational exuberance of the dot com era. Off in the Northwest of the U.S., a gathering of engineers from Microsoft and Unisys were designing the Windows Data Center Edition operating system to be run on open servers. Microsoft engineers brought their Windows desktop experience, and Unisys engineers and others brought their experience to building mainframe operating systems. The goal of this partnership was to build a first-class operating system that could run high transaction volumes within a highly reliable environment.

While in the late 1990s IT budgets were strong across all industries in preparation for the Y2K event, this was also a time when there was a great deal of skepticism among the CIO community as to whether it was practical to think that Microsoft, known for its desktop OS and tool set, could produce an operating system that would be industrial strength enough to run mission-critical applications inside the data center. After all, there were the strong mainframe environments, although proprietary and costly, yet so reliable. There was the UNIX environment that had matured to be the platform of choice for the many applications and, of course, Solaris.

Today, when we look at the IT data center environment, some nine years later, we see that roughly 50 percent of the data center operating system environment runs Windows Data Center Edition. In fact, it has displaced much of the previous installed base of proprietary operating systems. It has shown that it is reliable, scalable and capable of running the large mission-critical applications. It has also shown the power of supportability cost savings achieved through standardization from the desktop through the mid-tier servers and into the data center. Skeptics are now believers!

So what does this have to do with Open Source?

Here we are in 2007 with a new concept, Open Source, for the creation of applications from operating systems to data base management systems, ERPs and beyond. Limited only by the imagination, virtual gatherings of talented engineers, each with their own area of specialty, embark on software development projects sponsored by a variety of sources, built around shared IP and unrestricted use. Their goals are to provide unique applications which benefit the IT industry and the companies that the industry serves. Strong leader projects have emerged to provide viable products, such as MySQL, JBoss, Apache, and the Linux operating system to name a few. Predictably, the CIO skeptics have also emerged.

Open Source brings with it the unknown. And unknowns create risk and doubt that causes slow acceptance in the marketplace – and that’s not all bad. It’s part of the vetting of new ideas. These unknowns show themselves in IP liability issues, supportability questions, interoperability and scalability concerns. At the same time the open source community is coming to grips with these issues. Policies and standards are being set, and service companies are being created to address the maintenance, distribution and general support concerns. Companies like Sourcefire and SugarCRM have paved the way on licensing and pricing models. A whole new set of service providers geared toward the Open Source issues has emerged. Unisys has announced a set of service offerings, Unisys Open and Secure Integrated Solutions (OASIS), which will address the installation, interoperability and configuration of a defined Open Source technology stack. Oracle, Microsoft, and Sun have also joined the party with their own Open Source offerings.

At the same time, as this segment of the IT industry is forming, the skeptical CIO community sees that it cannot be avoided. Most IT shops have taken on the Open Source standards just as a function of acquiring normal commercial product, which has embedded Open Source functionality. The government and some industry segments in media, entertainment, utilities and communications have become very aggressive in their adoption and use of Open Source for even critical business applications, as the claims of lower total cost of ownership and lower acquisition costs are realized.

Here’s to the winners

Much like the early days of the Microsoft venture into the data center operating system market, which took a decade for large-scale penetration and acceptance, the Open Source marketplace is forming -- and its viability is being proven. We will look back in a decade’s time, and maybe quicker, to see an industry that has been radically transformed by virtual engineers, working collaboratively with great innovation, supported by a new model of service companies. The winners will be 1) engineers who will apply their endless creativity, 2) entrepreneurial companies who see the voids and fill the spaces, 3) consumers who see the future and the benefits to their environment and 4) the global IT industry as it strives for greater agility, speed and business focus.

Open Solutions Alliance (OSA)

I’ve spoken (and written) often on the need to drive open source not only from the bottoms-up, but also from the top down to help clearly articulate the value proposition of what open source can do for business, from a CxO perspective. There is noticeably much focus on enhancing open source components with new features, improved reliability, and the like. But, where is the push to ensure the business needs are being clearly captured and driven throughout the community? It sure would be nice if there was an unbiased initiative setup with the right level people and the right culture to drive such a focus. And now there is.

The Open Solutions Alliance (OSA) is a 501c organization (nonprofit) with a vendor-neutral membership focused on driving the development and acceptance of open source business solutions. The organization will work with open source software developers, system integrators, and the broader open source community to improve interoperability among software products. The goal: create more integrated and rapidly deployable solutions for business users. This is a very good thing for everyone involved.

Driving interoperability standards for open source components should lead to greater enterprise-class functionality and increased breadth of applications. Not only will standards help the incumbent players better develop their applications, but this should draw more ISVs into the fray leading to more competition and better products for the end user. But, in order to incorporate mission critical business requirements, you need someone who really understands systems integration, high-end enterprises, and vertical markets. Enter Unisys.
As the first SI player in OSA, we will work closely with the members to help position these requirements. Additionally, with our product development capabilities, we are going to help implement some of the glue code to help make that integration work. There are several other top notch organizations that are part of OSA, and I’m sure others will soon join. The end result: more rapid creation and better applicability of open source solutions to address compelling business challenges. I am very excited to help drive this initiative.

SOA, OSA, and the Philly Emerging Technology Conference

To those who follow my postings, I apologize for the short-term absence. Between completing 2007 strategic planning, meeting with clients, attending the Eastern Technology Council's CIO Rountable on Web 2.0, Web Services / SOA on Wall Street conference, Linux World in NYC, and developing a press-release around the open solutions alliance (OSA), it’s been a busy time. New York is such a great city to visit, especially when I have an opportunity to chat with so many open source leaders. The only negatives (besides the snow storm that stranded so many would-be attendees) were the accommodations at the Roosevelt Hotel. The rooms are very tiny, with zero sound-deadening, and the closets are no more than 10 inches deep … forget about trying to hang any shirts or jackets in there, unless you cram them in sideways. The in-house restaurant service is very slow, and, like everything else in NYC, prices are very expensive. A single bottle of spring water at the Roosevelt costs $16. But, putting all that aside, it was wonderful to see so much buzz around open source, both from a vendor perspective as well as from major Wall Street firms. And, that buzz is just starting to heat up for 2007.

Some great events coming in March include the Open Source Think Tank, the OTD conference, and the Emerging Technologies for the Enterprise event.

The Think Tank is sponsored by the Olliance Group and will be bringing many leading open source companies together to discuss the future of commercial open source. Myself and Ali Shadman from Unisys are planning to attend.

The ODT conference is a two-day event addressing the Department of Defense’s Open Technology Development (OTD) to leverage open source software, standards, and architecture into the DoD. One of the foremost leaders in this space, John Scott, will be attending this event, not to mention other top executives from the government.

The Emerging Technologies for the Enterprise event had a huge turnout in 2006 and looks to be even bigger this year. It is the largest event in the Philadelphia region around open source technologies for the enterprise. The conference is sponsored by Chariot Solutions, which, by the way, is a great open source consulting firm with some very impressive talent. A senior Unisys executive and CIO, John Carrow, will be speaking at the event as well as the founder of Spring Framework, Rod Johnson. Also, I will be part of a panel session discussing the various legal aspects of open source, including how to select the best tools, applications, and licensing models to best meet various business needs.

I know these events (and many others this year) will help further the open source movement and draw more businesses closer to realizing the huge potential from leveraging open source. I can only hope the accommodations for these events will not resemble the Roosevelt.

Open Source investment takes off

For any who doubt the rise and acceptance of Open Source, take a look at ComputerWire’s report on how much venture capital is being invested in this space. Not only did those investments more than double from last year, not only is it nearing a total of $1 billion invested since 2000, but this growth is “vastly outpacing” investments in the rest of the IT market. The market demand for open source solutions is driving proliferation of new products and the financial backing for those companies focused on developing them and bringing them to market. And, most of the VCs I know want to see a 10x return on their investment over 5 years, making the 2011 valuation look pretty sizable. The article is a highly worthwhile read.

The SI’s role in Open Source

System Integrators (SI)’s, by definition, must be “Jacks of all trades,” and preferably master of some (though oftentimes better than master of one). But, the biggest challenge in today’s service economy is how best to bridge the gap between business and technology. Within an Open Source environment, the gap is the empty space between the business vision & strategy and the technology required to realize that strategy on an ongoing basis.

In recent discussions I’ve had with the CIO of a very large Wall Street brokerage house, their challenge is all the legacy systems and multiple databases, each serving different types of investment accounts with little to no automated data sharing. How does a major business process like “Open Account” map through all the hardware and software elements of the datacenter? How does it all tie together, and how easy is it to make a change, or even understand the implications of a potential change? These are major hindrances toward a more seamless, flexible environment in which the vision, strategy, and technology are all coordinated.

In order for an SI to move beyond being one person or company that integrates disparate systems into a datacenter environment, they need to be able to bridge the connections between the systems and business. And the only way to successfully do this is to understand the business. Good SI’s hold the advantage in this approach as they understand business top to bottom, comprising skills of part business executive, part industry consultant, part technologist, and part innovator.

Here are a few more FAQ’s as to an SI’s role in Open Source

Why are SIs in great demand?
Because companies want to focus on their core attributes … what they do best … the true differentiating value they have to offer. That means that for the rest of the stuff, they want someone else to worry about that.

But the SIs also have the role of driving the best technologies into business. Why?
Many of the best technologies are built from startups, particularly in the open source space. And these startups, with their great technological innovations, don’t have an easy entrée into the mass corporations. The SIs have this penetration capability with their skills, proven solutions, and their relationships.

Do SI’s need to remain unbiased?
They sure do. It is not good if an SI is also a maker and seller of these technologies. If an SI has a vested interest in pushing their own technologies, a company may not have the opportunity to explore more effective components (cheaper, better fit, etc.) from the “outside”.

This is an approach we take at Unisys, and believe in. The priority, of course, is to ensure our customers have the best offerings for their mission critical open source environments. As an SI with no vested interest in the solutions our customers are using, we simply will not succeed unless they do. Hence a strategic partnership is formed.

Lastly, regarding an SI’s role in Open Source, if you haven’t already seen it, Matt Asay recently published Open Sources Reflections on 2006, which you may find of interest. In his post, Matt recognized Unisys as “the biggest services gun” around open source, a bestowal for which I am most proud.

Another sign that Open Source is becoming mainstream

You know that a word or phrase has become hugely popular when it is used as both a proper noun and a verb, such as Windex, Google, and Scotch Tape. Now we can add “Open Source” to such an esteemed category.

Wanted: Open Source solution architects

There is a gaping hole in the open source commercialization eco-system. And, by “commercialization”, I don’t mean that in a negative “selling out” manner, but rather in leveraging the greatness of open source to solve real-world business problems. There are a large and growing number of technical experts driving the open source projects and the innovations therein. This started as a grass-roots movement, as many significant innovations and paradigm shifts do, and continues to cross from innovators and early adopters toward the mainstream. But, the open source “movement” still has its detractors.

Typical comments I hear all the time (from CxO’s):

“It’s geek stuff, not real code that is ready for the enterprise. I would never bet my business on it.”

“The code is developed by people all over the world who never see each other. And anyone with bad intentions has total visibility into the code. That doesn’t sound too safe to me.”

“Who owns any of this stuff, and where would I turn if I had any questions or problems?”

Of course, those comments come from people who are misinformed. However, since perception is “reality” in many spheres of life, the challenge is to overcome those false perceptions.

So, while the technical merits of many open source projects are driving acceptance amongst IT folks, what is also needed is a commensurate “communication” push at the executive level. In other words, drive the value articulation of open source both from the bottom-up and the top down. But, to do it “top down” requires a rare skill set. This is what I call the “open source solution architect”.

An open source solution architect not only understands the open source space inside and out, but also knows the particular business space. By business space, I mean a selected vertical industry such as telecommunications, hospitality, transportation, financial services, public sector, and so-on. So, this solution architect understands the business (the players, their challenges, their success criteria, etc.) and can speak at a CxO level. This person can go toe-to-toe with any CIO and articulate how open source can help them solve pressing business challenges and enable new business opportunities. Although growing in number, the people with these skills are still few and far between.

Enterprise Open Source Reader’s Choice Awards – Cast Your Vote

The 2007 Enterprise Open Source Magazine “Reader’s Choice” Awards is currently taking place, and you can vote here. The magazine is an excellent resource for all things open source, and these awards recognize solutions and products ranging from the best Linux book all the way up to the best open source product. And, in the spirit of full disclosure, the Unisys OASIS stack is one of the products up for nomination in that category.

I encourage all readers to take a moment and browse through the categories with which you are familiar and cast your vote. The more votes received, the more significant the results will be.

Open Source Predictions for 2007

I recently published a set of open source predictions for 2007 to detail those areas that we in Unisys believe will really take off next year. I’d like to offer a summary of those thoughts here to encourage your views and comments.

Businesses will take a much more holistic, architectural view of implementation and deployment of open source projects rather than managing them in a piecemeal “as needed” fashion. Now that many open source components are really proving themselves as ready-for-prime-time, or as I like to say, “bet-your-business-on-capable”, CIOs and CFOs are really starting to take notice. As such, business executives are now extremely interested in how these pieces can be architected into an organized strategy for enhancing their business, particularly around some sort of a services-oriented architecture (SOA). Perhaps most compelling is the ability to modernize a legacy environment in a well thought out, evolutionary approach.

Another area of rapid adoption will be around vertical solutions, particularly in the public sector, financial services, and communications space. Teams with expertise in both open source technologies and industry solutions will pull together stacks tuned to address business challenges and opportunities in their respective markets. Coupled with the industry verticals will also be more specialized horizontal plays to go after the BI, ECM, and systems (datacenter) management trends. And, I suspect we will see even more open source startup companies formed to go after those specific opportunities in both the pure verticals as well as the horizontal markets.

The opportunities for businesses are huge, and I believe that more SI players will get involved in helping pull together the entire ecosystems for the end-users. An obviously growing corporate trend is to focus more on specific value-add and to “outsource” their non-core activities to a partner who understands their space and can help them meet their business goals. That’s certainly the position Unisys is taking with our open source business model, which is focused on helping clients around the world realize the benefits of open source and open standards without sacrificing any of their mission-critical requirements. Those benefits are obviously a dramatic reduction in datacenter costs and a significant increase in the flexibility of their infrastructure.

Road thoughts on Microsoft, Oracle, and Open Source

Many of you can appreciate the weariness of traveling, waking up in a hotel room and having to think for a moment where you are. Or sitting in an airport lounge forgetting what state you are in. Such is the condition I find myself in as I write this. But, I’ve been asked so much over the past few days what I think about all this Microsoft and Oracle stuff and its affect on open source. So, for the record, here are my thoughts.

Giant corporations like Microsoft and Oracle have a lot going for them. For one, they have many great employees with a ton of talent. Secondly, they have a lot of marketing pull. The stones (boulders) they drop into a lake make much bigger ripples than the tiny pebbles from most other companies. However, with such greatness of size and power also comes a certain amount of antipathy from the masses. Notwithstanding Wall Street’s view, it’s almost as if there is some fundamental principle of external disenchantment that sets in once a company passes a certain threshold. Regardless of one’s world view, it is a fact that both Microsoft and Oracle recently dropped some pretty heavy stones into the open source lake.

So, what does this all mean for the open source community? Not only do I think it is good news, but I also think inevitable. Let’s start with the inevitability and then move on to the goodness.

Oracle wants to be in the operating system environment, actually the whole stack environment (think Fusion) for their business process architecture. They had been rumoring at Linux for a long time, so this announcement should have been no surprise. Oracle wants to be “the” platform for business processing, and the operating system is a natural part of that architecture. Now, how much Oracle will really do with Linux remains to be seen. They certainly won’t want to fork RedHat unless there is a really solid business justification behind it. Some may speculate a “conspiracy theory” to depress RedHat’s market cap, but while highly juicy from an editorial perspective, I highly doubt that is what drove Oracle to make this move. The OS software is free, and Oracle’s focus is to do everything they can to drive businesses to their application environment. (NB: I will say that it is rather interesting that you don’t find much recent information from the Oracle execs on their blogs. A quick look into a few of them revealed last updates from over six months ago.)

Likewise, Microsoft is in the operating system environment. And, what many people probably don’t know is that Microsoft has been working with Linux for quite a while. Bill Hilf, a really smart guy who came from IBM’s Linux team, runs the Microsoft open source team, and these guys have been quite busy. And, of course, Microsoft wants clients to use their software, so why would they ignore a huge market in the Linux space. Now, how many Novell “coupons” Microsoft actually ships also remains to be seen. But, Microsoft will certainly continue to find the best balance between the revenue they generate from their operating system and the opportunities (both from a revenue and PR perspective) with Linux and the open source community.

So, the reason I think both of these “moves” are positive from an open source perspective is because they add additional legitimacy to the whole space. Of course, all of us already swimming in the open source lake know that the water is nice and warm, clean, safe, healthy, and here to stay. But, for those looking in from the outside at this (dare I say) oasis, the obvious question is, “Is that real?” When companies like Microsoft and Oracle start splashing around, you know you’ve crossed a tipping point. Now it no longer looks like an oasis, or even a lake. It is starting to look like an ocean.

West Coast travels and SOA

It’s a long trip travelling east-to-west, fighting the jet stream along the way, from PHL to SFO. However, it affords the traveler a great chance to catch up on a ton of reading. Since I travel quite a bit, I am the kind of person that keeps a stack of material to read for just such an occasion. This trip allowed me to get through a two-inch thick manila folder of great open source articles (and about 10 packs of US Airways’ “Fancy Cashews & Honey Sesame Sticks”).

The topic I’d like to throw open for discussion here is the correlation between open source and services-oriented architecture (SOA). I’ve come across a few analysts that don’t see much (if any) correlation between the two, but thankfully they seem to be in the minority (and I won’t mention them by name). Open source is an enabler to SOA, and although not all SOAs are built completely with open source components, the modular, loosely coupled nature of open source components make them ideal for many SOA implementations. And, with approximately 80% of CIOs making SOA a priority, this is a worthy discussion.

But, a step back is probably in order. If you ask 10 people to define SOA, or even “architecture” for that matter, you will most likely get 10 different definitions. My view (or definition) of SOA in one sentence: a defined, governed infrastructure environment (or parts thereof) where business rules & processes have been decomposed into a set of registered, discoverable services, which, when invoked, perform a function and perhaps return a result. The goal: leverage existing assets (ie legacy applications and mainframes) and the build or acquisition of new assets in an intelligent, modular approach such that component reuse is high and solution developers can focus on their core value-add rather than having to reinvent parts of the wheel for every solution. Analyst firms like Kennedy estimate that organizations can save 30-40% on their infrastructure costs “because clients can easily reuse software once it is developed”. But another huge benefit of building a SOA environment and thinking through the business processes that are core to the business is the ability to more effectively link business rules with the infrastructure and thereby create a paradigm where the business rules drive the IT infrastructure, rather than the other way around. At Unisys, we call this 3D-VE or 3D visible enterprise, where the linkages are defined all the way from a company’s vision, down through its business processes and applications, and into the IT infrastructure. By seeing how it all fits together (or, in many cases, doesn’t) and understanding the impact of changes before they are actually implemented, it is a lot easier to build a future state environment like the one I just described.

The hard part, of course, is developing a governance model that is used by the entire organization and coming up with the right level of “granularization” for the service components. Take the presentation layer as one example. User sign-on. Security. Policies and access models. Interoperation of the security components with the rest of the middleware environment. Companies need to think through all this to get it ideal, and it will have ripple effects throughout the infrastructure. But, one of the beauties of open source is that you can start with a low cost without spending a fortune and being stuck on the path of a purely proprietary implementation. The hottest SOA areas right now are around portals, integration, business intelligence, and security, and there are plenty of open source components to help.

Sun open sources Java

Kudos to Jonathon Schwarz, Rich Green, Bill Joy, and the rest of the Sun team for more than just following up on a promise but making a very difficult business decision to release some of their crown jewels. I suspect that the resultant code base will be enhanced with new features and that more developers will be attracted to Java. It should be fun to watch.

Open Source, The 3 C’s, and a New Beginning

It starts with an idea … as always. Although I’ve commented extensively on other’s blogs and been quoted quite a bit in the press for what I’ve been doing around Open Source, it’s time to put together a new model for such “communication”. One in which my perspectives and insights can be shared, discussed, and debated directly without the other “noise”. But, perhaps even more importantly, a communication model in which I can get honest feedback from the global community and help drive our shared passions forward.

Why do this? In the words of the great essayist Emerson, “If we are related, we shall meet.”

I am passionate about a lot of things, and one of them is Open Source. Not just because it’s such a disruptive technology and is turning the software world upside down, although I do think that is cool. Not just because it affords businesses tremendous cost savings and flexibility improvements, although that’s precisely what our solutions at Unisys do. But because the open source development model fosters what I call the 3 C’s: community, collaboration, and components. People from all around the world, coming together to design, build, test, release, and support standards-based modules in an open-forum environment. But, for me, it’s much more than “just software” (or “free software”, although that’s a topic for another posting) … it’s a development model that is revolutionizing the way people build solutions to problems.

By leveraging like-minded souls across the globe who share a common interest and passion, solutions can be built much more quickly and efficiently than “typical” development projects. A perfect example comes from the Goldcorp gold mining corporation that needed a way to improve their success at locating gold in their mines. By sharing their geological data on the internet and hosting a contest to offer a large sum of money to the team that could process that data and find the right spots to mine, Goldcorp became hugely successful. Mind you, a mining company’s geological data is the key to the kingdom. Imagine the fortitude it took for Goldcorp’s CEO, Rob McEwen, to take that bold step. Rob credits his idea to the Linux development model he had recently learned about from a seminar at MIT. Sure enough, people from around the world competed, and some teams developed new methods for processing the geological information (including new methods for drilling) that Goldcorp’s team had never even imagined. An Australian team from half-way around the world from Goldcorp’s headquarters in Ontario won the big prize, and they never even saw the gold mine. Check out the article Don Tapscott wrote on Goldcorp last year. As an aside, I met Don Tapscott at Gartner’s Open Source Summit a month ago in Phoenix. His visionary insight into technology trends and evolution are superb, which he’s translated into many books worth reading.

So, as the person who started and runs the Open Source business in Unisys, I can assure you that the development model I just described works equally well in giant corporations like ours (think 33,000+ employees, think over 100 countries around the world, think over $5.7B in revenues … starts to give a sense as to the magnitude). But certainly not without challenges. There is a lot of education required to create such an environment, and a really good governance model in place to make it work well. However, with the right focus and leadership, it can pay off immensely (as it has for us and others like Goldcorp).

In essence, open source is successful and will continue to revolutionize the industry because it leverages the collective genius of the community and helps them collaborate more effectively thus resulting in globally reusable, high-quality components that they can continue to build upon as a community. That development model is here to stay and will expand into new territories. It’s great fun to be a part of this journey, and thanks for joining me on the ride.

So, back to Emerson, if we are related and it’s time for us to meet, I can be reached at anthony dot gold at unisys dot com or privately at apgold at yahoo dot com. I promise to respond to every email message as well as read every comment in this blog. I look forward to making your acquaintance.