ehick Migrating to TypePad.com

I've decided to migrate my blog to TypePad.com. From now on, I'll be hanging out at http://scottmcmullan.typepad.com/blog

For syndication purposes, my Feedburner RSS/Atom XML feed is still the same: http://feeds.feedburner.com/scottmcmullan.

The Dells of Open Source, Part 2

A little over a week ago I blogged SourceLabs, a newly minted Open Source aggregator aiming to sell support and services around productized open source components that have affinity. I expected to see a flood of these (it's a good idea after all), and last week we were indeed treated to another: SpikeSource. Turns out Kim Polese is CEO and the company was incubated and funded Ray Lane and Kleiner Perkins. Nice start!

Digging deeper, an interview with founder Murugan Pal (former Asera CTO) at TheServerSide quotes him as saying,

Almost all the other companies in this space talk about the same thing--but what are the objectives metrics that they are measuring? Is it integration? Standards compliance? Regression? Negative tests, boundary tests. How can you integrate these tests in multiple dimension? How about IP rights classification? Security threat assessment?

But thinking about this for a few seconds longer, I see some cracks in this foundation. For starters protecting the investment Murugan mentions above. Once SpikeSource's LAMPJ stack becomes known as versions a, b, c, ... j of open source components 1, 2, 3, ... 10, and this info is widely disseminated, why pay the subscription? Certainly some will, but how many, and how much can you charge? And then there's the low or no cost competitors, who "knock off" your package with their own free distribution the day after each new release. I can picture tiny me-too companies shadowing SpikeSource's "products" and getting a free ride off their rigorous processes.

I'm obviously glossing over a whole host other value-add they have in mind. However in general, the basic value proposition of selling access and support to a, "vetted and test set of open source software as a product" seems better suited to software higher either higher up the stack, like Gluecode's portal server, or to a "sell the services" model, like JBoss or Orbeon.

Excite co-founders launch JotSpot -- getting INTERESTING!

I've been reading Joe Kraus' blog Bnoopy on entrepreneurship since he started it last month. His posts recounting lessons learned as Excite's co-founder have been entertaining gems for entrepreneurs. Inovie Software, the San Diego-based business collaboration company I founded in 1997 and later sold (now at UGS), was a minnow compared to Excite. Even so, we faced most of the challenges Joe describes.

So given my background and interest in business collaboration and entrepreneurship, I was very excited to read that Joe's new company, JotSpot, is joining SocialText to bring the power of wikis to a broader audience. Nice!! Ever since I first used a wiki I've been hooked. The first thing I do now when getting involved in a new project is ensure a wiki is in place -- I don't want to work without one! A Wiki provides a type of ad-hoc, free-form collaboration we never achieved with TeamCenter. If I knew then what I know now, I... Nevermind! ;)

Dan Farber writes:

JotSpot is based on wiki technology, which lowers the barriers to creating Web-based collaborative applications. JotSpot extends the concept. "Wikis run out of steam in that they don't allow you to add structure or build apps," Kraus said. "On the surface, JotSpot looks like Wiki and you can use as a wiki, but it allows you to start with unstructured data and add structure incrementally."

That's the stuff right there. I'm really looking forward to seeing where SocialText, JotSpot, and some in open source (e.g., XWiki) take this "Application Wiki" concept.

ps. Jon Udell has blogged a Flash Demo for anyone interested in seeing JotSpot in action.

Web 2.0

I'm enjoying reading some of the coverage of the Web 2.0 conference going on this week. Coverage, pontifications, thought provoking soundbites, and new company and product launches are flying out fast and furious! Many ideas great to silly for sure -- I should have gone :(

One particular new company/product announcement (blogged by Jeremy Zawodny) that caught my eye was Rojo, a new web-based "feed" aggregator. I'm overwhelmed by my current 82.6 (and growing daily) sources of news, blogs, commentary, etc., and Rojo sounds like a promising solution. Not exactly sure yet how it compares to other similar products like Bloglines, but i'm currently evaluating both and will post some comments soon.

The Dells of Open Source

One common way to innovate is to combine two or more different things and create something new that is more than a sum of parts. This happens in music all the time. Musicians take what they like -- their influences -- and combine them in their own way. Sometimes you get literal combinations that create little genres like "trip-hop," "ambient dub," our "sadcore," but most often you just get bands that, "sound like a faster mix of band X and band Y."

Sooo... what do you get when you combine Dell and Open Source? As covered by CNET in Industry veterans bet on open-source model, you get a startup called SourceLabs. SourceLabs looks to make money by efficiently sourcing, pre-integrating, and selling solutions made from low-cost ($0) open source software packages. I like the analogy, and certainly being the "Dell" of anything has a nice ring to it.

Now this is nothing that Redhat and others haven't done for the likes of Linux and other now established open source products. So in a way, it's just more of the same good stuff -- giving corporate adopters of open source "one throat to choke." But still, I like thinking about this in terms of Dell, rather than just purely in terms of selling support and peace of mind. Dell makes money combining commodity hardware and offering computing solutions, Redhat does the same for operating system, and SourceLabs will pre-integrate and sell open source "stacks." No word yet on which or how many stacks.

My big question is how does this scale? Can SourceLabs, or someone like them, go big and become the Amazon of open source? Or just focus on a core set of applications, like Linux (or Dell)? I expect to see many more companies like this in the near future.

Open Source and the Transistor Radio?

I recently listened to Clayton Christensen's presentation from the 2004 Open Source Business Conference called "Capturing the upside." (Actually I streamed it from Doug Kaye's wonderful IT Conversations site).

Clayton compared the adoption and success of open source to Sony and their first transistor radios and the first Japanese autos exported to the US. Basically the early transistor radios were feature-wise pitiful when compared to the existing products on the market. However, they succeeded because they addressed a new market: young people who would put up with the static and poor reception because they could actually afford them, combined with the fact that they relished the ability to listen privately to there rock music, away from parental earshot. Existing radios, while high-quality, were big and expensive, and thus out of reach of most teenagers. So while the existing market supposedly clamored for ever-more features, the "good enough" transistor product proved that features and functionality had gotten ahead themselves, and the new "poor quality" upstart came in to open a open a new market. And then of course the transistor radio slowly improved, and the rest is history...

Clayton points out that open source is doing the same thing today. Beyond the now established open source infrastructure standouts like Linux, MySQL, Apache, etc., there's a newer crop of applications like SugarCRM, Gluecode, and Firefox that have also started out humbly as "good enough." Many people just aren't served by feature-saturated, high-priced commercial offerings. Instead they're finding relatively immature open source alternatives to be good enough, and also lower TCO or be more customizable or... I'm now looking at innovation and market evolution with respect to open source with a new twist -- thanks Clayton!

Angel funding coming back?

I went to SDForum's VC SIG tonight to hear an angel investor panel discussion on the climate for angel investment. The general consensus was that the angel community is slowly but surely moving out of the "fear" mode it has been in since the bubble burst and earlier angel rounds were getting "crammed down" when VC's came in on down rounds. Interestingly, the angel deals that have been getting done during the downturn have consisted of larger groups investing smaller amounts ($5-25k each).

But the bottom line is deal flow is supposedly picking up, and investments are getting done, mostly in the $1M-$3M pre-money valuation for prototype to nascent revenue companies (the panel admitted it's hard to generalize valuation). And the key to determining whether to fund the company: whether a VC will follow after new milestones are hit. The event was standing-room only and well run -- I look forward to going back again next month.

Minor Confusion over Open Source BPEL

Paul Brown sent me a heads up about the recent Infoworld article on open source BPEL (ObjectWeb plans open source BPEL server). The article also mentioned the recently announced Open Integration Suite, and mentioned that Orbeon had also recently contributed a BPEL Server to open source:

"It won't be the only open source BPEL server available. Orbeon Inc., a systems integrator in Mountain View, California, released the source code for its BPEL server a few weeks ago, along with several other components that comprise the Orbeon Integration Suite."

Unfortunately that's not quite the case... Orbeon did found and seed the Open Integration Suite project with a contribution of it's OXF product line, but it will be sourcing other complimentary components, including a BPEL Server, from other open source projects. The good news is that eMaxx's is now a candidate for inclusion in the suite! (Disclaimer: I am currently on Orbeon's board of advisors.)

Hi there. For starters, I'm currently an Industry Fellow at the Center for Document Engineering at UC Berkeley. Much more later...

I'm no conspiracy theory guy, but this is an interesting case about the "plan" to loot Iraqi Museums:

seetheforest.blogspot.com

Maybe we'll soon hear more, as it appears a Bush Administration official has resigned over the failure to protect Iraqi cultural sites:

http://www.msnbc.com/news/901486.asp

WS for "Partner Self-Service" at Providence Washington Insurance:

http://www.line56.com/articles/default.asp?ArticleID=4183&;TopicID=4

WS "in production" article, including Intel, Imperial Sugar, Putnam Investments:

http://www.line56.com/articles/default.asp?ArticleID=3305

WS Integration highlighting Con-Way Transportation:

http://www.line56.com/articles/default.asp?ArticleID=4160

Here's a good article about capturing and working with business processes with XML and Web Services:

http://www.webservices.org/index.php/article/articleview/859/1/24/