Business of Free Source
Business of Free Source
OpenCanal Corporation Announces Commercial Support, Training and Consulting Services for SharePoint Free Source Tools from Microsoft and Its Partners
OpenCanal Corporation announces the immediate availability of the OpenCanal Distribution™ for free download as well as a CD version for purchase from the OpenCanal Store. The OpenCanal Distribution includes the complete Microsoft .NET source code for a wide range of free source tools and solutions created by Microsoft and its partners for Windows SharePoint Services and Microsoft Office SharePoint Portal Server 2003. OpenCanal also announces formal support, training and consulting services for the SharePoint free source tools included in the OpenCanal Distribution.
TORONTO, ON and LAS VEGAS, NV - June 13, 2005 – At the SharePoint Advisor Live conference in Las Vegas, OpenCanal Corporation today announced the immediate availability of the OpenCanal Distribution™ Developer Edition as a free download as well as a CD version for purchase from the OpenCanal Store. The OpenCanal Distribution includes the complete Microsoft .NET source code for several categories of free source tools for SharePoint Products and Technologies including content import/export, usage reporting, search enhancements, Web parts, WSRP interoperability, RSS syndication and systems management.
In addition, OpenCanal announced new support, training and consulting services for the OpenCanal Distribution of SharePoint free source tools.
OpenCanal also launched a new corporate web site and a community-based Windows SharePoint site to foster partner and customer discussions with developers of SharePoint free source tools, as well as provide self-service assistance for the OpenCanal Distribution.
"In response to Microsoft partner and customer demand for support for the growing number of free source tools on Microsoft GotDotNet and other web sites, Parallelspace has founded OpenCanal Corporation to provide commercial support, training and consulting services for SharePoint free source tools created by Microsoft and its partners.” said Michael Herman, president and CTO of OpenCanal Corporation and Parallelspace Corporation. “In addition, the OpenCanal team is especially excited about providing Microsoft partners and customers with quarterly value-added updates of the OpenCanal Distribution. The initial OpenCanal Distribution will focus on free source tools for Windows SharePoint Services and SharePoint Portal Server 2003."
“We are pleased to see OpenCanal provide these new support offerings for free source tools to benefit SharePoint Products and Technologies customers and partners.” said Sanjay Manchanda, director, Microsoft Office SharePoint group.
“Prior to OpenCanal, Microsoft partners and customers who wanted to use SharePoint free source tools faced a fundamental problem: Where do I go for support, training or consulting when these free source tools break or don’t do the specific task I need them to do?" said Michael Herman. “OpenCanal is now providing them with the services they require.” For owners of SharePoint free source projects, free development support is available by registering with the OpenCanal Community web site.
What is Free Source Software?
Free source software (sometimes referred to as open source software) is software in which the source code for a software project is freely and easily identifiable, downloadable, buildable, redistributable and reusable. For more details, please refer to “What is Free Source Software” at http://www.opencanal.com/aboutus/whatisfreesource.htm.
About OpenCanal Corporation
OpenCanal Corporation is a leading provider of fee and subscription-based support, training and consulting services for Microsoft .NET free source solutions for Microsoft SharePoint Products and Technologies. OpenCanal Corporation is a subsidiary of Parallelspace Corporation.
About Parallelspace Corporation
Parallelspace Corporation, founded in 2001, is a leading provider of business collaboration solutions and services for information sharing and business process workflow for Microsoft SharePoint Products and Technologies, Office Live Communications Server and Groove Virtual Workspace.
More Information
More information on OpenCanal Corporation and the OpenCanal Distribution can be found at http://www.opencanal.com.
The OpenCanal Community web site can be found at http://www.opencanal.com/community. Free downloads of the OpenCanal Distribution can be found at http://www.opencanal.com/downloads. The OpenCanal Distribution on CD can be purchased from the OpenCanal Store at http://www.opencanal.com/store.
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For additional information, please contact:
Michael Herman
President and CTO
OpenCanal Corporation, a subsidiary of Parallelspace Corporation
(866) SOFTPASS (763-8727) toll-free
(905) 884-8285 x111
mwherman@opencanal.com
From: sharepointdiscussions@yahoogroups.com [mailto:sharepointdiscussions@yahoogroups.com] On Behalf Of Michael Herman (Parallelspace)
Sent: Friday, June 10, 2005 10:11 PM
To: sharepointv3@yahoogroups.com; SharePoint@yahoogroups.com; sharepointdiscussions@yahoogroups.com; sharepointkms@yahoogroups.com; sharepointv2@yahoogroups.com
Subject: [sharepointdiscussions] SharePoint Advisor Live conference starts Monday in Las Vegas
Checkout: http://advisorevents.com/cmt0506p.nsf/wSessionsTrack?Open&RestrictToCategory=CMT0506-CMS
MikeFitz, Jeff Teper, Joel Oleson (among others) will be there from the SharePoint product groups as well as MS IT.
Cheers,
Michael
NOTE: My SharePoint security talk has been moved to 6pm on Tuesday. My content migration talk is Monday at 11am.
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Michael Herman
Parallelspace Corporation
Enterprise Business Collaboration Solutions for Microsoft SharePoint, Microsoft Live Communications Server, Active Directory and Groove Workspace
Portal and Content migration Specialists: http://www.parallelspace.net/sharepoint
SharePoint migration Knowledge Center: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/sharepointmigration
Parallelspace KMS (K2.net, Meridio and SharePoint) Knowledge Center: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/sharepointkms
Parallelspace PresPart Knowledge Center for Portal Co-existence and migration: http://www.parallelspace.net/portals
Parallelspace Knowledge Center for Microsoft "WinFS": http://www.parallelspace.net/winfs
Weblog: http://dotnetjunkies.com/WebLog/mwherman2000/
Checkout: http://zdnet.com.com/1606-2-5662663.html
Polese: "It's a condition of human existence"
At PC Forum in Scottsdale, Ariz., Mozilla President Mitchell Baker and SpikeSource CEO Kim Polese talk to technology trend-watcher Esther Dyson about how open source projects are managed.
11 minutes 27 seconds
Apr 11, 2005 9:16:00 AM
Credit: http://www.forbes.com/2005/04/06/cz_dl_0406notes_print.html
IBM In Denial Over Lotus Notes
Daniel Lyons, 04.06.05, 6:00 AM ET
The marketing folks in IBM's Lotus division are starting to sound like the Black Knight in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, who insists he's winning a fight even as he loses both arms and legs: "'Tis but a scratch," the Black Knight declares after one arm is lopped off. "Just a flesh wound," he says after losing the other. "I'm invincible!"
The same goes for IBM's (nyse: IBM - news - people ) Lotus, which keeps declaring victory even as Microsoft (nasdaq: MSFT - news - people ) carves it up.
First Microsoft consumed Lotus's 1-2-3 spreadsheet business. Lotus spinmeisters insisted Microsoft wasn't really winning because Lotus 1-2-3 still had a larger installed base. Eventually that wasn't true either.
Now Microsoft's Exchange has clawed its way to the top of the corporate e-mail market, displacing Notes/Domino, which once dominated e-mail and was the main reason IBM paid $3.2 billion to acquire Lotus in 1995.
Exchange, first released in 1996, now outsells Notes/Domino and has a larger installed base and more momentum, many analysts say.
Yet IBM still claims Notes is the "best-selling" e-mail product on the market. And the rah-rah Lotus faithful--consultants who make a living by maintaining Notes and writing specialized Notes applications--promote this version of reality to their customers. (IBM declined to comment for this article.)
Conceived in 1984 and introduced in 1989, Notes has a user interface that some consider dated and overly complex. The product is also costly to operate, some say.
Even IBM seems to think something new is needed. It has developed an e-mail program called Workplace Messaging, which is part of a new family of software products.
IBM says Workplace Messaging won't replace Notes. Instead, IBM says Notes will, ahem, evolve and become part of the Workplace family.
The truth is that the spin is aimed at keeping Notes customers from dropping Notes and switching to something else.
Meanwhile, Notes consultants have resorted to bashing market researchers who say Notes is slipping, suggesting on blogs that these analysts are extreme outliers who lack credibility and/or are shills who were paid off by Microsoft.
But the fact is that all but one of the top market research firms say Microsoft Exchange is now the leading e-mail product. Even Gartner Group, the lone holdout, says IBM maintained a mere 1.8% market share lead--but that was in 2003.
Nevertheless Notes zealots cling to this Gartner statistic, touting it to support their "We're number one" rhetoric.
For the record, here is a rundown of analyst opinions:
- Gartner: In 2003 Gartner estimates IBM had a 46% share of e-mail sales vs. 44.2% for Microsoft. The firm won't comment on 2004 sales yet.
- IDC: In 2003 Microsoft outsold IBM $770 million v. $709 million. The final 2004 figures have not been tallied but the preliminary estimate is that "Microsoft will go up and IBM will go down. The delta is growing," analyst Mark Levitt says.
- Ferris Research: Microsoft has a 60% share of the business e-mail market vs. 25% for Lotus. Microsoft has a larger installed base and generates greater license fees than IBM.
- Meta Group: "Exchange is picking up share, and Notes/Domino is losing share. I'm seeing more defections from Domino. There is migration from Domino to Exchange," says analyst Matt Cain.
- Radicati Group: In 2004, Microsoft had 115 million seats installed worldwide vs. 83 million for IBM. By 2009, Microsoft will have 200 million seats installed vs. 103 million seats for IBM's Notes and Workplace products combined.
- Info-Tech Research Group. Among midsize companies ($1 billion or less in annual sales) in 2004, Microsoft had a 33% market share and IBM had 25%. By end of 2005, Microsoft will reach 35% with IBM dropping to 18%. "A lot of Notes shops are looking elsewhere," analyst Carmi Levy says.
Despite all this research, IBM and its head-in-the-sand Lotus "community" insist they're still number one. Which, paradoxically, helps explain why they're not.
Please post feedback if you are aware of any category of commercial software that has experienced a partial or total collapse due to the creation of a free source project?
If you don't know of one today, what are the top 3 categories that you think are the most vulnerable?
Please reply as soon as you can.
Cheers,
Michael.
Elsewhere in my blog I'm asked questions about the new competition Parallelspace faces in the area of content migration tools for Microsoft SharPoint Product and Tehcnologies and this has open my eyes big time to the world of free/open source, its threats and opportunities.
Totally coincidental to the events of the last 2 weeks is the two-day Open Source Business Conference being held in San Francisco today and tomorrow. I'm not attending but very much wish I was there. Checkout http://www.osbc2004.com/live/13/events/13SFO05A/keynotes (don't be confused by the “2004“ in the url.)
For those of us that have been staunch believers in the traditional commercial Microsoft ISV model (myself for 2 decades), I think the software industry is well into a huge inflection point brought on by the encroachment of free source projects into virtually every category of commercial software. They're community-based and not going away. They're here to stay and will continue to grow and spread to every facet of commercial software.
The early effect: driving down prices and most likely, eliminating traditional software licenses as a reliable source of revenue. When Bill asks “Who will want to buy free castrated software?“, he shouldn't be surprised by the answers.
Cheers,
Michael.
In*flec"tion Point
n. A moment of dramatic change, especially in the development of a company, industry, or market.
The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition
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From: http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/index.php?p=1241&tag=nl.e539
This morning kicked off the Open Source Business Conference in San Francisco, where a mixed crowd of IT enterprise customers and vendors, lawyers, and venture capitalists rubbed elbows as they contemplated open source market strategies.
In his keynote, Larry Augustin, CEO of Medsphere, left everyone with no doubt that the next frontier for open source software development is the applications space. Augustin talked about four successful models, each representing a different application category: sugarCRM, Compiere, Asterisk, and VistA (the technology his company first deployed to the private sector) and looked at what they had in common to come up with six rules that identify a ripe opportunity for open source: (1) Look at heavy applications that are traditionally a big expense and take years to implement. These include, CRM, ERP, PBX, and EHR (electronic health records). (2) The presence of big proprietary traditional competitors with big upfront software licensing fees that make it hard to get started. (3) A large, enthusiastic free user base so you don't have to spend a lot of time educating them and the market about what you are doing, giving you sales leverage. (4) An enthusiastic developer ecosystem--you have a community of people that participate in some way. (5) There is a big enterprise market opportunity: for healthcare, the market is to grow to $25B IT market by 2007. (6) You have a big under-penetrated SMB market opportunity.
Augustin then gave two drivers for the next wave of open source. The first is developer interest. He said that applications give fodder for the next generation of developers looking for a new challenge. "They're not going to build Linux again," he said. The second reason is that the traditional enterprise software model is broken (long sales cycles, expensive, inaccessible to SMBs, etc.). He said that 76% of new license revenue today goes to sales marketing, pointing out the irony that vendors are charging customers to convince them to buy their software.
After a line by line comparison showing how Siebel's financials wouldn't take that hard of a hit if the company ditched its upfront licensing fees, Augustin justified the theoretical scenario and showed how lower cost is in part derivative of a lower cost to sell and market the software. And lower cost means broader market availability.
He concluded his talk recapping the advantages open source has over proprietary enterprise software: a shorter sales cycle, you don't have to pilot, the install time is shorter, there is nearly no enterprise license fee, and you have a large user base to work on.
What does the future look like for commercial for-profit software companies (ISVs)? ...especially smaller, emerging software companies that are facing free/open source competition in their software category.
What is your advice? What references would you recommend reading?
Is it possible for a software company to be based on one of the free source/open source business models and still operate on a for-profit basis (with a business plan that is based on more than just a support and services model)?
Michael Herman
Founder and CTO
Parallelspace Corporation
http://www.parallelspace.net
I've been able to distill this topic into 4 key questions:
- What is Microsoft's corporate policy regarding the use of company resources for engaging in public free source activities? …where "engaging" might be defined as creating, maintaining, promoting and/or extending a free source project.
- Is there a required submission and approval process for Microsoft employees wishing to engage in public free source activities? At what level in the organization is approval required before a Microsoft employee can engage in free source activities? Is there a (public) Microsoft corporate list of free source projects that the company supports?
- When a vibrant, committed, loyal Microsoft commercial ISV community exists for a particular software product category, when does it make sense for Microsoft to engage (or continue to engage) in free source activities that compete with Microsoft's commercial ISV partners?
- When speaking with other Microsoft partners and customers, are Microsoft employees expected/trained to recommend a Microsoft commercial ISV partner product, a (Microsoft) free source project or both? ...or are they left to recommend the one that comes to mind first?
4/3/2005 Addedum: More generally, there are 3 corporate governence questions with respect to a company's free source activities:
1. Is there a need for a company to have corporate goverence with respect its free source activities?
2. If so, what is the company's corporate goverence policy with respect to its free source activities?
3. Has the company's free source corporate governence policy been applied to its engagement in specific free source activities?
Today I was engaged in an email conversation about Microsoft's support (along with HP) for the free source SharePoint content migration tools on GotDotNet (http://www.gotdotnet.com/Workspaces/winforms/fileshare.aspx?id=6996fb17-2a54-4607-983b-35c7697baa53).
There is an existing vibrant commercial SharePoint content and portal migration tools market that includes ISVs like Tzunami, Casahl, Metalogix and ourselves (Parallelspace Corporation) to name a few.
Given a) Microsoft competes daily against open source versions of Microsoft Office, operating systems and other applications and b) when a vibrant ISV market already exists for a particular software category, (when or) should Microsoft engage (or continue to engage) in free source activities in direct competition with its partners (harming the very partners who are commited and loyal to the Microsoft platform)?
(Definition: to engage in free source activities = create, maintain, promote, and/or extend a free source effort.)
Note: IMHO, I don't believe this is a SharePoint specific issue but a Microsoft corporate policy issue only addressable at the most senior levels of the company.
Michael.