Another open source startup was funded not too long ago called Mulesource as reported in many places including Will Price’s blog http://willprice.blogspot.com/.
The inevitable marches on — further commodizaiton of the IT infrastructure stack. Mule source is an open source ESB (Enterprise Service Bus) that acts as transport vehicle for web services as they intermingle with each other in the enteprise.
And while it is nice to see this commodization marching on to the benefit of the IT manager’s budget, it is painfully obvious to those of us who have been selling into these organizations for a long time, that the higher up the infrastructure stack you go toward the business user, the less important is the underlying technology and the more important is the content.
None other than SAP has provided critical business functionality with entirely proprietary technology — ABAP — to considerable success because they delivered value to the business in the form of content that matched the requirements of the business. Sure this content was in the form of technology in many cases, but it could turn aside the Oracle technology broadside with the simple phrase from the users and the CFO — “It fits”.
Content is king and technology plays a factor only when either the content is immaterial (read ESB or transport layer buried leagues beneath the user community) or when the content is competitively equal and the only differentiation is technology (Salesforce.com vs Siebel?).
Is this commodization a big business? Well clearly Linux and JBoss have demonstrated that they can generate significant revenue, but how seriously will IT throw out commercial applications as they go upstack?
The answer will come back to the content question. When the content is comparable, the technology differentiator (in this case open source) will rule. In this case, open source (and its corollary of LAMP) is seen as a successor to installed software applications. Hence, the success of SugarCRM where they are commoditizing CRM by providing equivalent content and user-generated content to many of the packaged applications.
The question will be can content be delivered as the requirements become more specific and vertical? That will depend on how user-generated this content can be.