Aquarium Watch

An old-timer in the OSS aquarium, Hewlett Packard (HP), recently announced its support for MySQL and JBoss, claiming to be the first OEM to fully support OSS stacks. These OSS stacks are point solutions, such as ERP and CRM based on OSS components. The company plans to package Linux with MySQL as a database and JBoss as an application server on its hardware. HP executive vice president Ann Livermore said at the “Enterprise Outlook” conference in Redwood City in June, that Linux is her company’s highest growth area. HP also predicts a surge in Linux as the platform of choice for mission critical CRM applications and services. As an obvious beneficiary, MySQL welcomes HP’s lining up to support the enterprise market with open source vertical solutions such as the LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL and Perl/PHP/Python) stack.

Computer Associates (CA) also moved into deeper OSS waters. CA is offering a new CA Trusted Open Source License (CA-TOSL) based on the Common Public License, which provides legal protections such as ensuring trusted source code lineage as well as offering indemnification. CA will collaborate with the Plone foundation and the Zope project on content management frameworks offering products such as its Plone-based BrightStor document manager. CA has announced its intention to make its flagship database product, Ingres RDBMS, open source and will create an open source management technology stack using IJPL (Ingres, Java, Python, and Linux). CA has also contributed its Kernel Generalized Event Management (KGEM) instrumentation to the Linux development process. In another move, CA and JBoss will collaborate to build an OSS solution, which targets the high-performance relational storage and application server space. The JBoss Application Server and Ingres database will be used together to build Java applications that support transactional integrity, replication, caching and security.

Sun, not wanting to be left behind in the announcement flotilla, proclaimed in Shanghai its intentions yet again to open source Solaris. Sun also will use AMD Opteron-based systems and reorient itself as a subscription-based utility services company. Sun’s intent is to sell solutions with commoditized hardware and software to compete better against the 8000-pound killer whale - IBM.

New Schools of Fish

New schools of fish are forming. While Web services remain an important area of vertical solutions, new solution stacks, including CRM and ERP as well as content, document and event management systems, are maturing and will become important drivers of OSS adoption.

Meanwhile, the sharks are also circling. Companies whose hardware and software profits are being marginalized are looking for new channels of revenue from services. The hottest new channel, as reinforced by Sun’s announcements, is the concept of utility computing called variously N1 Grid (Sun), Adaptive Enterprise (HP), Agile Enterprise (EDS), and On-Demand Computing (IBM). Subscription-based utility computing is a net being cast to sweep up both proprietary as well as OSS applications, including the new OSS vertical solutions.

Whether or not the new OSS CRM, database, or development solutions can be provided as utility services remains to be seen. Complex software is really not so single dimensional as electricity or water. Plus many packages simply don’t fit a services model for example, why use an office suite such as OpenOffice as a service when it is convenient and free for use as a stand alone package. So, as the “net of utility subscription” is being cast, it’s still too early to tell how big the catch will be.