SpikeSource's Polese cites open source complexities

InfoWorld: Are there any parallels between SpikeSource and your previous venture, Marimba?

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Polese: Well I think [there is] one very, very strong parallel, and one of the things that attracted me to this company is this model of SaaS. And specifically, in the case of Marimba, it was a licensed model that we were using, so we were delivering our product in the form of software -- the free software product management environment that companies could run behind their firewall. In this case, we’re actually delivering the updates over the Net as a service, but the common theme is making it much easier and cheaper to run complex software within the enterprise.  So removing cost and complexity [from] software lifecycle management, that’s definitely a common theme between the two companies.

InfoWorld: Are you seeing more enterprises looking first for free, or so-called free, open source software rather than looking to buy software these days?

Polese: One thing that I’ve noticed, just in the last year or so, is a change in attitude on the part of enterprises, and they’re moving from kind of kicking the tires with open source to realizing that open source has already been at their enterprise, and they need help in the form of third parties basically managing and maintaining that open source software. So it’s becoming, first of all, acknowledged open source, that is acknowledged as mainstream within the enterprise.

And then secondly, it’s becoming increasingly not just another option or a cheaper option, but even a safer choice [than] proprietary software in some cases, particularly in the area of infrastructure where CIOs [and] VPs of IT don’t want to be beholden to one vendor, don’t want to be locked into a particular infrastructure or deal with the silos of the past. So it’s almost becoming a norm that enterprises are moving toward open source, particularly in the area of infrastructure.  And I think over the next year or two, we’ll start to see the application adoption happening as well.

InfoWorld: When you say applications, what kind of applications?  I know there’s SugarCRM, but what are some of the other application options for open source?

Polese: There’s been a whole crop of companies that have emerged over the last six months or so, and they include Alfresco, for content management; Pentaho, for business intelligence; GroundWork for IT management and monitoring.  The list goes on. Funambol, this is mobile applications -- the Java environment for telephones and handhelds, and Compiere, which is an ERP company. So basically, name a category and there are one or more commercial providers of services for open source applications.

InfoWorld: Is open source in fact cheaper or are there a lot of hidden costs? Is it cheaper than commercial software or is it just as expensive once you add up the service, support, and all the other issues?

Polese: Well there’s certainly been a lot of discussion about this topic and [I will] be glad to tell you just how expensive open source can be when it comes to implementation and maintenance and lifecycle management.  In fact, there are significant costs involved in ongoing patch management, testing, certification, and updating of these components, when you’re starting to use more than a handful of them.

So we can make a case that open source software can be as expensive as proprietary if you have the overhead of having to staff the internal team and almost becoming your own vendor just to maintain that open source software. And that’s of course one of the reasons that we were inspired to start this company, Marugan Pal and Ray Lane founded the company back in 2003. They saw that cost rising, they heard some CIOs who were frustrated with what they saw as increasing complexity in using open source, and Marugan saw an opportunity to create technology to eliminate a lot of that overhead for companies.

InfoWorld: Is there anybody else doing anything similar to what SpikeSource is doing, IBM Global Services or anybody like that?

Polese: There are a couple of other companies that are sort of pure-play providers of open source services. We [see] OpenLogic and SourceLabs, but the traditional systems integrators are not providing automated testing in lifecycle management for open source stacks.  They typically have a team of consultants that they bring in and are on-site on an ongoing basis, but there’s not a specific service that I’m aware of from the large SIs that provide what we are providing, which is a wide choice of components across multiple operating systems, including, by the way, Windows. So we do certify on Windows as well as Linux. And then the ongoing maintenance updates, alert [notifications]… that is a unique service. I’m not aware of others, certainly in the systems integrator space, who are offering that. And as far as we know, we provide the greatest breadth of coverage of testing from the open source market today.