SpikeSource's Polese cites open source complexities

InfoWorld: Do you have any other topics you wanted to discuss?

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Polese: I think the main points that I would want to get across are that we are seeing a very [strong] demand for our offering in the marketplace, and that is because of the complexity of managing and maintaining open source on an ongoing basis. And that’s something I think maybe people who aren’t emerged in the world of open source often don’t see.

There’s a lot of discussion about [LAMP] or Linux, but in fact it’s not commonly known that a typical open source application is comprised of dozens of components, and many of which are not at all household names. And the overhead of managing those has really cost the companies significant money and created risk internally as well, so that’s why they’re actively looking for third parties to offload these tasks.

The other thing I just want to emphasize is at the root of what we provide as a company is this automated test framework that’s running today over 30,000 tests nightly, as I mentioned earlier, across six operating systems, including Windows as well as Linux. Six language runtimes and over 100 components, and that’s what’s enabling us to know at any given time what works with what, what the potential conflicts are, dependencies, and therefore deploy a tested, validated cache to a customer site. So this is all to say that what we’re doing is not providing a sort of traditional professional services function. We are a software company, we’re delivering that software in the form of a subscription on an ongoing basis. But this is very much a technology solution based on automated testing.

InfoWorld: As a global company, would you say that the majority of the demand for SpikeSource is presently in the North American market or elsewhere?  And how do you expect your revenue to pan out as far as the different markets globally?

Polese: Based on the interest that I’m seeing, I would expect over time for at least half, if not more, of our revenues to [come] from outside the United States, and I would expect that to happen on a more compressed time table than in the past. And that is because there is so much aggressive open source adoption in Europe, in Asia, in other parts of the world -- South America. And those companies are actively seeking third-party solutions to help them reduce the cost in overhead of managing that open source.

But they’ve made a strategic decision that’s from the top and oftentimes even is prompted by a government mandate within that, in China, in Brazil, in the United Kingdom. Even here in the United States as well, and in certain states are starting to see it. But certainly outside the United States there’s been a tremendous movement to open source in the last year, two years in particular, and we’re seeing that continue to accelerate.  So I expect, as I said, more than 50 percent of our business ultimately to come from outside the United States.