Open Source Weblog

My ComputerWire colleague Tony Baer also sat down with Astor recently and got a slightly different take on the story:

“It’s not that enterprise customers are necessarily demanding open source, said Astor. It’s that the open source model helped shortcut what would have otherwise required tens or hundreds of millions of dollars of investment to develop enterprise-class databases, making it a very economical development model.”

There has been some criticism recently of EnterpriseDB’s attitude towards open source given that its developments above and beyond the open source PostgreSQL database are proprietary (for more on that, including Astor’s response see here).

I’ll leave that discussion for another time, but what the EnterpriseDB example does show is the potential for open source to lower costs while also raising the bar for innovation. Building on top of PostgreSQL enabled the company to focus on issues such as Oracle compatibility, performance, enterprise-class tools and support.

It also enables the company to sell what it claims to be an Oracle-compatible product at a quarter of the price, something that is winning it customers such as Sony Online Entertainment (who liked it so much they bought into the company).

According to Astor, SOE is now running all of its game development of EnterpriseDB, as well as all of its back office processing and game forums, while it is in the process of moving the rest of its business, including its massively multiplayer online role-playing games, such as EverQuest II, Star Wars Galaxies and The Matrix Online.

Employing EnterpriseDB enables SOE to realize 80% on five-year total cost of ownership compared to its previous set-up, which corresponds to more than $1m a year, according to Astor.

This is an example of the TIO of open source applying in part to production deployment as well as development. If you were Sony Online Entertainment would you rather invest $1m a year in databases, or developing online games?

"The reallocation of resources is a key part of the message," says Steve Bale, EnterpriseDB general manager, EMEA. “Leveraging the open source environment is not what it’s all about, it’s about what we have here is a comparable product at 25% of the price.”

For deployment customers like Sony, the attraction is not necessarily that the code is open source, but because it is an innovative product at a competitive price. The reason it’s an innovative product at a competitive price is because it’s based on open source.

For more on the total innovation opportunity of open source see also:
The innovation opportunity of open source
Putting a value on the total innovation opportunity of open source
Balancing open source risk and the total innovation opportunity
Unisys aims to ride the wave of open source TIO
Open source TCO and the total innovation opportunity
TCO versus TIO: a simple diagram
Ingres’s Roger Burkhardt on the innovation opportunity of open source