OPEN SOURCE BLOGROLL

Open Source Weblog

Unisys aims to ride the wave of open source TIO
January 31, 2007

I just got off the phone with Hans Sparkes, head of enterprise open source with Unisys, who gave me a good introductory overview of the company’s open source solutions and services.

Unisys is now pushing open source as one of its main strategic programs, alongside the likes of outsourcing, Microsoft, and real-time infrastructure. One of the reasons is that the company sees a groundswell of client in interest in open source.

The drive has previously been driven by a focus on cost said Sparkes, but the big opportunity comes not from driving down cost but increasing innovation, he said, before I even had a chance to mention the total innovation opportunity angle.

“Using open source technology as a change agent – it’s a great opportunity to step back and see where do you want to be,” said Sparkes. “People are still looking at it from the cost side but not ‘what does it open up for us’.

“That’s the great big wave,” he added. “We’ve got to encourage customers to take that next step.”

A focus on innovation, rather than cost, also enables users to avoid “fruitless debates about the five-year TCO of Microsoft and Linux” added Sparkes, noting that “really the movement is from proprietary to open source. What open source does give you that proprietary software can’t is this potential for innovation.”

On the subject of costs versus innovation, Hyperic’s CEO Javier Soltero recently posted an interesting blog about the dangers for vendors of focusing simply on cost.

“I’m running out of ways to count the number of times companies claim an intent to “take on the big four enterprise management Goliaths—IBM/Tivoli, CA, Hewlett-Packard and BMC Software—by providing 80 percent of the functionality for 20 percent of the cost.

"Frankly, this is reflective of the lazy, losing proposition of setting low expectations, a common affliction for some open source vendors.

“Hyperic HQ is not “OpenView, just cheaper” anymore than Apache is “IIS on the cheap,” he adds. “This is not Hyperic’s frame of reference, and it should not be the reference for any company out there looking to drive innovation into an existing space populated by lazy incumbents.”

On the subject of the total innovation opportunity, it’s a concept that seems to have struck a chord. Before posting my initial thoughts about it on January 22 I ran a quick Google search on the phrase to make sure it hadn’t been copyrighted by a vendor or the likes of Gartner.

The result was a big fat zero pages. Nine days later, this post should take it up to 300…

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
EnterpriseDB – the open source total innovation opportunity in action
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