Launched in February, the Open Solutions Alliance (OSA) came together to help open-source application vendors make their products work better together and gain visibility among enterprise users. One of the group’s board members, Barry Klawans, who is also CTO with open-source business intelligence software vendor JasperSoft of San Francisco, discussed the Alliance’s goals and enterprise IT plans with Computerworld here at the O’Reilly Open Source Convention. Excerpts from that interview follow:
With a host of other Linux or open-source advocacy groups like the Linux Foundation and the Free Software Foundation, why launch the Open Solutions Alliance? We’re representing the business applications fork of open source. We looked around at the other consortiums out there; We didn’t want to create another foundation just because we thought it was fun. But they were all aimed at advocating for Linux or advocating for infrastructure. No one was advocating for businesses that were looking to build applications for the business world.
Your members so far include a wide range of small to mid-sized open source applications vendors like CollabNet, Centric CRM, EnterpriseDB and SpikeSource. Nowhere in there are the bigger names in Linux and open source, such as Red Hat, Novell’s SUSE Linux and Ubuntu. Why aren’t they in your group? We’ve talked to all the obvious people who are missing. It’s not where they’re going to spend their money because they’re advocating Linux rather than applications. Companies like MySQL AB are wanting to see business applications succeed, but it’s not their main focus. I think as we do more and accomplish more, I think we’ll see more companies joining us. And one of the reasons that we’re seeing mid-sized to small companies joining us so far is that they can make decisions faster. Big companies are anything but nimble.
How did the idea for this group germinate? The original meetings began in November. I knew all the guys from the other companies. We met down in Redwood City (Calif.) in the Bay area and spent about a day-and-a-half talking about various issues and decided to start a consortium. Then the next job was convincing our employers to come along. About 15 companies were at that first meeting and about 10 decided to join. Now we are at 22 members.
How is the OSA getting to work? We’ve set up three working groups since we formed to address areas that we think are problems. One of them in interoperability. I’ve talked to a lot of CIOs and it’s been a very eye-opening experience. When I ask them why aren’t they using open source, they say it’s due to a number of technical reasons such as they can’t connect it to their financial software, to their databases. They’re finding that classic open source doesn’t always play well with others. We’re looking at it more from the application level, such as promoting single sign-on systems. I shouldn’t have to do a lot of coding to make that work with that level of interoperability. The other message I heard, loud and clear, was that when they change a database connection somewhere, they need to go to four different configuration files and make the same change. It drives them nuts. We’re competing with one-stop shops [that can do these changes easily with other operating systems such as Microsoft Windows]. The first exercise we’ve done in terms of such interoperability will be shown at LinuxWorld with eight member vendors.
The second working goup is for marketing. Basically, we’ve learned that people haven’t heard of the wide range of available open-source applications out there for the enterprise. The last working group centers on the community, reaching out to the business community and building a community around the Open Source Alliance.
Is the group focusing on such outreach only for its member companies or for the whole open source marketplace? We’re advocates in general and we encourage other companies to join us. We think right now that where the world is, it’s a lot more important for non-members and members to collaborate than it is to try to kill each other.
How are you getting face time with business IT decision-makers? I spend a lot of time talking with CIOs. At JasperSoft, we have our own CIO council, and other member companies have them, too. The various members have been introducing us to the CIOs they know.
Are you satsified so far with the group’s progress? We’re ahead of where I thought we’d be in some areas. My personal goal was to double membership in a year and we have doubled it in six months. We’re also seeing people step up and contribute. In other areas, we’ve rethought our original plans when things didn’t work right, such as refocusing the path of our interoperability workgroup. It’s taken us a bit longer to set up our online member forums, to set up the communications side of things. It was a bit rougher that I expected, but it’s set up now. Sometimes as a group, we end up going in a different direction that I didn’t foresee.
