Content Log

Off to Davos and the World Economic Form

I am currently writing this on the train from Zurich Airport to Davos journeying through amazing Swiss scenery. The flight from Heathrow was completely full and Davos was probably the reason. I saw a few faces that were vaguely familiar, probably because they won the Nobel prize. In the seat behind me was Emma Thompson, which was a thrill for me and looking at all the faces of the guys behind me queuing to get out of the airplane, probably a thrill for them too. Our investor from Accel, Kevin Comolli, was in the front of the plane.

I am cheating and using o picture from last year's trip.

Lakes as large as seas, snow covered mountains, rushing rivers and cows grazing on pastoral land have been rushing by me for nearly an hour. It's hard to believe it has been a year since the last time I saw this gorgeous scenery, but what an amazing year it has been. The insights that I gained from Davos last year helped me understand what was going on in the world and how it affected Alfresco. Davos was where I finally understood Web 2.0 and it is core to where we are taking the company.

This year's theme for Davos is the Power of Collaborative Innovation, a topic near and dear to my heart. Although, there is less tech content than last year, I will be particularly interested in how innovation and collaboration can be applied to some of the world's most difficult problems. I am also keenly interested to see where the economy is heading. If this group of people don't know, we're in a heap of trouble. As always, I will look forward to the workshop sessions and the one on one interaction that is unique to Davos.

I am going to try to keep up my blogging while I am here and try a Twitter or three, as well as keeping my Facebook page up to date.

Ooooh. It's starting to snow now...

MySQL Acquisition and Enterprise Software

In a software industry that had little innovation and created obstacles for the next class of rising companies, open source is turning enterprise software on its head. Xen Source, Zimbra and JBoss are now part of larger companies acquiring new technologies and new distribution models by leveraging the power of open source. Now we see that MySQL has been acquired by Sun for $1 billion. Sun has been embracing open source more and more under Jonathan Schwartz's watch as CEO and this can be seen as a logical next step in that strategy.

Marten Mickos, a happy man and a really nice guy.

When we started Alfresco, we came in with the assumption that one of the only things that is working in enterprise software is open source. The past year or so have proven this prediction right. Although it wasn't really my prediction. A meeting with Marten Mickos, CEO of MySQL in 2002, helped me understand that, yes, open source really could work. Up to that point, I was of the same opinion as Bill Gates, that open source is equivalent to communism. MySQL helped me understand the power of huge numbers of people using software and the value that support can provide to fund the development of professional software. The fact that the model works means that small open source companies can thrive in an environment of behemoths consolidating stacks and actually create an environment of innovation.

David Axmark and Monty Widenius, founders of MySQL

When a category has been around long enough that customers know what they want, then open source works really well. MySQL provided a simple, cost-effective database system that meant that you didn't have to install a big, hulking Oracle, DB2 or SQL Server and more importantly, you didn't even have to pay for it. You just pay for support. JBoss did the same thing for app servers, Xen Source for virtualization systems and Zimbra for email. Some people question whether MySQL was really innovating, after all the set of SQL is the same as Oracle had in the early 90's. In reality, there wouldn't be a Web 2.0 or possibly even a Web 1.0 without MySQL. MySQL pioneered the model of Scale Out rather than Scale Up to provide web properties like Facebook, Google, Yahoo, etc. to scale to levels that were unthinkable in Oracle back in the 90s. JBoss, Xen and Zimbra were doing the same to their respective industries and bigger companies were willing to pay for that.

From our perspective at Alfresco, Sun is a great company to acquire MySQL. Sun has proven their alliance and cooperation with open source. And this doesn't change our plans to become a public company. We have created public companies in the past and we intend to in the future. Our sales of support and development of our community have exceeded our expectations and events like this make us even more determined that IPO can be successful for the development of the Alfresco system and the Alfresco community.

Congratulations to Marten and team and good luck in the future. We are looking forward to more successful collaborations and joint deployments of Alfresco and MySQL.

Open Source IPOs in 2008

Matthew Aslett at the 451 Group blogged on a Fortune article on IPOs in 2008 noting that 3 of the top 5 are open source including MySQL, Ingres and SugarCRM, all of which are partners of Alfresco and good friends. The 4th is an open source project sponsor, Parallels. The Fortune noted that even if a recession is coming that doesn't mean that business still don't need to innovate or cut costs.

On MySQL, the company most likely to go first, Matt says:

"MySQL has been talking up its IPO credentials for some time, and a 2008 offering was always more likely than 2007. The plan has not changed as far as The 451 Group is aware. What has changed is that the company has stopped being so open about its financial performance, which is typical of a company preparing to go public. Previously the company publicly claimed revenue of $50m in 2006 and $34m in 2005. Expect an IPO sooner rather than later."

The disruptive nature of open source and its low cost development and distribution model will ultimately thrive in a recessionary environment. The result could be very similar to previous recessions that created much bigger markets for mini-computers, relational databases, PCS, client/server and web-based technologies that ultimately cut costs of using older technology and made people more productive. The same will be true for the current generation of open source tools, applications and technologies. Companies just won't be able to afford using the old technology just because it is there.

That was FAST!

After the Microsoft / FAST acquisition...

Autonomy sign OEM Agreement with EMC

They must have known it was coming. You just don't do OEM deals that fast. So why didn't they announce it the day before yesterday?

Made the Move to Mac

I have been using Windows now for nearly 20 years and PCs for over 25. This October my Dell refused to come out of standby mode, which forces me to reboot every single time I leave the building with my laptop. After all those years of blue screens, hanging on large PowerPoint presentations, hanging on network connections, waiting for the laptop to come up when I press the On button, I finally gave up. I ordered a Mac.

I would say half of Alfresco now have Macs. Matt Asay must own Apple shares as he has been the key sales person for all those Macs. The sales organization in the US all have Macs and a lot of the developers are now transitioning to Macs. A lot of our customers are also using Macs. When you look at the pain of transitioning to Vista versus just leaving Microsoft behind, it becomes a much easier decision.

I must say the transition hasn't been too difficult. The first thing you notice is how much faster the Mac is for doing all sorts of things. Coming out of sleep is so instantaneous that it seems like it was on all the time. The user interface takes a little getting use to, but it doesn't look as bad as moving to Vista. Transferring files is much faster. Upgrading to Firefox 3 beta at the same time has made web browsing much faster than before. I am using ChronoSync for synchronizing backups and Vienna for RSS reader. I haven't decided yet between MS Office for Mac, Apple’s iWork or NeoOffice (Open Office). This is my first blog using my new Mac.

During the last 25 odd years, I used Macs and Unix systems in addition to my PCs and laptops. I have been using Unix for over 30 years now and still can use Vi and write amazing shell scripts. When we started Documentum, my desktop machine was a Mac for writing and formatting the business plan and I owned a Mac SE for home use. I have also used Unix systems, mainly Suns and HP, side by side with my PCs and Macs for a very long time. Before that, we all multitasked on Vaxes and even PDP-11s while I was at Berkeley. I still find that I can do more with c-shell, sed, grep and awk for managing and finding information than I ever could with a drag / drop interface. It's nice to get some of that back.

I actually heard the CIO of a major US government agency say they were considering moving to Macs or Linux. The lock-in of new file formats and features in Office Vista were a concern for them. Between that and the user interface and file format issues of the new Microsoft systems, won’t a lot of people be looking back at the last couple of decades and saying "Why?"

Going Nowhere FAST

I was a little surprised by the announcement today that Microsoft offered to buy FAST, the search engine maker. Surprised because Microsoft claims that have the whole search thing sorted in SharePoint after hiring a lot information retrieval talent. And surprised that OEMs dependent on FAST and who compete against Microsoft let it happen. Most notable is EMC with Documentum and Oracle with Stellent.

The press release implies that the purpose of the acquisition is to bolster enterprise sales. In their overview of SharePoint enterprise search, Microsoft states that MOSS enterprise search capabilities provides “enterprise-grade scalability, extensibility, and manageability meet the needs of even the largest organizations.” Jeff Raikes implies that FAST is there to provide the high-end solution contrary to previous claims. SharePoint could definitely use the performance boost.

Is Microsoft just trying to target the general search industry? Are they trying to block any in-roads that Google is making with Google Appliance? Although Google Appliance is only a side show for Google, it is still one of the largest enterprise search vendors, but have a limit of 30 million documents on their high end system. FAST originally made their name in internet search, so is Microsoft trying to bolster its Microsoft Live Search which few seem to like or use out of choice? Are they trying to undermine the ECM industry and their reliance on vendors like FAST for full-text search? My guess is that they are just trying to bridge one of the weak links in their product functionality. This technical note from Microsoft indicates that they have some real issues scaling and an upper bound of 50 million documents for its index server and require complex configurations to go beyond that.

So what do the OEM vendors and customers who are competitors of Microsoft do? Ironically, it puts Oracle in a similar to the position that it put MySQL in when they purchased Innodb. These vendors could do what we have done and use the Lucene open source search engine. We recently performed a benchmark with Unisys demonstrating linear scalability beyond 100 million documents with no inherent blocks to scaling to 1 billion and beyond. Lucene also has related projects such as Solr, Nutch and Hadoop that provide infrastructure for scaling, crawling and distribution. Being open source it is probably the full-text solution of choice for most people building systems from scratch.

The alternative is to go to Mike Lynch over at Autonomy who purchased Verity, the engine software vendors left to go to FAST, especially after EMC Documentum’s decision to OEM the search engine in 2005. Autonomy/Verity still powers the search of a number of other ECM systems. Some are looking at Endeca to provide alternative styles of search that are more aligned with taxonomic search.

Regardless, it would be prudent for FAST’s OEM customers to get off FAST fast. Microsoft is already in a position of locking in a number pieces of layers that users access in the office environment from the proprietary hooks in Office to SharePoint to bundled services in the operating system. For the sake of innovation in the future, we should have alternatives to Microsoft for search.

Happy New Year and Happy 3rd Birthday Alfresco

This is more or less Alfresco’s third birthday. More or less because we started Alfresco in earnest in the new year as people were coming back from the holidays. Early 2005 was an exciting time, since we knew we wanted to create an open source enterprise content management system, but we didn’t know exactly who was going to buy it or how the open source model would work. With 2007 just completed, we have learned a lot and the future looks to be just as exciting as our first year. Alfresco is in its third year of exponential growth thanks to all of you who not only downloaded the software but deployed it in the tens of thousands of live systems and your active participation in the community.

Every company needs to start with table football.
L-R: Dave, Kev, Derek and Roy in early 2005

The year started by focusing on our community and nothing could have been more important than our decision to move to the GPL license from our previous modified MPL license. With this we made the entire system open source with an OSI approved license and decided not to withhold any features or bug fixes. We would encourage the community with full feature set and encourage enterprise customers with support and more testing and certification on different platforms, a model that most open source companies are adopting including MySQL and RedHat. CMO Ian Howells and his team are responsible for getting the world to know about Alfresco with a budget that is a tiny fraction of what anyone else in the ECM industry spends by building on an open source foundation and helping community development. Ian has hired Nancy Garrity as a community manager and we are in the process of revamping the whole community infrastructure. The result has been a dramatic growth in the community, over a hundred contributions, and our first user community meetings in New York and Paris.

Kevin Cochrane and Paul Holmes-Higgin presenting at the Paris User Conference

Our engineering group led by VP of Engineering Paul Holmes-Higgin and Chief Architect David Caruana, expanded functionality of our ECM capabilities while providing excellent support for customers and increasing robustness and scalability of the Alfresco system. During 2007, Kevin Cochrane, Britt Park and Jon Cox led the release of our web content management product, although almost all of engineering was involved in the WCM application, runtime or deployment services. WCM has already had a significant impact on the product, the community and our customer base. During 2007, Activision, EA Sports, Harvard Business School Publishing, Kaplan Educational Services and Swisscom launched internet websites on Alfresco. Web Scripts, the brainchild of Chief Architect David Caruana, uses REST as a web-oriented architecture to make it easy to create both mashable user interface components and new data APIs. Web Scripts enabled us to quickly create Microsoft Office extensions and integrate Alfresco into all sorts of environments such as Facebook and iGoogle as well as standard portals. The simplicity of web scripts has also led to a lot more contributions of new functionality to the community such as the new calendaring functions provided by the London Boroughs of Islington and Camden.

Dave Caruana's Facebook enhanced with Alfresco content thanks to Web Scripts

Enterprise sales and support grew dramatically and allow us to make the Alfresco system available free and open source. Matt Asay finds time between blogs on CNet to sell and hire the rapidly expanding US team. Denis Dorval, previously from FileNet, was promoted to VP of European sales and expanding a strong partner network here in Europe. The speed with which companies are adopting the enterprise system has surprised even us. I normally find out about and am surprised what new companies have bought an enterprise license during our end of quarter review.  This meant that we added hundreds of paying customers in 2007 and Helen Dann has been furiously hiring both here in the UK and in Austin, Texas to support them. In addition our OEM business has been growing very strongly with more companies, such as Ricoh and Quark, incorporating either our lightweight repository or our CIFS capability with the newly GPL’ed JLan engine developed by Gary Spencer.

The coming year is shaping up to take Alfresco into the realm of greater collaboration and social computing as a natural extension of our Enterprise Content Management business. In 2008, we will be developing enhanced collaboration features, integrate Web 2.0 and social networking services into our applications, and take Alfresco services to the outside world as “Content as a Service”. The idea behind this is that ECM is no longer about application suites, but accessing and contributing content wherever it is needed, inside or outside the enterprise. Briana Wherry and her growing team are developing new documentation and training to help you learn more about these new and existing capabilities. We will be expanding our footprint into Europe with more support, marketing and sales in more countries and increasing the depth and breadth of experience in the US.

On this third birthday, I would like to thank all the people of Alfresco for their efforts who are now becoming to numerous to name. We are now getting close to seven times the number of people we had at the start. I would like to also thank all the people who have been active in the community and spreading the word about Alfresco and actively contributing to its success, especially people like Russ Danner, Jeff Potts and Ray Gauss. I would especially like to thank the original team that came together in that small room in Maidenhead in January 2005 - John Powell, Andy Hind, Dave Caruana, Derek Hulley, Gavin Cornwell, Kevin Roast, Linton Baddeley, Paul Holmes-Higgin, Roy Weatherall, and Steve Rigby. Thanks for believing.