Content Log

Cloud vs. Open Source? I don't think so!

Photo Credit: aufziehvogel2006 (Kai) at Flickr

There are some who are asking if cloud will have an impact the growth of Open Source. For instance, my fellow AIIM board member Lubor Ptacek from OpenText suggests in his predictions for 2012 that "the Great Open Source Movement will hit the trough of disillusionment in 2012 - courtesy of the cloud." Presumably Lubor means Content Management in the cloud, because the cloud runs on Open Source. Operating System? Open Source (Linux as in LAMP)! Database? Open Source! Web Server? Open Source! Big Data? Open Source! App Development? Open Source! The cloud runs on Open Source and not Open Text -- or Oracle or IBM or Microsoft. I am assuming that he means the Open Source that has been a threat to his business of ECM (OpenText) or WCM (Vignette) and therefore he means Alfresco for ECM and Drupal and Joomla for WCM.

At Alfresco, Open Source offers no hype cycle "trough of disillusion"; we only seem to be seeing the "Slope of Enlightenment". Our Open Source Community platform continues to grow apace driven by new releases, such as the new Alfresco 4. There are now over 3.5 million downloads of Alfresco and the number of Community installations is in six figures. As a business, bookings grew 60% year over year in our last fiscal quarter ending in November. This growth is based upon significant revenue figures, not small numbers, and we are now the second largest Open Source company by revenue after Red Hat. We have a real business with over 2000 significant customers using Alfresco for mission critical information in many important industries. If that is disillusionment Lubor, I would hate to think on which slope OpenText is right now!

There is nothing to suggest that cloud and Open Source are mutually exclusive. The cloud is built from open source and if open source is architected to run in the cloud, it will. At Alfresco we have spent the last several years building multi-tenancy and scalability features into the Alfresco system to ensure that it can run in the cloud. This January we launched our cloud offering into beta and expect it to go into production later this Spring. The cloud will become yet another means of using Alfresco as well as trying the product before you buy. I have already articulated the use cases that we think will be important for running in the cloud. In addition, since Alfresco is capable of running an entire system on a single virtual machine or Amazon AWS instance, Alfresco is already used in many private and on-demand deployments. Rather than a threat, the cloud becomes a really big opportunity!

So rather than the cloud being a threat to Open Source, I presume that Lubor means cloud-based file sharing services such as Dropbox, Box, Huddle and others are a threat. Some of these are on the sharp edge of the Hype cycle and are gaining a lot of marketing oxygen as a result. There is no doubt of the popularity of Dropbox compared to anything in ECM, there are reportedly in excess of 50 million users. However, Dropbox is very complementary with Alfresco, which is why we will be providing an integration to/from Dropbox in the near future. Box is a company with more enterprise aspirations, comparing themselves to SharePoint, and although we rarely see them in the market today, we may in the future. However, Box is nothing like a SharePoint, or Alfresco or any other real content management system, as it lacks important features for content and document management such as metadata, workflow, rules and more than rudimentary policies. We shall see how cloud-based file management services and content management in the cloud evolve over the coming couple of years based upon the use cases I mentioned earlier.

As with on-premise proprietary systems, Open Source offerings in the cloud can provide advantages over closed cloud-based offerings. Rather than being the domain of tinkerers, Open Source is mandated as preferred first choice by many governments and organizations. Open Source is transparent and you know exactly how it works. Unlike running software on-premise, you have no idea how software works in the cloud, how it is encrypted or how your data is being stored. In addition, Open Source means that you are not locked into the software that you are running, whether it is running in the cloud or not. You have the choice to deploy it elsewhere and there is not cost to doing so. Open Source as a development model means that the Community is creating new solutions and news extensions, many of which will be very useful for cloud-based solutions. I look forward to sharing some of these with you in the coming months. Far from being at a disadvantage, I see Open Source as being a distinct advantage in the Cloud.

I think a more interesting question is how both cloud-based file management services and open source content management affect the existing ECM sector, which is already stuck in neutral. Having the flexibility to move into the cloud, even a private one, offers new opportunities to explore new applications, deployment scenarios, and business models. As far as I am aware, OpenText, Documentum and FileNet (correct me if I'm wrong) are incapable of running in the cloud. They all require multiple servers running different complex configurations just to get a single instance up. Last I heard, OpenText has a fragile url configuration that couldn't possibly work in a virtualized, cloud environment. And last I heard EMC Documentum was not even certified to run on VMware. I doubt we will see a public service of these systems in my lifetime. What use cases and business opportunities could this preclude?

Seems to me that ECM's "Plateau of Productivity" is tailing off and that represents threats for the large guys and opportunities for the new. I am actually very excited about the cloud and what it can bring and I have never had more faith in Open Source as a way to address those opportunities.

Symbiosis of Cloud and On-Premise Enterprises

Symbiosis: One is free to move, the other is not. But they both need each other. 

Eventually we will see computing as a utility like electricity that will be consumed on demand. I also believe that cloud infrastructure providers will ultimately be able to undercut the cost advantages and carbon footprint of the data centers of even the largest companies. Just not yet.

As Gartner’s 2012 Predicts, Cloud Computing dated December 8, 2011:

"The perceived (and real) risks to the technical reliability, integrity and security of applications and data that are entrusted to cloud providers hold back organizations' initiatives."

For many CIOs, we as an industry still need to overcome security issues, build trust from the IT organization, ensure open exchange of information, and even negotiate treaties on the rights of information domicile and ownership.

However, there are benefits to using the cloud and even the public cloud starting today that can transcend these issues. There are several use cases that require a cloud platform, particularly in the context of content and collaboration, that would not be possible or at least very difficult today. The first is when sharing information between companies, such as those that are currently described as an extranet, only easier to set up. The second is when information is public anyway and the efficiencies of cloud make distributing this information more efficient as well. The third is where the risk or cost of hacking or intrusion is low compared to a relatively high cost of operating computing resources internally. The fourth is when the need to provide information externally, particularly for the purposes of accessing in mobile environments, outweighs the relative risk of exposure of that information.

Business to Business Collaboration

Credit: Confederation of Indian Industry, Jan 2011

Business-to-Business Collaboration through IT systems has always been difficult when any one side of the collaboration is responsible for the infrastructure. Trying to get the IT organization in a large corporation, even a technology vendor, to set up an external system that is accessible from outside the firewall is nearly impossible—not from a technology perspective, but from an administrative perspective. And there is no way that the IT organization is providing a VPN.

This often leads to the default means for collaboration, which is email. I have been involved in enough standards and board meetings to recognize this is a real problem for even the big IT vendors. Perhaps this can be done with Private Cloud instances outside the firewall, but that again would require thinly stretched IT resources. Yet this needs to be done when two or more companies cooperate on development of products, joint bid offerings to customers or coordinated marketing campaigns. At the end of the collaboration, the results need to be owned by everyone, not just the one who set up the collaboration.

Public Information

Information that is public by default provides another opportunity to share in the cloud. When I first started broaching the subject of Cloud Computing with CIOs and IT departments, I was met with a bit of incredulity about why anyone would want to do this. However, the idea of putting information that was already or should be public in the Cloud didn't really meet much resistance. After all, this is what everyone is doing with web content, either in a DMZ or CDN and Cloud provides an excellent vehicle to manage that content. Marketing departments want to provide marketing material to potential customers and see that material as wasted as long as it is behind the firewall. Also some government agencies must provide certain information to the public by law. If it is going to be public anyway, putting it behind the firewall is only hiding that information.

Small, Medium and Underserved Organizations

Medium and small size organizations are likely to have an IT department that is swamped, if they have one at all. This is the situation we have for internal systems here at Alfresco, like HR and expenses. However, this situation is not limited to smaller companies as even large companies have their underserved departments with strained resources likely focused on core business processes. Many collaboration and content needs may not get met and it may be impossible to know what the impact will be.

Smaller companies are more likely take the risk of putting content in the cloud or with a SaaS vendor, but increasingly, it is becoming more acceptable for non-mission critical departments to also store information in the cloud or with a service. That is if that service can be shown to guarantee security.

Sometimes speed of execution outweighs the risk of exposure. Many on-demand projects or customer interactions require IT resources "Right Now!" or business will be lost. Limiting the time of exposure in the wild or public sphere may help, but if business demands immediate access and IT cannot provide that, then organizations will seek ways to make it happen.

The Mobile Worker

Finally, there is that nether world outside of the office, but still in the domain of the enterprise. Increasingly, we are doing more and more work outside of an office. Right at this moment, I am writing this in my home office, away from any distractions. I am often on the road working - in the air, in a hotel, in a convention center - on presentations, plans or reports, much of which I would just keep in the enterprise. A similar situation exists where workers are out in the field or at a customer site, where working outside the office is essential. Increasingly, this work is being done on tablets and mobile devices.

These are situations where you would want to have the mobile device or laptop be seen as an extension of the firewall. However, using VPN connections is not always practical and can create their own security concerns. If you could put and store the content and materials you need to get the job done in the cloud, you would not only make yourself more productive, you could raise the productivity of the entire organization. This of course assumes that the content is secure and perhaps available only for the duration of the task at hand. The value of the work should exceed the risk of exposing the content.

Content Symbiosis

There are many more situations where you wouldn't want to put content into the cloud. Any corporation that is regulated should consider documents and content under regulation and be stored on premise. Highly sensitive information such as board documents or legal documents should be maintained behind firewalls. I know of two very large corporations with very popular cloud services that are using Alfresco to store their documents behind the firewall for this reason. Records whose final disposition is managed and destruction guaranteed should be stored in a controlled environment. Mission-critical documents that must be absolutely accurate and must not be tampered with should also be considered behind the firewall.

However, these new use cases are so much easier in the cloud. They become the reason to start to move to the cloud and actually add value to the enterprise systems to which they are connected. As Gartner puts it:

"Users should plan for a gradual shift from on-premises IT architectures toward a hybrid model in which these architectures coexist and interoperate with public-cloud-based architectures. For most midsize to large user organizations, a shift to a totally public-cloud-based strategy will not happen during the next five years."

I have heard the term "Hybrid" used for this combination of In-the-Cloud and On-Premise enterprise structure. I prefer to use the term "Symbiosis" since these environments are very complementary and help maintain the health of each. The more symbiotic these systems are, the more effectively they will work. Just like symbiosis, the cloud and on-premise may be very different, but have evolved to derive mutual benefit. If you remember your high school biology, this is called Mutualism. From a content perspective, we can see how these use cases of on-demand content services, enabling mobile working and facilitating B2B collaboration can help the enterprise thrive. Likewise, the enterprise is the protector of information and the producer of content from internal processes.

Like any symbiotic relationship, these systems will reach a balance. As I said previously, I think it will be a long time before the cloud becomes a dominant component. However, equilibrium of 80/20 where 80 percent is in the enterprise and 20 percent is in the cloud could be something we see in the next few years. We are far from that equilibrium at the moment, but the signs are there. If we look at this as a symbiotic integration of systems, it's easier to see how we get there.

Our next lesson on Content Biology will be about “Content Osmosis”.

Content Monkey Predicts 2012

It's the last day of January, so I am not too late for predictions for the new year. Besides, it's my birthday and what a great time to predict the future. This year I am influenced by a book I received for Christmas, "Thinking Fast and Slow" by Nobel prize laureate Daniel Kahneman, from our one of investors, Accel Partners. Every year they send out a profound book to their portfolio companies and boy is this one potentially life changing.

I won't go into the book in detail, but one of the things that Kahneman, who is a psychologist and decision theorist, discusses is why experts are so bad at predicting the future. There are a few reasons including some things called the Theory-Induced Blindness, Optimistic Bias, Hindsight Bias and the Planning Fallacy among others. But put simply, experts just try to be too clever.

Kahneman referenced the 20-year study by Philip Tetlock at the University of Pennsylvania that studied 284 experts in economics and politics and 80,000 predictions. The experts were were asked to rate the probabilities of three alternative outcomes: the persistence of the status quo, more of something such as political freedom or economic growth, or less of that thing. As Kahneman states:

"The results were devastating. The experts performed worse than they would have if they had simply assigned equal probabilities to each of the three potential outcomes. In other words, people who spend their time, and earn their living, studying a particular topic produce poorer predictions than dart-throwing monkeys who would have distributed their choices evenly over the options. Even in the region they knew best, experts were not significantly better than nonspecialists."



Tania, the dart-throwing Content Monkey (attribution: Quixado on Flickr)

So there you have it, if we want to know what will happen in 2012, we need a dart-throwing Content Monkey to decide the future. All you analysts please take note, she (I asked her what sex she was) will _probably_ (and the operative word is probably) be more successful than you will be. Her name is Tania Majerus, see http://www.kleimo.com/random/name.cfm and I asked her a series of questions related to "either/or" answers or "less than, same as, more than" answers. I will add my "expert" analysis of the result, because Kahneman suggests that we humans need to think causally and will always look for a cause even when events are random. I swear these are the answers that "Tania" had generated.

Will the ECM market still exist by the end of the year?

Content Monkey says "Yes!"

I guess a market that is some $4 billion or so wouldn't disappear overnight, with a year being classified as overnight. There is some talk about it disappearing or perhaps being absorbed into the infrastructure or being merged with the social business sector. It may not be exciting, but it's still there and still very useful.

Will Mobile be the next big thing in Content Management?

Tania says "Yes!"

It's certainly early days, but with the spread of "Bring Your Own Device", users are certainly challenging IT and the organization to accommodate these mobil devices. Smart phones first and then iPads are starting to create their own demands on the usage of content. I see that OpenText has some sort of offering that bridges mobile devices to internal content management systems. It's not exactly a Cloud offering, but I can assume that other ECM vendors will follow suit.

Will Cloud be the biggest influence in Content Management?

CM says "Yes!"

I guess it is only natural to assume this given the high degree of interest in various surveys of CIOs. We have CEO saying that they "must get into the Cloud" whether they know what that means or not. Flexibility is the clear driver more than cost advantage. The largest corporations say that they can better deals on their own systems than they can from Amazon, but they can add machines on demand. The big question is whether it will be private or public clouds that will have the influence on Content Management. However, I'm not really sure what I would have said if the result was no.

Will companies start to put content into public cloud offerings?

CM says "No!"

If the answer was yes to this one, I would have rationalized this as they are doing this whether they know it or not. People are putting stuff into DropBox and Box whether the IT department and management knows it or not. Still I think we are still a bit away from resolution of a few security issues before companies consciously put content into the Cloud. An AIIM survey last year said that only 6% of corporations are even using a corporate cloud, but that 30% would consider using a public cloud in the future. This may be ignoring the informal usage on the file sharing services.

Will "Big Data" really have an impact on Content Management?

Tania says "No!"

This was one of the big predictions of Real Story Group  and Lubor Ptacek at OpenText. To be fair, Lubor said that "Big Data" in general would be the hype of the year, but that no one knows what that really means. RSG has aggregated their analyst predictions, presumably to avoid the failing pundit syndrome, and make Big Data sound like business intelligence. When I think Big Data, I think Map-Reduce and Key/Value pairs in extremely parallel processing a la Google and Hadoop. IBM sees the former as the future and I would think the latter. Still Tania says "Who care?"

Will Open Source market share in Content Management grow, remain the same or shrink?

Tania says "Grow!"

Whew! I wonder what I would have said if Tania had said shrink? I know Alfresco is growing and quite rapidly. I know that a lot of Drupal and Joomla is eating the commercial vendors lunch. But I can't comment on how other commercial vendors are doing. Still, good call Tania! Sorry, Lubor - did you consider that Cloud and Open Source go hand-in-hand and that most of the Cloud runs on Open Source?

Will EMC sell off Documentum?

CM says "Yes!"

There have been interesting rumors over the last year about Documentum. At this point, I can probably count on one hand the number of people I know who are still there. Interesting to see a number of the engineers going off to Salesforce. I had heard a rumor that SAP was considering buying without a lot of substance. I had also heard a very interesting rumor that a strategic acquisition by Autonomy that they had referenced in their earnings call where related to Documentum. That made sense prior to the HP acquisition. Now, you have to be wondering if EMC is thinking more about the potential drives they could be selling more than the prospects of their dwindling ECM brand.

Will SAP enter the ECM market?

CM says "No!"

I'm not sure if SAP would consider whether Tania is right or not. This is an adjacent market that SAP has been reselling OpenText for a while. Could they consider, once again, whether to purchase OpenText? SAP is also building out a cloud solution and CMIS is part of the cloud solution. Even so, they have said it before and will probably say it again that they are not interested in entering this market. And of course, they are using Alfresco in their enterprise.

Will HP grow, shrink or maintain the size of Autonomy?

CM says "Shrink!"

I would consider encouraging Tania to throw this dart again. When you go to the autonomy.com website, it hardly seems like anything is different. That would call for at least a "Maintain". I can see Meg Whitman investing in the service, but she could consider undoing yet another decision of the hapless Leo Apotheke. Autonomy's cloud offering has been somewhat murky from the financial analysts' perspective in terms of what it actually constitutes. However, it may add a bit of Cloud pizazz to HP's line up and it's not likely given the sunk costs of acquisition. Still Kahneman in the book suggests that sunk costs should not be considered in any rational economic decision and that companies are usually very good at removing CEOs who use "mental accounting" to avoid losing sunk costs. Meg's job is to avoid that mental accounting.

Will we see more consolidation in Content Management?

Tania says "No!"

There has been a lot over the last 10 years and perhaps we are seeing an equilibrium of the old guard of enterprise software. This prediction may fly in the face of a Documentum sell-off. I could also see OpenText folding into a larger software portfolio. But monkey says...

Will SharePoint market share in Content Management grow, shrink or remain the same?

Tania says "Shrink!"

Sorry, I can't see this and I can't explain it away. Sure, growth will slow and the Microsoft brand being tarnished by some bad handling of consumer products. But Microsoft Office is still the main game in office software for a long time to come and it's going to be natural for Microsoft to hook in SharePoint as part of the deal as well as SharePoint driving Office sales.

Will OpenText's market share grow, shrink or remain the same?

CM says "Shrink!"

I am going to be accused of being biased of even acknowledging this answer. I personally say "Remain", but we'll see.

Will those anti-Documentum ads that Oracle are producing actually work?

CM says "Yes!"

These ads really piss me off. Sure we compete against Documentum as well, but I can tell you that 8-Track tapes were well and truly dead when we started Documentum. Kids these days probably think we were all living in black and white and called each other "Man!" And can you tell me that Stellent's architecture is really that more advanced than Documentum when they were started within 5 years of each other 20 years ago. Anybody could get great results if they use an Exadata. Just give us a machine and we'll show you.

Updated Bonus Question: Will 2012 be the Year of CMIS?

Monkey says "Yes!"

I guess I have been taking CMIS for granted, otherwise why wouldn't I have asked this question in the first place. It has come a long way over the last several years. Apache Chemistry has made it possible for so many to implement it and Chemistry also means that the lighter weight JSON bindings (think brower plug-ins or mobile apps) can connect so much easier. As the Cloud becomes more important, what better standard to have to connect to content than one that was designed for that purpose and has so many systems like SharePoint, FileNet and OpenText supporting it.

Finally

My final prediction, is my personal one, which is these predictions will beat the others that are out there and that they will have around a 50/50 chance of being accurate at the end. Unfortunately, I won't be able to take credit.

 

A Month in the Bay Area

Sixteen years ago, my wife, my 9 month-old son and I left the San Francisco Bay area to live in the UK. I was still at Documentum, but I had always wanted to return after starting a company, which ended up being Documentum. Since then I have constantly flown back and forth between the UK and SFO. 

Friday before last, I returned from one month in the bay area with my family. This is not something I tweeted about or put onto Facebook. There were enough warnings about this on the Internet to make sure I didn't say "Hey burglars! You still have 31 days left to rob my house!" In fact, I unintentionally made it a one month holiday off of Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+ and most things SocialNetwork.

That's me on the left - that little dot next to the Golden Gate Bridge

The purpose of the trip was to re-establish connections in the Bay Area (I'm a Cal grad!), to network in Silicon Valley and do a reality or "sur-reality" check on the state of technology. As William Gibson noted "The future is here, just not evenly distributed." Living in Europe has its own interesting sur-realities and in most cases stuff just moves faster (too fast?) in the valley. I have tried to take an extended period of time every 5 years or so and the last time was much longer than that. Besides, I have a lot of family in California and a day trip into SFO or San Jose just doesn't allow any sort of good catch up time.

I guess the way to think about it was that I was doing good old fashioned social networking, not internet social networking. I also had a few objectives that I wanted to accomplish.

First, I wanted to understand how consumer and enterprise were intersecting. As Geoffrey Moore noted in working session with AIIM, end users of software are asking "Why am I so powerful as a Consumer and so lame as an Employee?" The conclusion that most enterprise software companies have come to as the antidote is to make their software more like consumer software. "We are the Facebook for the enterprise!" they will exclaim. I have never been convinced of this and wanted to get other opinions, particularly of consumer internet companies. I also wanted to see if the traditional enterprise software guys are staring to get it.

Second, as we are approaching the launch of our Software as a Service later this year, I wanted to explore what the best practices are in operating SaaS in the Cloud. What are the adoption rates? What are the hardware requirements? What are the best practices in pricing and billing? How do you value a Freemium service? Etc., etc., etc.! Interesting there is more experience of this in San Francisco than on the peninsula. A real reversal of fortunes from when I left the bay area in 1995, not that either is doing too badly!

Third, I wanted a first hand observation of the Clockspeed effect first introduced to me by my friend and Documentum co-founder, Howard Shao. (It's too bad he was skiing in South America, which he always does during the North American summer.) The book Clockspeed (http://www.amazon.com/Clockspeed-Winning-Industry-Temporary-Advantage/dp/0738201537) by Charles Fine says that markets consolidate to a point of unsustainable Oligopoly or Monopoly until their whole ecosystem is exploded by a new wave of either vertical or horizontal integration. One example given was the horizontal integration of the Wintel platform that is now being challenged by new vertical integration platforms. These new vertical integration platforms have everything to do with cloud, mobile, social and consumer. This is going to lead to radically new ecosystems and I wanted to meet and work with the participants in these new ecosystems.

Finally, it's hard to overemphasize the role that personal life can have on professional life and the need to balance the two. I am of a generation that didn't do this very well and I can only try my best. Normally, I fly into SFO, try to see some of my siblings, niece and nephew, and the then head out to non-stop meetings as jet lag takes it toll. This is no way to do either. As my sister said last year, "Of course John, we love to meet with you and watch you fall asleep over dinner. :-)" I not only want to get some quality time accomplishing my professional goals, I wanted to see old friends and spend time with my family. I wanted my kids to see where we used to live and what it's like living in the bay area. In the end, I could have done better on this and everything really, but the trip was very fulfilling.

I will be blogging (I hope) about the first three points over the coming days and weeks, but not the last part. If we are connected on Facebook, you can learn all about that side of the trip. However, in the meantime, I thought I would include this photo of some of the old-timers from Documentum. We were able to meet up at the Hopyard Brewery in Pleasanton. It was great to see everyone so well and so healthy given how old we all are. ;-) I hope we can get more people next time I do this. 

Jim Donahue (Dr. Object), Kendall Smith, Nicki Crosswhite, Dana Ford, Roger Kilday, Lalith Subramanian, John Klassen, me, Cathy Herbert, Jeff Miller.