Major technology vendors are all over the map when it comes to corporate strategies for Linux and Open Source. Some opt to embrace virtually every distribution of Linux and Open Source to give their customers maximum flexibility, while others choose to become Linux/Open Source application “rental services” themselves, and still others focus on specific distributions of Linux and Open Source. This article reviews a recent visit with IBM to discuss Big Blue’s strategy for Open Source—and what that strategy portends for customers and ISVs.

An Integrated Strategy

IBM’s strategy for Open Source is decidedly multi-faceted, with the understanding that its enterprise customer base also desires an approach to Linux/Open Source that considers the entire enterprise “mix” of both Open Source and private source applications.

“Instead of working on a separate Open Source strategy, we look at integrating Open Source with other strategies,” said Adam Jollens, IBM’s Worldwide Open Source Track Manager. “That’s what our customers want, and what they expect of us. Consequently, we have orchestrated a mixed use of Open Source as evidenced by deployments of DB2 on Linux, Lotus Notes using Open Source toolkits such as Eclipse, and Windows strategies as well. This approach uses elements of Open Source at different layers of infrastructure and applications.”

Within this strategy, IBM has several goals:

1. Continue to employ Open Source in collaborative computing.
According to Jollens, IBM has seen that Open Source is able to drive enormous innovation with the ready exchange of ideas and technology that it facilitates between organizations and developers throughout the worldwide Open Source community. “This innovation is extremely beneficial and we want to promote it,” said Jollens. “One example is our work on the Eclipse platform, which we use as an active innovative and collaborative development model.”

2. Actively contribute to the continued growth of Open Source
IBM has positioned itself not only as a major “consumer” of Open Source technology and solutions, but also as an active contributor to Open Source growth. “We have over 600 programmers working full time on over 150 Open Source projects, with half of these on the Linux platform,” said Jollens. Active project platforms include Apache, Mozilla and Eclipse, to name several. IBM has also established a support foundation for Eclipse and is working on an Apache support strategy.

3. Identify the different levels of Open Source contribution and support
Significant development has focused on the creation of reusable Open Source components that can be employed by operating systems, system infrastructure and end applications. “We continue to identify many different levels on which we can support Open Source components,” said Jollens. “We are integrating Open Source components together on WebSphere Community Edition and are producing software that runs on top of Open Source, such as Rational2 and Eclipse tools for developers.”

4. Identify new market opportunities for Open Source
IBM sees Open Source as a good entry point for both emerging and small and medium sized (SMB) business markets.

Working with ISVs
Most industry analysts agree that the degree to which enterprises and SMBs consciously adopt Open Source will depend upon the number of Open Source end applications and infrastructure components that they find to be immediately beneficial to their businesses. The same companies will undoubtedly benchmark Open Source offerings against competing private source products to determine which solution is “best of breed” from the standpoints of functionality, quality, ease of integration, cost and support.

“If you are an ISV producing commercial product, you have to carefully consider the market and on which platforms you are going to support your product, and Open Source applications are no different,” said Adam Jollens. “Most of our ISVs support the x86, Power and IBM mainframe platforms. Then you have to multiply this by the number of distributions of Linux/Open Source you are planning to support on these platforms. Our primary business partners for Linux are Red Hat and Novell (SUSE Linux), and we find that two is a good number of options for the majority of our ISVs.”

Understanding the development and support burdens that ISVs face, IBM looks closely at the distributions and licensing arrangements for Linux/Open Source that it supports, and is also actively engaged with its primary Linux/Open Source partners to ensure that the distributions it presents both to ISVs and customers are “enterprise class.” “Expanding the number of Linux/Open Source distributions we support is ultimately a function of the market,” commented Adam Jollens. “If our customers want other solutions besides the ones we currently support, we will consider those.”

Working with the Open Source Community
Like its competitors, IBM is actively involved with the Linux/Open Source communities at both strategic and technical levels. The Open Source community brings fresh and innovative approaches to software development, while organizations like IBM bring this worldwide community an enterprise perspective on software deployment and performance.

“We have decades of experience in enterprise computing that can benefit both the Linux and the Open Source communities,” said Adam Jollens. “We have the know-how on how to scale applications from small to very large system deployments, and we are actively involved in leading edge projects such as AJAX and SOA (services oriented architecture) programming models.”

Jollens cites an example where IBM and Open Source community developers were faced with the problem of how to develop complex applications for client machines. “We worked to together with a number of our ISVs on the Eclipse platform and were able to develop a Lotus Notes application,” said Jollens. “The project has reaped great rewards, because it established the mindset in both the ISV and the overall Open Source communities that you can build complex applications for client machines using Open Source by using toolkits like Eclipse.” Results like this provide solutions for similar problems that enterprises are facing. They pave the way for enterprise integration of Open Source components across the entire IT portfolio of databases, Web services and applications through techniques like collaborative development.

The Transformational Power of Open Source

In working with the worldwide Open Source development community, IBM has also adopted new and collaborative development methodologies that it now uses internally.

“Ten years ago, when Open Source was in its early stages, we originated a study and wondered how this “unusual” approach of collaborative development between small groups of programmers could be better than a company having its own staff of programmers and data architects working together on software development by using a standard software development life cycle with requirements definition, design, development, test, and so forth,” said Jollens. “We initiated some pilot tests of this alternate development process, which combined in a collaborative fashion all of the elements of traditional development concurrently, and we tested the concept in pilot projects.” Seeing the value and the benefits of collaborative development, IBM has now revised some of its own development practices to take advantage of collaboration. “Some of the practices that we have found to be especially beneficial include frequent peer reviews and early beta testing—instead of waiting for these processes to come up later along the traditional continuum of the traditional development cycle,” said Jollens.

Bringing Open Source to the Enterprise
Enterprises increasingly adopt Open Source when they can see time to deployment advantages in doing so, when they are convinced that managing an Open Source solution will not involve extra work, and when they are confident that the solution they are deploying is reliable and sufficiently robust for their present and future needs.

Many times, their adoption of Open Source is unconscious, because they are purchasing what appear to be proprietary products that utilize Open Source components and underpinnings that they do not see.

In cases where enterprises are making conscious decisions, they want:

• Off-the-shelf end applications that provide “best of breed” solutions that satisfy specific business needs;

• Solutions that can easily integrate in a mixed enterprise environment of both Open Source and private source applications;

• An easy means of “governance” for Open Source distributions licenses.

“Governance is a complicated area, because enterprises are not dealing with a single supplier who can do it all for them,” said Adam Jollens. “They can either administer governance themselves, or they can bring in a specialist or a consultant to assist them. Another alternative is to go with a major vendor who has the wherewithal to assist the enterprise with both governance and the overall integration of Open Source applications and components.”

On the end application side, IBM works with over 300 ISVs to facilitate the delivery of Open Source end applications and tools to enterprises. It does this by equipping ISVs and developers with methodologies and platforms like Eclipse that enable the rapid development of commercial Open Source applications for the enterprise market. “Many of our Open Source components can plug directly into commercial end applications,” said Jollens. “A prime example is WebSphere Community Edition, which is being used by ISVs in their development. Hundreds of these ISVs have Java applications that are built on both Open Source and private source components in this environment.”

The Future of Enterprise Open Source

Open Source has already made significant inroads into the enterprise market at the level of IT hardware and software infrastructure. It is now coming of age as an end applications solution as well, with growing penetration in software development tools and methodologies, application servers and databases—and in niche applications like customer relationship management (CRM) and e-Commerce. Open Source is not as far along as an accepted solution in the areas of system management and services-oriented architecture.

The long-range enterprise picture for Open Source indicates that it will fit as a best-of-breed solution into an architecture that will be a mix of Open Source and private source. Ultimately, it comes down to the area that you are working on and what the “best-of-breed” solution is for the business problem that you need to solve.

 

NaSPA member Mary E. Shacklett is President of Transworld Data. She is listed in Who’s Who Worldwide and in Who’s Who in the Computer Industry.

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