Last year I switched from buying CD’s to downloading singles, therefore I have only occasionally acquired a complete “album” of music from one artist. Of the top 20 bands in my collection last year, more than three-quarters of these were cases where I downloaded one or two single tracks. The risk is that by doing this we might miss the summary effect of a complete work. This week we went to see the band “Sea Wolf” live and discovered that their debut album, “Leaves in the River”, is one of these cases. Like the new release by “Coldplay“, this one deserves a listen from start to finish.

A Second Look

At Ingres we are now taking a second look at our own digital face to our customers, the Ingres community, and Ingres Service Network. The capabilities we offer are all built utilizing open source tools and utilities. To render these sites as a more complete whole, we just signed up with Tricipher to provide a single sign-on solution for our web properties. They just released this as a SaaS based service which will integrate with all of our open source based solutions. We are excited to get on-line next month. This will complete stage one of a series of steps we are taking to keep the site updated and fresh.

Exceptional Value

Two years ago we set along this path with a strategy that focused on utilizing open source for infrastructure, web properties, and consumable utilities. This is the first time I have worked with a team to apply this strategy so aggressively, and it has paid off exceptionally well. What I have found is that developers now entering the work place are amazingly productive with open source tools, as well as leveraging communities and social networks to answer questions and complete solutions in a fraction of the time I have seen it take in the past. We are utilizing open source software including our Ingres database for discussion groups, content management, and collaboration. This allows us to provide a fairly rich capability at a fraction of the cost that it would have taken to deploy some of the closed source platforms. What it does require, is an architecture and plan for common services, some of which we are now altering after taking a new second look at the complete work.

My input to the panel was focused on how the advent of SaaS solutions has changed the role of the CIO and what criteria we apply when evaluating SaaS vendors. In fact, many of these same points apply to the sales cycles for open source software vendors:

• SaaS Defined: Superior SaaS solutions are correctly architected to leverage multi-tenancy, and evolved data centers.
• Extensibility: Superior SaaS solutions are highly extensible - critical to assuring fit for unanticipated requirements.
• Integration: The best have advanced standards-based integration capabilities.
• Reporting: Have a plan for integrated reporting across your best-of-breed solutions. We at Ingres market a BI appliance to establish a platform for this reporting and analytics.
  
• Auditability: SAS70 is not a set of standards – continue to review and understand the security assertions of the vendor.
• Deal Term: Sign for 1 year initial term, with additional commitment that is not auto-renewable
• Variable Cost: Assure user count or subscription basis is adjustable upwards or downwards at renewal dates or continually.
• Data Recovery: Be sure there are provisions to obtain your data in case of disaster or cessation of the agreement.

Some spirited debate followed. Check out the webinar when you get the chance.

For years we in IT have been procuring and installing software and building onsite solutions with our internal resources. We did this based on a series of vendor compatibility matrices - pouring over specifications for operating systems, databases, application and web servers, along with other associated software infrastructure, and following these in exacting detail in order to end up with a supportable solution. We’ve kept all those bits up to date to stay on a certified code stack. Of course at the end of the day what mattered was that the business application or functional utility built on top of all that infrastructure ran reliably and was supported by the vendor.

A Better way…

I believe there are better ways to manage this complexity and an important avenue for this is to rely directly on vendors who have the proven ability to deliver a complete stack of software for a chosen solution. This is why I am so excited by our deployment of open source software “appliances” and “community bundles”, such as the Ingres Icebreaker appliance. Open source software providers face the same interoperability challenge that legacy providers faced, but with two distinct advantages: (1) most OSS software is by the nature of its design more prone to being extended and (2) there are more resources via the community for adapting the solution to specific purposes. On top of this, when you add the concept of software “appliances” which are supported by a single vendor and are updated in production by that vendor you now are looking at a superior solution.

That is what we have done here at Ingres with our Business Intelligence and Content Management appliances and bundles. The work of determining the right versions and patch levels has been done. We are taking first call and supporting the appliance as a whole, and are offering single-stream updates to keep the stack updated. Internally we took this market offering, installed it, and used a plug-in for Salesforce.com data synchronization and produced our first data mart with analytics in a week. At a prior company, doing this same thing with legacy products took more than 10 times the effort. I will have more on this project in the coming weeks.

On the music front, this month has been very busy with several bands coming through the Bay Area. The most current event was Peter Moren of “peter, bjorn, and john” but for me, the highlights were the more nostalgic Collective Soul, B-52’s and Crowded House shows, all of which highlighted the strength of these enduring acts.

When talking about our 100% SaaS / Open Source strategy at Ingres, I am often asked, “what will that mean for your future as a CIO” or “how do you maintain control of technology at the company” using this model. The first thing I let them know is that CIO means “Career Is Over” – then I try to smile.

Enablement & Alignment vs. Control

First things first. Control is overrated. The role of the “evolved” CIO is to focus on strategy, innovation, and enablement rather than worrying only about operational efficiency. Sure we have policies, governance, and security measures, and we need to assure the company’s information assets are protected. But we count on people to follow the policies, and we put technology in place to assure no harm is done.

Then I hear – what about all these SaaS offerings – people can just sign up and you have no idea what they are doing. I think several CIO’s have stories about the tool, utility, or even application that suddenly appeared on the network. I certainly have my own.

The First Time…

My first experience with SaaS was at my last company. We were mired in a very poor implementation of “Project Accounting” from a legacy software vendor. When new management for the Services group came in, we discussed the situation and the difficulty we were having upgrading this on-premise nightmare. The new local VP went out on his own and found several SaaS based PSA tools, and came to the conclusion that we should seriously consider 2 finalists, and rip out the legacy provider for this function.

At first I had the typical reaction to these events – shock and horror! How could we abandon the platform in preference for some point solution? What about integration? What about reporting? After this wore off, I realized this had to be a business driven solution, and I was either going to be a part of it, or be a detractor. Well, we ended up going through a bake-off and selected OpenAir, which quickly became a huge win for the services organization and for IT as well.

Darwin’s Theory

Instead of worrying about where this would fit in the data center, what servers it would run on, and how I was going to train our operations staff on its use, I had a chance to concern myself only with how to make this work for the business as effectively as possible. We transformed Lilly from our operations department into one of the best business analysts I have ever known. IT got out of the position of being a roadblock to the services group, and into the position of being a key partner.

Does this all mean there is no room for the CIO? Not at all – these are still complex decisions that require architectural consideration and due diligence. Vendor management becomes a bigger part of your life. Making sure there is air and power in the dc becomes less a part of your life. It’s all about focus.

I have a very similar story about the adoption of open source software – the need to evolve and adopt these solutions is very much the same as with SaaS, and will cover that one in a future posting.

Was just looking over a Gartner report, which finds that by 2010, 90% of SaaS providers will utilize “some” open source software in their offerings. But it is said that this use of open source is primarily limited to the vendor’s infrastructure and is not expected to offer them a “competitive advantage”.

Disruptive Technology Changes Everything

My first reaction was…huh? I believe these vendors absolutely will experience competitive advantages from their use of OSS infrastructure. The variable cost subscription model should allow SaaS players to grow or constrict their consumption of OSS at the same rate as their own customer subscriptions. In addition, access to talent – Engineers who excel at their craft and aggressively adopt OSS tools – provides an advantage to the player who adopts this strategy. In fact, SaaS vendors may go far beyond their initial deployments of OSS for infrastructure, and drive even greater success by increased adoption of OSS along with effective use of customer/developer communities as part of their offerings.

A Note of Truth?

I say this, as the tentative nature of the report reminded me of recent headlines in music industry journals. Record labels and retailers are reeling from their failure to adapt to disruptive changes in their own distribution model:

• Apple’s iTunes online store just passed up Best Buy to become second largest music retailer in the country. They are about to launch a subscription based offering.
• Wal-Mart, the number one music retailer in the country, are reportedly demanding that the major record labels reduce wholesale prices so that the average title can sell for less than $10.
• This month Nine Inch Nails released a new album without a major record label, in packages ranging from a free download of nine tracks to a paid deluxe package for fans. The label that broke NIN filed for bankruptcy in February.
• Only fifty-two percent of teenagers bought a CD in 2007, down from sixty-two percent in 2006.

Quite a fact pattern! SaaS and open source software movements, which are very much compatible, have the ability to inflict this kind of disruptive effect on the perpetually licensed proprietary software market.

I am speaking there Tuesday April 29th at 3:45 p.m. under the following subject heading:

How Digital Killed the Analog Store: Open Source and SaaS Solutions Virtualize Global IT Delivery (also titled “how I stopped building data centers and learned to virtualize IT”). Yes I am fond of the movie “Dr. Strangelove” and that song by “The Buggles”. The presentation will focus on the twin disruptive forces of Open Source and SaaS solutions on the technology marketplace.

Our CEO and President, Roger Burkhardt, is on the keynote Software Trends panel Tuesday at 2:30 p.m., speaking about the future of technology.

Ingres will be there with a booth that emphasizes our latest solutions and services. Oh, get a “back stage pass” to join Ingres in our booth where we will be playing Rock Band and demoing Ingres on a PS3!

Come and see us at Software 2008 and make noise with Ingres!

One of the reasons I was excited to join Ingres is the fact that the management team was dedicated to the idea of supplying all of our business applications via Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solutions and everything else using open source software (OSS) solutions, including our own Ingres database. I had just gone through 2 years of painful but not uncommon downsizing effort at another company, taking IT spend from $8M down to $4M annually. I became convinced that the right way to provision IT is to maximize variable cost and get far away from large up-front capital expenditures. So I joined Ingres and we adopted a solutions sourcing strategy which included the 100% SaaS/OSS goal.

Lots of Solutions on the Menu

We started down this path with salesforce.com already in place for the sales team. We then selected Intacct Financials, and ADP’s HRIS system, all SaaS players themselves. Along the way we implemented SaaS based software from eProsper, Xactly, and others. We get our eMail from a hosting provider named MindSHIFT and our conferencing from WebEx. The only services we have in a data center include a wiki for our intranet (which we plan to replace with another open source provider), and our own Ingres IceBreaker BI Appliance using Jaspersoft. Our customer facing web properties are built with php, MediaWiki, and other open source tools and solutions all running on Ingres atop RedHat Linux, and hosted by Broadspire in Los Angeles and London.

Pay by the Pound

We pay for all this on run rate subscription model, including the open source software solutions (now that they are “in production”). We almost completely avoided the typical up-front data center, server, storage, and software costs of these solutions.

Not Looking Back

If this approach yields results that meet or exceed your business requirements why would you ever buy perpetual software licenses, or build and maintain a data center ever again? Watch this space for more news and stories about this strategy, and our experience thus far.

On the music front, I went to see Eddie Vedder (lead singer from Pearl Jam) last week with Liam Finn. Eddie wrote much of the soundtrack from the film “Into the Wild” last year and did most of those tracks at the show. Sometimes a musician has to “go acoustic” for you to really see through to their soul. This was one of those cases. Don’t miss this concert if it comes your way!

I have been a dedicated fan of popular music from the time I was three years old. I still have a copy of the Beatles record, “Rubber Soul” that I played repeatedly, sneaking into my sister’s room to use the record player. At that early age I became a complete Anglophile. Ten years later, I was spinning anything out of Britain from the progressive rock acts of the time, including Jethro Tull, Yes, and so on. The “new wave” movement hit in the late 70’s and early 80’s and I was then again hooked on all types of creative bands such as Depeche Mode, Cocteau Twins, and others that mixed fashion, electronics and lots of attitude. My horizons expanded a bit from the 90’s on. For me, women saved the 90’s between Tori, Fiona, Natalie and other similar artists. The new millennium has my ever expanding collection taking up lots of disk space with music as rich and varied as any that has come before. Through each of these decades, I have played music, collected music, and attended live performances as frequently as possible. I would define myself as a music “aficionado”.

In many ways, my career in information technology fits in rather nicely with this passion for all things musical. When you read music, it is like its own language with a unique alphabet and organization. This is also true in the IT world with the programming languages and scripts that drive our solutions. Okay, sometimes the results are fairly mundane, but often, particularly in the last 10 years, there are amazing displays of creativity, all powered by new tools and technology. Each groundbreaking musical or technical achievement typically leads to a new longer period of assimilation, during which the new is made more broadly appealing, and is subsumed into the mainstream. Additional creativity is applied to create variations on the new themes, and spread the word. You can witness this happening in both the music and technology industries today.

We are in the midst of a groundbreaking era. Net based communities and social networks are being used to revolutionize software development, distribution and support providing these solutions are under open source licensing agreements. This disruptive market trend is represented by these new solutions, whether they are delivered via open source tools and platforms, or through subscription based Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) models. We are entering and to an extent, are already in a period of assimilation for these groundbreaking methods of IT delivery. These solutions fit the way we want to try to pay for technology - they may start as free or for trial usage, but when they are implemented, we will subscribe to the solution, on a basis more commensurate with our usage and the value generated by that usage. Traditional software vendors are finding it difficult or impossible to respond to this disruptive trend and move into these new markets effectively. It is truly an exciting time for the industry.

These developments parallel events in the music business. Providers such as iTunes, Amazon, and social networks such as MySpace threaten physical media for survival. Just last year, the band Radiohead offered its new music release for download without a major record label’s distribution - on their site - and for a price you set. Downloadable music, priced if you like by the song, is overtaking preconfigured record sales. My year-end mix in 2007 was built 95% from songs that I downloaded selectively. One of my favorite haunts of the last 20 years, Tower Records, just went out of business. Traditional record companies are struggling to survive technologies, which have disrupted decades-old music business processes. While old models change, new ones come in to take their place.

The entries in this blog will be covering developments in the IT marketplace from the perspective of the CIO. I will pay particular attention to open source and SaaS solutions. I hope to also find moments to share a bit of news or information from the world of music along the way.