Open Source — Selling Software That Sells Itself

mrcgran writes to mention that LinuxWorld is running an interview with Alfresco's Matt Asay. "Open source is changing not just how companies make software, but how they sell it. Alfresco's Matt Asay explains the new sales cycle and the skills that today's software sales people need to close deals. [...] 'But you know what? We have worked with Microsoft on interop without doing any sort of a patent deal; as has Sugar and MySQL and Zend and these other companies. We work directly with Microsoft for a customer of ours to insure SQL Server integration with Alfresco. Didn't have to sign any patent deal with them to get that done. We both had a mutual customer. It was in our mutual interest. We both wanted to make money, therefore we did it. But the patent thing is a complete smoke and mirrors, I don't want to say trick, but it has nothing to do with interoperability. No matter how much Microsoft may repeat that, it has nothing to do with interoperability.'"

Is Alfresco open source?

My workplace just signed an agreement with Alfresco. They claim that they don't charge an up-front fee for licensing (they just charge for support) - but their demo software stopped working after 30 days because the demo license expired. (So until we bought a license, the software didn't work.)

As one of our managers put it "this is the least open-source open-source project I've ever seen."

Re:Is Alfresco open source?

The community version does not need a license key, but you used the Enterprise trial version. on the download page you can read "Please note this is a time-limited trial and by installing the software you are agreeing to our Enterprise Trial license, specifically that you will uninstall it in 30 days if you decide to not purchase the Alfresco Enterprise Network" If you want open-source, use the community version.

Re:Is Alfresco open source?

Yes. What's on the Alfresco website is indeed demoware. You can get the open source edition from their dev site here [alfresco.com].

What Is Alfresco?

So if you're like me, wondering what is being slashvertised today, Alfresco [wikipedia.org] is an open source content management system like SugarCRM.

A CMS (Content Management System [wikipedia.org]) or CRM or Wiki allows a large number of users to collaborate online, typically meeting business needs like product delivery, scheduling, Human Resource management, and internal business documentation.

Does anyone know of other similar open source projects? In specific, I'm curious if there are other projects like SugarCRM. I know about all the different Wikipedia projects.

Re:What Is Alfresco?

SugarCRM is nothing like Alfresco! Alfresco is more like products like Documentum. Alfresco is the solution for all those documents you have laying around your company's share drives. Drag those documents into Alfresco. It's simple, just connect to Alfresco using FTP/WEBDAV/CIFS (SMB). Alfresco will authenticate against almost anything. Alfresco indexes all the documents. Change a document? Alfresco keeps the revisions. Want to start a discussion about the document? No prob. Need to find a document? All documents in Alfresco are searchable. Open a document in Word and see the revisions and TODO's? No problem, there is a MS Office and OpenOffice plugin.

Alfresco gets compared to Sharepoint a lot, but from what I've seen it is much better than SP.

The thing that I'm looking forward to is wiki integration. Now that will be amazing. Full web content managed along side traditional .doc files.

Forget putting .doc's in Samba. Use Alfresco! I wish the word would get out on this thing. It is fantastic software that is badly needed.

I do not represent the Alfresco company in any way. I'm just a person that recently discovered it.

The one page version

http://www.linuxworld.com/cgi-bin/mailto/x_linux.c gi?pagetosend=/export/home/httpd/linuxworld/news/2 007/081607-matt-asay-interview.html&pagename=/news /2007/081607-matt-asay-interview.html&pageurl=http ://www.linuxworld.com/news/2007/081607-matt-asay-i nterview.html&site=lw_general [linuxworld.com]

Article is horrible

I skimmed the article, and honestly, as someone who was a software consultant from the mid 90s, to 2002, it reads like a consultant from Informix of CA from the year 2000 wrote it.

First, you never have to sign a patent deal to use a database with your software.  I worked for a company that if you used our stuff, you could use Oracle, DB2, Postegres, MySQL, or MSSQL.  Just depending on what you wanted to do with it, and how robust your needs were.

And for a great deal of things, MSSQL, ORACLE, DB2, and Postregres hands Mysql its ass.  For CRM services, Mysql is fine, so why pay for a database, when there is a free one that suits it just fine.

Our sales cycle, to major clients.  Paramount Studios, Maxis, Sun Microsystems, never took 9 months. HP for about a 60k a month retainer deal was done in three.  Did I mention we were a proprietary, closed source shop?  Longest was Universal, but was a deal for USA Networks, Sci Fi, and Trio combined.

Also, the guy fails to realize if you do business with big business, sales cycle is longer.  You have approval through departments, testing, etc.

Open Source has nothing to do with the sales cycle.

He says "is we don't commission our solutions engineers, our sales engineers, at all."    then a paragraph later he says "And it means that we commission our sales people on renewals as well. "  Thought you did not commission them at all.

The article is an advertisement, and the guy being interviewd should realize he sounds like a sales 101 pamphlet.

It has everything to do with interop

Yes it does, if Microsoft OWNS you, aka "Microsoft SQL Enterprise", you are just a pimp and a whore. Two entities with a mutual customer indeed!

Anyone worth their beans in IT has run into their own Microsoft subsidiaries (lemures) that promise "interoperability" yet fail horribly to deliver.

Besides I do not want Microsoft's code its unmaintainable and all of the variables are named after Teletubbies.

Brand the sucker

Open source developers need to brand their software more. Give it a personality and a cool logo, sell some mugs and t-shirts to generate some revenue, maybe sell an instruction guide (um, or maybe not). Throw up some YouTube videos that showcases the features (or better yet, the benefits for the user). I know it's not about the money with open source, but making a little cheddar on the side isn't gonna hurt.

Yours truly,
An open source fan

Re:Brand the sucker

I know it's not about the money with open source, but making a little cheddar on the side isn't gonna hurt.

What's wrong with making money writing software directly? Why should programmers be damned to pursue a menial job while voluntarily writing software in their free time? Is programming for a living not a worthy occupation?

Print Version

Print version [linuxworld.com] of the article on a single page.

There are about six or seven of these multipage articles linked to on Slashdot each day. It took me less than twelve seconds to get the link to this one. Would it not be possible for submitters/editors to do this? Or is it that Slashdot has some kind of agreement not to do this?

Fascinating article

That article is worth its weight in raw platinum. The guy from Alfresco sound like one of the most open, decent and honest management types I've ever heard give an interview. The interview raised so many points that get discussed over and over and over here on slashdot, such as the need for sales people to be mediated by engineers so as not to give false expectations, such as the feeling that the propietry software models are not working very well because they are simply too expensive and place too much risk on the customer. He also notes how SuSE went south after the Microsoft-Novell deal, this directly from data on his own product.

The guy sounds like he would be a real pleasure to work for.

Technologies and not devmodels moving into battle

More and more I see OSS winning over in key markets. In fact I see the major conflict not in 'which Vendor do you use?' but in 'which technology do you use?'. Which is actually the way it should be. For instance: I've got a medium size web project comming up - a web-based B2B/CRM plattform - and the big figtht wasn't "proprietary" vs. "OSS" but "Symfony" vs. "CakePHP". The customer has some buddy companies who all use Cake, so I'm suposed to build the thing in CakePHP aswell.

What I find interesting is that throughout the entire evaluation and preperation phase the entire 'OSS or not' question wasn't even being discussed and allready had been decided in favour of OSS. Shrinkwrap software business is mostly a thing of the past. It's about how and with what extras and service you can deliver you software.

great quote about white papers

"I don't think I've ever read a white paper that actually had much meaningful information in it. Most of it is kind of marketing garbage that people like me write, and that's not that useful."

Indeed. As he says, just let me download the software, and give me a welcome page, a demo site, a tutorial, or sample data that give me a sense of what I can do with it.

Re:riddle me this:

Microsoft - of that i have no doubt