Linux no open and shut case

The open source market has been around for almost two decades and while its popularity has ebbed and flowed through the years, technology pundits believe it has finally established itself as a technology norm.

There's no doubt companies are becoming curious about the open source market and what it can do for the organisation. Experts believe resellers now have customers who either want to implement open source or are curious about open source.

However, channel partners wanting to put all their eggs into the open source basket are in for a big fall. The money is finally there, but only if channel partners have the time, money and right fit with open source.

Con Zymaris, founder and CEO of Melbourne-based Cybersource, has a reputation as an open source evangelist. He believes the potential for resellers in the open source market is huge.

According to Zymaris, IBM and Novell's signing in March with the NSW Government to become a member of an open source panel showed the IT industry that the potential for state procurement is tangible. He says there is a "refreshed view" in the marketplace - the signing gave open source a refreshed view on Linux.

Zymaris notes the open source market even had its own section at CeBIT in Sydney in early May this year, which was unheard of a couple of years ago.

"I talked to at least 30 resellers at CeBIT this year, and that's quite a large number at the event."

Michael Costigan, marketing manager at Avnet Solutions, which distributes Cisco's Novell Linux product and is a Novell authorised centre, has been noticing a change in the open source market during the past 12 months. He says he has seen resellers leading the Linux solution to the market.

What has changed, according to Costigan, is the perception of Linux moving from a back office experiment to becoming a credible alternative to other solutions.

"Traditionally, Linux had no part in the mainstream environment because of issues surrounding the total cost of ownership. However, any perception about the open source market has changed over the past five years," he says.

"Now Linux is no longer seen as a technical application experiment and is considered a low-cost alternative, not only used in the back but in the front office. Teenagers who once experimented with open source are now the grown ups who apply it to their organisation."

Greg Keiser, channel manager of Novell, says if you go back a few years, Linux interested just a few enthusiastic people. Resellers, partners and vendors were not really interested in the market.

"The open source market was fringe in nature and now nothing can be further from the truth. This is no longer the preserve of a few enthusiastic technical programmers. There is a vast, overwhelming trend of people seeing the financial sense in becoming 'open'," Keiser says.

Anthony Rumble, owner of Everything Linux, has been providing open source tools and merchandise to the general public since 1998. He says quite a lot has changed since then.

"In the early days we were fighting to get people into becoming 'open'," Rumble says. "They didn't understand or believe the product could be a huge boom. Now they are taking the time to try it and accept it as another technology.

"I've spent a lot of time being persistent and diligent in pushing it. I think also people have gotten fed up with traditional software and have found the open source market to be not as bad as detractors have said. My mother runs it because I got sick and tired of fixing her machine - unless it ran on an operating system I could support. There's no better validation when your mother can run it."

No understanding

Zymaris believes resellers have not understood about the opportunities that existed in the open source market and it is now time to change. "This market gives the reseller open source rights to source code. Imagine that, in the traditional software market, if you want to buy Microsoft the end publisher is always Microsoft. Resellers were able to buy the software licence but it will always be owned by Microsoft," he says.

"In the open office there are a number of vendors and a channel partner who don't have to go on the stipulations dictated by one vendor. You can't do that in the proprietary marketplace."

Zymaris says if an open source reseller wanted to sell Linux, they do not have to go to Linux vendor, there are Linux groups instead. "In the open source a reseller never has to kow-tow to vendor. The technology you want to go with in this space can be different versions. However, if in the traditional channel space you have only one choice of vendor for a software product, they could essentially shaft you because they are the owners of the software."

Costigan says there is a big community continually contributing to the open source market. "Individuals are getting Linux and bringing it into the mainstream. I think Australian organisations are discerning over things that work; they are also quite competitive and price comes into mind when buying products. They don't want things that don't cost an arm and a leg, they want to experiment and be more flexible in their decision process," he says.

Zymaris believes this kind of mainstream attention creates a marketplace without blockages in the distribution channel. "There's enough business in open source to create enough business with a pure competitive model. There's also a lower barrier to entering because there's only a handful of vendors."

Keiser says the whole software industry is going this way and it will become even more prevalent as traditional hardware vendors from the top of the chain offer customer support. "Let's look at the alternative: the market shifts over the past three or four years for resellers aren't good. Margins are lousy and they have had to shrink services as part of a survival strategy," he says.

"I know of a number of reseller who won't even bother to sell software products. Any vendor who does on any level of commodity type business also competes with partners on the resell of products."