Selling open source

“The trade off for that level of flexibility is integration. You pay for integration one way or the other -- you pay for it from a commercial software vendor where there’s rigorous testing so that things have smooth edges and work well together from a mobile device to the desktop to a server or a data centre. The alternative is you either pay someone to do that integration work for you or you take on that burden yourself.”

“The open source community is generally driven by building what they want or need. There’s a lot of people who want to work on some of the more exciting ‘rock star’ projects in the community but perhaps there is less of a motivation to do the hard yards of testing lots of drivers and doing compatibility and integration testing,” Gregory says.

Forrester’s Goulde agrees this is a weakness of the open source model but says big Linux vendors are working to improve the situation.

“One of the problems with open source is any particular project mostly focuses on their project, so there’s not a lot of integration testing of all the components necessary for a complete solution,” Goulde says.

“One of the things that Red Hat and Novell are essentially doing is a first level of systems integration in assembling components and then doing the integration testing and then providing all the necessary support. They’re providing their resellers with a pre-tested package that they will provide the software maintenance for and support for the reseller if they can’t support something.”

The open source model provides Linux developers such as Red Hat with a greater level of quality control than proprietary software vendors, says Red Hat Australia general manager Max McLaren.

“We have about 350 developers at Red Hat and then they each of them have a group of about 10 people in the community that they interact with. Each of those 10 have a group of about 10 people as well. So we’ve got at least tens of thousands of people that develop our technology,” McLaren says.

“The rigour that is imposed on open source technology is generally dramatically more than you would get in a proprietary environment. This assists not only with quality testing but with innovation.”

Red Hat's McLaren: Lots of innovation and solid code

“Not only are they assessing the quality of the code that has been submitted but they’re putting forward their two pennies worth of innovation. As a result we have this dramatic scale of innovation and generally the code that is produced is very solid.”

When it comes to supporting those dealing with Red Hat products, Red Hat provides training -- Red Hat Certified Engineer and Red Hat Certified Architect designations.

“We have a self-assessment process on the web and then it recommends which courses they go on. Generally it’s about a week of conversion for a Unix skilled person and about three weeks for a Windows person.”

Novell also offers extensive certification, training and sales support for SuSE, says Novell Asia Pacific distribution manager, Geoff Craig.

“We have a number of specific Linux and open source training programs such as the Certified Novell Sales person, which aims to enable sales personnel who have not had exposure to Linux,” Craig says.

“Registered Novell partners also have access to Novell’s Partner Campaign Central Portal, which delivers demand generation campaigns to partners. In addition, Novell is conducting extensive channel development with direct partner account assistance, and assigning leads from Novell’s direct demand generation campaigns to partners to start them on the road to selling Novell solutions. We have also recruited distribution-based business development managers who are strongly focused on assisting partners in going to market.”

Industry giants such as IBM and HP have embraced open source software such as Linux, particular Red Hat and Novell SuSE. The move has been partially driven by customers abandoning expensive proprietary Unix solutions running on high-end hardware in favour of Linux running on commodity Intel/AMD boxes.

IBM has established a Sydney testing centre to assist partners and ISVs in porting applications to Linux as well as performance testing and load balancing, says IBM’s Australia and New Zealand Linux business development manager Ivan Kladnig.

Novell's Craig: Offering demand generation tools for partners

“We’re also providing them with sales enablement in terms of selling solutions based on Linux,” Kladnig says.

“Clearly there is an investment to be made in terms of both technical skills and understanding the marketplace; certainly there are lots of companies and vendors that are willing to assist; certainly IBM is more than happy to get involved and assist anybody that is looking to move into that marketplace and we actively encourage it.”

HP supports both Red Hat and Novell SuSE, which are “the two most popular commercial distributions and offer good support to their customers,” says HP’s regional open source and Linux business manager Anupam Nagar.

“Enterprises want predictability in their environment, they don’t want 100 flavours. They want what works best in their environment and what can be supported over the next few years rather than the next few months,” Nagar says.

“HP has been focusing its energy on designing the Linux Reference Architecture, which acts as a blueprint and helps our partners and customers to build a solution from different building blocks.”

“Our experience is that it’s the Unix base that is moving faster to Linux, and the resellers who have knowledge about Unix are taking to it the fastest. If you’re a purely Windows shop it’s a steep learning curve, but if you’re an organisation that has been dabbling with Unix for a while it’s fairly easy.”