Selling open source

Staff training is certainly a key factor in making a successful move into the open source market, says Babel Com Australia chief executive Del Elson.

Babel Com Australia started in 1996 as an offshoot of an ISP doing business internet consulting. After working with both proprietary and open source solutions for several years, Babel Com Australia declared itself a purely open source consultant in 2000.

The transition would have been much harder had Babel Com Australia been a Microsoft-only shop lacking staff with open source skills, Elson says. An audit of staff skills is an essential early step towards embracing open source, he says.

“We generally find the average techie in a small, customer-support type IT company has got a Linux box at home and has got quite a bit of Linux experience anyway, even if their day-today job is managing Windows servers,” Elson says.

“Your Windows-only staff may be looking to work elsewhere in order to add some Linux experience to their resume, so this might allow you to hang on to them. Certainly if you offered to put a few of your staff through something like a Red Hat support course to put a few extra letters after their name, most would jump at that opportunity.”

Businesses without on-board open source skills should consider starting off by partnering with an establish open source company, Elson recommends. “For the small to medium system integrators, it may be very much easier to partner up with a small Linux integrator and say ‘you scratch our back and we’ll scratch yours’”, he says.

“Remember that most of the Linux support companies are quite small and they’re only too happy to partner up with a larger system integrator or someone to shoulder some of the work for their Linux systems to get them into the position they need to be in the marketplace.”

Along with skilled staff, channel players also need an appreciation of the open source concept, says Solutions First chief executive David Kempe.

Solutions First started in 1998 as an IT services company specialising in Linux and open source support and Kempe is a director of Open Source Industry Australia. Solutions First is one of only three small to medium enterprises on the NSW Government panel for supply for Linux and open source services.

“You can’t just wake up one day, read CRN and say, ‘Oh, let’s get on this open source bandwagon’, because you’ll have no idea where to start. You’re going to need to start on a long, exhaustive self-education process as to what the world is like in this neck of the woods,” Kempe says.

“The open source community expects the experts to be largely self-taught, of which everyone that I hire is. You can go out and do your certification but at the end of the day it’s pretty much a piece of paper. You can say this person is of this standard but you can’t necessarily throw them out into the industry and say ‘now bill some hours’ because it’s quite different to solving someone’s problem.”

Community is a fundamental part of the open source concept, Kempe says.

“There’s literally thousands of people, tens of thousands of people, that may be able to help you in one way or another from day to day. Tapping into those resources is an entirely different way of dealing with your supplier. Part of that is unfortunately being around long enough that the community understands who you are and will answer your questions when you ask and you’re part of the reciprocal give-and- take,” he says.

“Being a good corporate citizen takes on a whole new meaning. You need to get involved, to start contributing to the community, in order to get some credibility.”

Kempe’s advice on staff training is echoed by Anthony Rumble, managing director of open source-focused reseller Everything Linux.

“You’ve got your certified programs, and they’re pretty good, but again you’ll only just beat the square box kind of reseller and you’ll only be useful in those out-of-the-box circumstances,” Rumble says.

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“There are certified consultants out there that can do a lot of the work, but they’re much like MSCEs in that they work by the textbook. When things all work by the book everything is happy, but when things don’t work by the book you need someone who is trained by time and came up the hard way and fixes things by intuition, knowledge and fault finding, not just remembering what the answer was.”

Fortune favours the brave and open source presents great opportunities for those who can get beyond the mind-set that Windows is the “be all and end all”, Cybersource’s Zymaris says.

“If you’ve been in the industry for long enough you’ll know that any particular vendor is transient, there’s no guarantee of being king of the roost in any particular space in five or 10 years time. At the same time, it seems likely that if Microsoft moves into your area today then your chances for success in the next three to five years in that industry vertical start to diminish.”

“I would look to moving to new fresh ground where I know Microsoft won’t be. Not only would I make my product available on Linux but it’s in my best interests to make sure that as much of the market as possible moves into this Linux space -- because they won’t be there. Once enough of the market moves to Linux, I know that for the first time ever we have a neutral playing field. Microsoft will not have an unfair advantage on Linux over me, because for once they won’t own the field.”