Attendees listen to presentations at Structure, Structure Data 2016 will also be held at UCSF Mission Bay Conference Center. Image source: Structure Events.
It’s really hard to underestimate the impact of open source projects on the enterprise software market today; the integration of open source software has so quickly become an industry norm that it’s understandable we missed the turning point.
For example, Hadoop has not only changed the data analysis world, it has led a new generation of data companies that create their own software around open source projects, adjusting and supporting that code as needed, much like Red Hat embraced Linux in the 1990s and early 2000s. Software is increasingly delivered through public clouds rather than running on buyers’ own servers, providing amazing operational flexibility, but also bringing new questions about licensing, support, and pricing.
We’ve been tracking this trend for years, these topics filled our Structure Data conference, and this year’s Structure Data 2016 is no exception. The CEOs of the three most important big data companies around Hadoop—Hortonworks, Cloudera, and MapR—will discuss together how they sell their enterprise software and services around open source projects, making profits while giving back to community projects.
In the past, making money on enterprise software was easy. Once a customer purchased, an enterprise vendor’s software suite became a cash register, generating near-lifetime revenue from maintenance contracts and periodic upgrades, and the software became increasingly difficult to replace because it had become core to the customer’s business. Customers complained about this lock-in, but if they wanted to improve their workforce’s productivity, they really didn’t have many choices.
But that’s no longer the case. Although countless companies are still stuck running crucial giant software packages on their infrastructure, new projects are being deployed to cloud servers using open source technology. This makes upgrading features possible without removing large software packages and reinstalling others, and also lets companies pay as needed rather than paying for a bunch of features they’ll never use.
Many customers want to take advantage of open source projects without building and supporting a team of engineers to adjust those open source projects to meet their own needs. These customers are willing to pay for the difference between open source projects and proprietary features built on top of them.
This is especially true for infrastructure-related software. Of course, your customers can adjust projects themselves, like Hadoop, Spark, or Node.js, but paying can help them get custom packaged deployments of today’s important open source technologies without doing the work themselves. Just look at Structure Data 2016 speakers to understand, like Confluent (Kafka), Databricks (Spark), and the Cloudera-Hortonworks-MapR (Hadoop) trio.
Of course, another thing worth mentioning is having a vendor to blame when things go wrong. If your engineers mess up an open source project implementation, you can only blame yourself. But if you sign a contract with a company willing to provide service-level quality that ensures performance and uptime metrics, you’re actually paying for support, guidance, and someone to blame.
The continued growth of the commercial software market built on open source is something we’ve been tracking at Structure Data for years, if this topic interests you, we encourage you to join us in San Francisco, March 9th and 10th.
Compiled from: https://www.linux.com/news/enterprise/cloud-computing/889564-the-evolving-market-for-commercial-software-built-on-open-source-Author: Tom Krazit
Original: LCTT https://linux.cn/article-7548-1.htmlTranslator: alim0x
Reposted from: Developer Relations »
