Open Source Community Competition

After spending time last week at the OpenStack Summit I have been thinking about how solutions based on open source technologies compete. I have categorized the open source communities into two categories:

• Market Competition – in this community the companies formed around the technology compete directly against each other for the same customer base
• Market Separation– in this community the companies formed around the technology sell to various segmented markets with limited direct competition

There are plenty of market separation communities in existence and I will detail two to provide a better understanding:

• Linux Distributions – the most familiar of open source projects is prominently led by a few market leaders; SUSE, Red Hat, and Canonical/Ubuntu. Each of these three solutions primarily target different segments; SUSE – Microsoft enterprises looking for Linux solutions; Red Hat – Linux enterprise IT organizations; Ubuntu – general open source users, primarily clients. Thus, limited direct competition.
• Xen.org – this hypervisor technology is primarily used by Oracle and Citrix in production. Oracle targets their customer base looking to virtualize their database solutions and Citrix primarily uses Xen for their customers as the behind the scenes virtualization platform. Thus, limited direct competition.

As for market competition communities I highlight two well-known groups, OpenStack and Cloud Foundry.

• Cloud Foundry – all the solutions based on this technology will compete directly against each other as I am unable to determine how they are reaching different customers. A debate on this issue was recently blogged b/w Apprenda and AppFog ( post1 and post2)
• OpenStack –this community currently has more than 10 distributions with more coming and I am unable to determine how they plan to reach various customer markets. The current marketing is putting each of these companies in direct competition to each other.

These two communities are a relative new idea in open source where companies come together, share resources, and then compete directly with each other. I find this direct competition aspect to be most interesting and am unsure how this will play out. My confidence level is not high for the majority of players as I expect one winner in each community to emerge thus causing the collapse of the ecosystem.

So, what are your thoughts? Do you agree? Am I missing another open source community example that demonstrates how market competition works? Can’t wait for some feedback.

Austin Startup Week: Startup Crawl Highlights

This past week, Austin hosted an interesting event to promote the growing collection of technical startups in the city; Austin Startup Week. The final night of the event was a Startup Crawl giving the 50+ companies a chance to present their solutions/ideas and meet with the broader technology community in Austin. I attended the crawl to see what the latest trends in startups are and if I could find any solutions to try for myself or bring into Dell via a partnership for our cloud platforms.

Thoughts:

• I am an old-timer now, the average age was easily 22 and it was great to see such an enthusiastic group of young people creating new companies
• I did not see very much open source at all; this was a disappointment for me and something that the open source community needs to put some efforts toward to keep the movement going in next generation startups
• Social Media Scoring –  I saw MANY companies creating proprietary solutions allowing companies to better evaluate their social media influence via significant data analysis;  interesting that none of these are public like Klout where I can just enter my social media account and get results.All of these are behind the scenes solutions for companies to purchase
• Email – people are working on interesting solutions for email and mobility for GMAIL. It would be nice to see these solutions for cross-email systems including Outlook, etc but at least people are working on creative ideas for email

To help promote awareness of some of the companies I spoke with, here are a few that I liked:

• Taskbox “Your Inbox is now a Taskbox”
• Whit.li “Explore Minds Like Yours”
• Ziften “Breathe New Life Into PCs”
• Umbel “Audience is Everything”
• RideScout “Urban Transportation Made Simple”
• WPEngine “Hassle Free WordPress Hosting”

Of course, there were lots of other companies that I didn’t have time to visit or were not interesting to me, which doesn’t mean that are not doing great things. Feel free to checkout the Austin Startup Week site to see the complete list of companies, etc.

You Have a Startup – What Next?

Over the past month or so, I have been approached by a few people asking me for advice on the best way to promote their new startup idea to venture capital companies or “connected” people who have experience in helping companies find VCs or angel investors. As I am not a “connected” person in the VC space I thought I would reach out to get some feedback from people reading this blog.

Queston 1 – What tool should I use when being connected via email?

For example, the people I am talking to have new business ideas and are starting to put together their business plans and need something to send to connected people that provides more details on the concept without going overboard with too much information.

My thinking is a 3 slide deck that has the following information:

• What is Business Problem Being Solved?
• How Does your Idea Solve this Business Problem?
• Why Me?

With a short and simple slide deck a person can quickly evaluate the idea and either respond to the idea or determine they are not interested. Thoughts?

Question 2: How to find those “connected” people who will respond to email requests?

I know a few people who work with VC firms and can ask them to review my contacts ideas but I think there must be other ways for them to get more feedback. Anyone have good ideas?

PS – This blog post is for others as I am not planning to do a startup due to my family requirements, health complications, and general willingness to sacrifice my life to a business idea. I just want to offer these people the best advice I can find.

OpenStack Summit Next Week – I am Attending

I will be in San Diego next week for the OpenStack Summit and look forward to once again participating in this great community. I am hosting the Introduction to OpenStack Track on Wednesday the 17th with Anne Gentle and have put together my event schedule here.

If anyone wants to get together and discuss Dell and its participation in OpenStack or has questions please feel free to contact me at @SpectorAtDell. I will be blogging daily on the #DellSolves blog  as well as live tweetting the Dell sessions.

Klout (What to think) – Good : Bad : Neutral

I just finished reading Return on Influence:The Revolutionary Power of Klout, Social Scoring, and Influence Marketing by Mark Schaefer which is a significant book in understanding the concepts of creating a score to value a person’s social influence. If you have any interest in being a complete social media “person” than I highly recommend you read this as it will demonstrate the good and bad of influence scoring.

Klout is currently the big dog in social media scoring and the history of the company as well as examples of how Klout is being used by major corporations such as Disney and Audi is well presented in the book. It is easy to see how companies can find online influencers using Klout and leverage their ability to spread your message via marketing campaigns to those influencers.From a basic social media perspective, the concept makes complete sense and appears to work very well.

However, the book also presents the case against Klout and other scoring systems in terms of privacy, non-online influencers (E.g. Malcolm Gladwell), and people gaming the system to name a few. I see these issues but believe that we are in the early days of social media scoring and these issues will be worked out over time. In fact, after reading the book I am more convinced of the value of Klout and these types of tools and plan to spend more time understanding them and leveraging them.

If you have any thoughts on this topic or ideas about Klout, please feel free to add them. I will update this blog regularly with new ideas I learn about this topic and look forward to learning from you as well.