Microsoft Warming to Open Source?
Posted on September 10, 2007
Filed Under Business Computing, Open Source/Freeware, Software |
When I opened my business I dreamed of bringing enterprise class technology solutions to Small and Medium sized Enterprises (SMEs). That direction was in response to two things I’d come to learn in the field, 1) many business oriented computer service companies set their sights on medium to large businesses where they believe there is more revenue and 2) effectively delivering such service requires innovation.
Small and medium sized businesses seemed to me to be underserviced in a time when it was widely recognized that they were becoming a driving force of the economy.
Since then I’ve taken the best of offerings from Microsoft and other commercial software vendors, the Open Source community, and several hardware vendors to bring real business value to my customers. What came as a bit of a surprise however was that some of the big players in the IT (information technology) industry were also starting to seriously court the SME market in a big way.
One of the products that caught my attention in the beginning, and remains a great solution for smaller businesses is Microsoft Small Business Server. I made some enquiries into it and it wasn’t long before Microsoft Canada offered a free text book and paid for my Microsoft Small Business Specialist exam. Microsoft sure seemed anxious to get small technology businesses like mine servicing other small businesses with their small business server product!
At the same time Cisco Systems, who builds some of the best network infrastructure equipment available, bought Linksys who had built its business on lower end SOHO (Small Office/Home Office) equipment. Prior to that, Cisco equipment was simply priced out of the SME market, but with the purchase of Linksys it was able to quickly penetrate that market with decent quality, low cost equipment. It seemed Cisco Systems had suddenly taken an interest in the SME market as well.
What has become more and more interesting in the past few years is the increasing acceptance of Open Source software in business. In fact a new business strategy is appearing where software makers will offer their product, and its source code, free of charge and then provide paid installation and support services for it.
Others like SugarCRM (www.sugarcrm.com) and Asterisk (www.asterisk.org) maintain two or more editions, the bleeding edge Open Source community edition and the paid commercial versions. Other are just plain free Open Source like the incredibly useful OpenOffice.org (www.openoffice.org) or many Linux distributions.
As businesses in general and SMEs in particular pick up on Open Source, the industry giants aren’t missing the message. As I’ve talked about before in this column, Dell is flirting with offering Ubuntu Linux on desktop computers and Microsoft has entered into agreement with Open Source players Novell (www.novell.com) and Xandros (www.xandros.com).
Today Microsoft, whose CEO Steve Ballmer once called Linux a cancer and suggested Open Source is merely an attempt to clone commcercial software, is now taking on an Open Source initiative of its own. Microsoft has created two web siites deciated to it’s open source initiative, the main site at www.microsoft.com/opensource/default.mspx and Port 25 at port25.technet.com. To top things off, Microsoft has even developed its own open source licensing albeit none too surprising. You can read the licenses at www.microsoft.com/resources/sharedsource/licensingbasics/sharedsourcelicenses.mspx
So what does this mean to you and me and all the small and medium sized businesses out there? Possibly not much but just as possibly some relief from high software costs and the ability to customize software to work the way we need it to. At the very least, the IT industry is beginning to see that SMEs can no longer be ignored.
And it’s about time. Now if we can only make politicians see the light…
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