Open Source Software Up the Stack

I had an interesting “meeting” recently with Kim Weins, Marketing VP, and Steven L. Grandchamp, CEO, of OpenLogic. The Denver-area-based company is among those driving the inevitable consolidation of the open source software (OSS) market but with a strategy that preserves the OSS culture. I did not hold their preference for the Colorado Rockies over the Boston Red Sox in the World Series against them. Like good salespeople everywhere, they looked for the positive, saying what a great year the New England Patriots were having.

The CEO explained the background. Open Logic was founded as a consultancy back in the late 1990s, with a mission from large enterprise clients to do something to rationalize all the OSS products then starting to permeate the clients’ IT shops. Right from the start OpenLogic avoided one of the biggest stumbling blocks that more purist OSS companies run into, only dealing with OSS. The company (Steve and Kim had not joined at that point) realized that large IT users needed to not only integrate the different pieces of OSS code finding their way onto large-enterprise servers but to also integrate the OSS with other software, no matter how it is developed, licensed or distributed.

Unlike me, the OpenLogic executives are not “open choice” by philosophy. Instead they are “open choice” because that’s what the market is telling them.

Beginning in 2002, OpenLogic began to productize software it had developed to support its consultancy. That software has grown in various versions into a library of over 300 certified OSS distros, a knowledge base, some IT governance functionality, support software and an interesting product that lets users do a census of OSS on their installations.The latter is freeware available for download but not an OSS distribution itself. The company has almost totally exited the consulting business and partners instead with firms such as Unisys and Covalent. OpenLogic secured venture capital in separate funding rounds in 2005 and 2006.

So how does OpenLogic keep the OSS culture alive when they don’t even OSS their own software?

Interesting tactic: Although OpenLogic provides first-level support as part of its maintenance subscriptions, which are also available via a Software as a Service (SaaS) offering called OpenLogic Exchange (OLEX), Steve and Kim “employ” on a per-incident basis what they call the OpenLogic Expert Community. These are the same guys responsible for the distros in the OpenLogic library. If you take a look at the library you’ll find a line up of OSS' greatest hits. Therefore, the OpenLogic Expert Community gives OpenLogic’s enterprise clients easy access to many of the well known writers of OSS’s greatest hits without having to go foundation web site to company home page to consortium bulletin board to South Pacific island looking for the experts.

Aggregating the support as well as the distros is a great idea and I suspect Kim and Steve will have a few more good ideas up their sleeves. We’ll keep an eye on OpenLogic.