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|In: Industry Commentary|Last Updated:

Greg Says:

SAP is trying to build an open source community, the article reads.  Considering how many open source communities there are, and how much they propel software, infrastructure, OSs, and management tools, I can’t say that I am surprised that SAP is trying to build this community.  In fact, SAP previously open sourced its core database decades ago, and doesn’t have a bad record in fostering collaborative communities.

The story goes, however, that SAP is struggling to get interest—and I think that the basic problem that all Open Source communities face is the problem of balancing self-interest (“What’s in it for me?”) with free riders with varying degrees of ethical chutzpah.    These problems have been around since the beginning of the movement, and there isn’t an easy answer to fix it.

In short— everyone who productively contributes to an Open Source community feels a little taken advantage of, at least in the short run.

Bob Says:

I’m old enough to … well, to know better than to start my side of a dialog with “I’m old enough to … ” And yet, I am. Old enough, that is, to remember when the reaction to open source was somewhere on a continuum with “Being part of something important,” on one end and “a bunch of commies” on the other.

While the two sides were busy disparaging each other, those with a more business-like mentality figured out that Gillette had long ago paved the way to open source prosperity with its “give away the razor and sell the blades” business model.

But to have razors to give away, the world of IT needed communities to create them – communities large enough to be self-reinforcing, but not so large that incompetent developers could degrade the product.

Which gets me to a point about free riders: Look at them with glass-colored glasses and it’s hard to differentiate between a free rider and a customer.

One more point about communities: Sure, they’re a collection of roles people take on to build and enhance the product. But they also create a sense of belonging. They are, in a sense, a tribe.

Which gets me to a point: It’s unsurprising that SAP is finding it hard to charter yet another open source community. There are already so many in play that I’m guessing anyone wanting to sign up will have to bow out of a community they’re already part of.

 

Greg says:

I love your point about free riders actually being customers.  And this is where the Open Source world struggles—The price may or may not be Free, but the value is of some significance, or the solution wouldn’t exist.   “

What’s in it for me?” really should be thought of in the Open Source sense of “does the work that I do in this project offer me more value than if I didn’t participate?”  not “Are there others that will benefit,  based on my work?”

And for the average customer, who may just want to download a great extension that somebody else created, and gifted to the community, this is a pretty easy question.

Getting back to SAP (and any other software publisher that wishes to build an engaged, active community)—Their Marketing team has its work cut out for them to demonstrate friendship, gratitude, respect, however the community is constituted.

Comments

|In: AI|Last Updated:

Enterprise software companies all promise a better future. The absolute core of their business is Marketing.  They all want to offer you a game changing software solution that , although very expensive, is worth every penny to the customer. (Whether this change is successful or not is up to us. We are the ones to make sure that the software is implemented well, and delivers one ( or more) of the six possible optimizations that delivers meaningful results for the organization. )

These companies must continuously innovate to try to stay ahead of each other. They are reading the trends, and trying to stay ahead of what you may ask for, or what they fear that competitors might tout at a Gartner conference. Good marketing is a vital input into product planning, always trying to anticipate what buyers will want next.

There is a bit of “creative imitation” in this, but most of the time, this works to the buyer’s benefit. Consider native cloud hosting of applications—not that long ago, this concept was pretty foreign to most organizations. Now, I don’t think there are more than a handful of companies left that would host their own email or E-commerce servers.

For Enterprise Software companies, AI is the new Cloud (Or the new NoSQL, or Consumerization, or SaaS, or etc, etc.), still high on the hype cycle promising lower long-term costs and better results. In their marketing efforts, they are trying to convince CIOs and other executives to sell the case to the leadership of why and how a new technology, whether it’s a big upgrade, a platform change, or a new application is going to solve important, existential challenges. As one Tech leader says, his goal is to use Marketing to position his product as “the reflex response for a CIO who is replacing legacy technology for the functional area of the asset.”

Something happened that completely surprised me, however—Salesforce reported a big slowdown in new deals, even with all of the AI hype. In fact, all Enterprise software companies seem to be struggling a bit right now.

In thinking about this, I think that AI has the same Marketing problem that the Cloud had 10 years ago—Security and Privacy.

With AI, the unspoken concerns are worse—because whether we can articulate it or not, we are not just worried about sensitive data, breaches, and so forth, but we are worried about the security and privacy of our insights.

We take the software company’s word ( and legal documents) that they won’t share our customer or product data.  That is step one in a basic agreement, and the infrastructure in a multi tenant architecture has proven safe enough to be trusted.

However, we can see clearly that our data, and more importantly, our questions, prompts and refinements are being used to make the AI smarter and more useful, not just for us, but for competitors, snooping governments, and potential bad actors.

Software companies need to address these concerns head on (again, even if we are not saying this out loud yet).  Organizations need to understand what ideas and insights are being shared between instances of these systems, as well as what is being exposed externally.   The concern that I have is that the Software companies themselves may not know the answers to these questions.

Helping CIOs and their colleagues gain confidence that the intelligent “soul” they are inviting to the organization can keep secrets is the marketing leap needed.  Keep your eyes open for whose Marketing department figures this out first.

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