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Winning Pragmatists with Open Source Products

Sandro Groganz 4 Comments

The meritocratic style of Open Source communities can irritate those who simply want to make a deal to raise their own productivity (so-called pragmatists). Highly community-driven projects without at least one strong corporate leader provide too many options frustrating especially those pragmatic buyers who are willing to spend good money for the best services.

A community without one ore more strong companies is in danger to alienate pragmatists who don’t want to invest time to become part of that community to later trade merit, but instead want to invest money to benefit immediately from the expertise hidden inside the community. For highly community-driven projects, crossing the chasm also means trading merit for money and building at least one strong corporation to provide the buying experience pragmatists expect (i.e. the whole product).

pragmatists_in_oss

For example, Drupal is still a largely community-driven Open Source CMS project without a strong company taking the place of the cathedral in the bazaar. Where could a potential pragmatic customer turn to if in search for the one and only Drupal service provider with the best expertise, longest and most successful in-market track record and offices around the globe?

In fact, things are changing when it comes to Drupal: Acquia sets out to become for Drupal what MySQL is for MySQL. Chances are good they will succeed, given their team and $7 Million VC financing. This means that Drupal can finally line up with those Open Source competitors who are Open Source CMS vendors providing enterprise-grade services, such as Magnolia, Alfresco, eZ Systems.

Interestingly, Joomla! (formerly known as the CMS called Mambo) has gone the opposite way by cutting off the one malicious corporate head and letting a thousand small heads grow. It remains to be seen if this puts Joomla! into a good position given the long march towards consolidation in the CMS market. Same goes for Plone, now a true democratic community.

Pragmatic customers want to buy the best from the best. They appreciate simple choices and distinct correlations between a product and a company – even if they just want to turn towards that company to check out which other companies provide similar services (e.g. partner companies).

In other words: Pragmatists don’t want to search whom they need to talk to. They need a point of reference, even if it is just for comparison sake. Allow me a pointed remark: A “secret society” of community members or a multitude of small companies scares pragmatists away if that’s the only way how they can get an Open Source product up and running.

Find more Open Source marketing articles in my Wiki.

Starting Open Source Marketing Consultancy

Sandro Groganz 8 Comments

Due to solid demand, I will officially start my own business offering marketing consulting services to Open Source software creators and contributors in February. Clients will be able to choose from a broad range of marketing services, including strategic as well as operational tasks and social media as well as traditional marketing.

The mission is to help companies and organizations behind Open Source projects become more visible and profitable, hence to boost adoption of Open Source. The only criteria is that a client contributes to Open Source software development, which makes up for the following types of potential customers:

  • Creators: Vendors of Open Source products
  • Contributors: Companies offering proprietary software including Open Source components they contribute to
  • Investors: VCs financing an Open Source venture

The consultancy will be able to help with:

  • Defining an Open Source marketing strategy
  • Open Source communications coaching of management
  • Branding and positioning
  • Community building/maintenance
  • Building/maintaining a partner network crediting Open Source contributions
  • Public relations (printed magazines, blogosphere, …)
  • Collaterals (brochures, business cards, …)
  • Events (e.g. (un-)conferences, partner meetings, …)
  • Investor pitches
  • Managing the contents of a client’s Web site
  • Social media: creating product Screencasts, coaching bloggers, …
  • …

One could completely outsource all marketing activities to the consultancy or take it in for specific projects or campaigns only.

I’ll be happy to share my experiences in this Weblog with you along the way and I will continue to provide general Open Source marketing know-how distilled from client projects to the public.

I’d also be happy to hear your advice.

David Nüscheler & Co Started Blogging

Sandro Groganz Leave a comment

ECM vendor Day Software AG now enables you to catch a glimpse of their developer’s expertise. Some of their best programmers started blogging and provide valuable insights into content management technologies and best practices.

Most notable, David Nüscheler, the driving force behind the JSR 170 content repository standard, debuts as a blogger. That was about time, because David is surely one of the most brilliant minds in content management and destined to be a thought leader in that area.

Although Day’s developers blog is only 4 weeks old, there’s already a bunch of interesting content. For example, slides and tutorials about microjax, a technology that allows you to access a content repository in AJAX-style right from a Web browser.

microjax

There’s also an interesting post about a tool for visualizing Day’s ECM product Communiqué and a lot more at dev.day.com.

Quantums of Open Source Communities

Sandro Groganz Leave a comment

I have a deep fascination for quantum physics ever after reading Heisenberg‘s book Physics and Beyond (“Der Teil und das Ganze” in German) while graduating at high school.

For example, the concept of wave-particle dualism states that all matter exhibits both wave- and particle-like properties. Just imagine the next person you are talking to suddenly transforming into innumerable numbers of waves going right through you (The Matrix contains a similar scene).

Wave-particle dualism seems like a nice analogy to describe the core elements of Open Source communities. For example, interaction between OSS community members exhibits both monetary as well as reputational properties. Money is the particle of OSS communities, while reputation is the wave.

Quantums of Open Source Communities

Money and reputation can be regarded as the same “thing” which appears to us in two different properties. Both are a mean to value a person’s expertise. You get what you’re worth, either in terms of money (i.e. getting paid for your work), or in terms of reputation (i.e. being acknowledged as a valuable community member).

The dividing line between money and reputation is blurry, because money is another way of valuing reputation and building a reputation can seamlessly lead to making money.

The money-reputation-“thing” is a quantum, an indivisible entity of Open Source communities, a matter of economic and personal exchange forming the basis for The Wealth of Networks.

Find more Open Source marketing articles in my Wiki.

Corporate Identity in Open Source Markets

Sandro Groganz Leave a comment

The potential for successfully building or extending a corporate identity based on Open Source depends on a company’s relationship towards an Open Source product. The graph below relates the extend of product ownership to the level of awareness potentially available for marketing:
Open Source Corporate Identity
Basically, the more you own the product, i.e. the more it is directly correlated to your company, the more you can make out of it.

If you’re the creator of the product (e.g. MySQL, the company, is the creator of MySQL, the database), you can utilize maximum awareness in your market. Your whole ecosystem will support your marketing efforts. For example, those providing extensions to your product, will automatically market your product while promoting their extension.

If you’re an external contributor to a product (e.g. providing patches with bug fixes), you might only be known amongst the developers community and your company will have a hard time transforming your contributions into business value via marketing. Nevertheless, being a contributor is not worthless. It allows you to build tight relationships within an OSS community, helping you to spot early trends and to mobilize visionaries and early adopters for whatever your offerings are.

System integrators market their specific expertise and experience, their goal is to build up a good reputation amongst customers. Of course, large system integrators (such as IBM) can leverage quite some awareness with all sorts of marketing tools, while small to medium ones typically try to score with their expertise (see for example Optaros White Papers).

Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) typically market to a certain industry. For example, they provide extensions or add-ons for an OSS product connecting to proprietary CRM systems (e.g. SAP connectors).

Distributors, such as the major Linux distributors, can utilize a similar level of awareness like large system integrators do – of course, depending on the fact whether their offerings are industry-specific or of general nature. Product ownership of distributors is two-fold: They don’t really own the OSS products they assemble, but they do provide tools which they own (e.g. installers, updaters, etc.) and which are crucial for a distribution’s business relevance.

Find more Open Source marketing articles in my Wiki.

Mantras for Entrepreneur's Hygiene

Sandro Groganz 4 Comments

Entrepreneurs are exposed to hubris and heart attack. Below mantras should help to gain back a calm state of mind. Read minimum twice per day (and thanks for raising my page view statistics).

You are not a genius!

Got the feeling that things only get done well if you do them yourself? That only you strive for perfection and others don’t care enough? Relax! First, there are so many chaotic companies out there who make a lot of money. Second, human beings are never perfect, not even you!

Don’t do it for money!

Your VCs scare the hell out of you and you do everything they ask you to do? Stop it! You did not start your business because of money, but because of a vision (make the world a better place or help yourself to afford living in a better place). In the end, it’s you who started it all, it will be your failure or success and that’s just fair.

You don’t own it!

You think you know exactly how your product should look like and you hate when others don’t get it? Let loose! Business success has a lot to do with not being selfish. If your product is a success, the whole world owns it (given a best case scenario). Everyone will buy it (again, best case scenario), because it helps them in their daily life. Listen to potential customers from the early days, because they might want to own your product.

If you take these mantras seriously, you will feel like a sociable genius, soon-to-be rich entrepreneur, and you will be proud of the company you own. Now, read again!

Saving CMS Consultants from Being Beaten Up

Sandro Groganz 2 Comments

Wise man are rare, but they exist and one of them is happy to share his wisdom with all tense CMS consultants and project managers to help them relax.

Martin Bauer is his name and Packt just published his book entitled Managing eZ Publish Web Content Management Projects. In fact, this book is a tremendous work of reference for any kind of CMS project, be it eZ Publish or not, proprietary or Open Source. Only two of 13 chapters actually deal with eZ Publish specifics.

The book contains a hand full lines of code, the rest is valuable information covering the whole life cycle of a CMS project, for example:

  • Project cost estimates
  • How to write a specification
  • Project management approaches
  • Implementation and testing
  • Training
  • Maintenance and support
  • Risk management
  • etc.

What makes the book such a great source of information is its valuable combination of experience and facts. Just a few insightful quotes:

If a developer continually gives me best-case scenarios, I’ll protect myself by adding 40% to the estimate.

So, you can accomodate some delays, additions, or changes but once it gets beyond 10% [of estimated project duration], the project will be in trouble.

Risk management itself is a risky activity, but an important one. It’s a bit like insurance; you can get away without it until something goes wrong at which point you wished you had done something earlier.

If you make the mistake of thinking that the team doesn’t include the Client, then chances are you’ll fall into the “Us and Them” syndrome.

From my past experience as a Senior Consultant at eZ Systems, the creator of eZ Publish, I can wholeheartedly recommend Martin’s book – it will help you a lot to successfully cope with implementing CMS-based solutions.

If I were Packt, I’d cut out the eZ Publish-specific content from Martin’s book and make it a general reference for CMS project methodologies. Based on that book, Packt could publish vendor-specific references (e.g. eZ Publish, Drupal, Typo3, etc.). That way, Martin’s book could become a classic.

Two bloggers of the eZ Publish community also reviewed Martin’s book.

Disclaimer: The publisher approached me and asked me to write a review of the book. I agreed not without making clear that I will express my opinion independently.

Welcome Carlotta!

Sandro Groganz Leave a comment

Carlotta Maria Groganz

Our daughter Carlotta Maria Groganz was born last week, Thursday, November 29th.

I am so in love with her and already feel like I know her my whole life. She will surely teach me to be a good father 🙂

@Carlotta: One day you will be able to read this, so let me thank you for being with us – you make us so happy!

Flying Garage

Sandro Groganz Leave a comment

Yet, no proof of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, but I have photographic evidence that the Flying Garage exists:

IMG 5173

Yes, and the flying truck also exists:

IMG 5182

Actually, the wonder did not happen unexpectedly, we ordered and paid for it. We also had the entrance to our house paved:

26112007625

Now we can easily access and leave our house with the pram, which is still silently waiting in the corner of our corridor for the baby to arrive within the next days … let the real wonder begin!