The VAR Guy is smiling. Another of his predictions is coming true: The emerging open source IT channel is converging with cloud services. To wit, OpenBI — a business intelligence solutions provider — is deploying applications in Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) for a health care company. Here’s the scoop.
First, let’s review the players in this customer deployment:
- OpenBI is a Chicago-based solutions provider (ahem, VAR) that specializes in open source business intelligence.
- Pentaho develops and promotes open source BI applications. Pentaho was ranked 13 in The VAR Guy’s Open Source 50 report, which tracks the most promising open source channel partner programs.
- Amazon.com’s Web Services feature multiple cloud services for customers and solutions providers to leverage, including the Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and the Simple Storage Service (S3).
- Nutricia North America is a manufacturer that needed business intelligence software.
Now, let’s look at how those four parties came together. Eager to meet Nutricia North America’s needs, OpenBI deployed Pentaho’s business intelligence software in Amazon’s EC2 cloud.
It’s a simple story but a landmark event for the following reasons:
- The New (But Niche) IT Channel: OpenBI is proving that solutions providers can build profitable businesses around open source applications.
- Software as a Service: Instead of merely competing in the on-premise software world, open source applications (and traditional applications) are shifting into Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud and other cloud services. Still skeptical? Check out the work that Jumpbox has been doing. Or examine the closed-source storage work Vembu is doing with Amazon’s cloud.
- Twice the Customer Trust: A few years ago, customers didn’t trust open source applications. And even today, many customers don’t trust SaaS. But Nutricia took two leaps of faith by embracing open source and SaaS at the same time. Kudos to OpenBI for earning Nutricia’s faith in the open source SaaS model.
Will all customers shift their applications to the cloud? Certainly not. Is open source always the best option? Certainly not. Is a bigger trend emerging — where open source and SaaS begin to infiltrate the IT channel? The VAR Guy sure thinks so.
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Tags: | Amazon EC2 | Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud | Amazon S3 | Amazon Simple Storage Service | Amazon Web Services | JumpBox | Open Source BI | Open Source business intelligence | OpenBI | Pentaho
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VAR Guy – your observations are astute as usual. This is a trend that will continue and accelerate in the next 12-18 months. It was a major topic at SugarCON last week among the partners and channel team. At Levementum, we are now offering cloud hosting and administrative programs for the commercial open source applications we represent (SugarCRM, Compiere, Talend, etc.) on EC2. There is strong interest by our customers in this approach, as well as great support from the software companies themselves. Almost every new customer inquires about the approach.
It’s one of the primary value propositions of open source applications. The best ones are designed to give the customer ultimate control over the deployment approach. Customers can host it with the application provider, do it themselves on-premise, or put it in the ‘cloud’. And more importantly, if down the road they find a better cloud service or approach, they can move without constraints to the new cloud offering.
Just last month we moved 4 SugarCRM customers from a various smaller hosting providers to EC2 over one Saturday. These were each separate instances of Sugar, two of which had CTI integration. Each instance of Sugar including all configurations and data was moved without just 2 hours disruption in service.
I propose this is a critical differentiation between open source and proprietary applications. Would Salesforce.com let you move a ‘platform as a service’ app to another cloud provider? Or within your own data center? I doubt it. Ultimately once the customer builds that app on the sfdc platform they are locked. If they want to move, they have to start over from scratch. In the long run, enabling the customer’s ability to leverage the cloud – hardware, available information on companies and people (e.g. from sources like Jigsaw, Hoovers, Linked-In, Facebook) in a process – will drive the real value of commercial open source applications. Our role as VAR’s is to educate and facilitate.
http://www.levementum.com
opensource-pragmatist.com
Another great example of Opensource SaaS or as we call them OSaaS applications can be found at http://www.workclouds.com the founders are seeking MSPs to white lable the service and given the lack of capital spend in our customer base we see the addition of OSaaS as critical this year for any MSP looking to make a dramatic impact on their recurring revenues numbers.