A few weeks back I spent time on the road visiting customers. It always amazes me how much you can learn spending one or two hours with a customer, asking questions and doing a lot of listening. What I learned during this trip was:
- Vendor independence is very important. End users have really had it with vendors and if there is an opportunity to establish a little independence they will take it. Customer’s adoption of FUSE and/or the underlying Apache projects(ActiveMQ, ServiceMix, CXF, Camel) see open source software as one way to do that.
- Cost reduction does not mean free. All customers are trying to reduce their costs but they do not expect software to be free. Be it SaaS or open source customers are willing to pay if the value is clear…they are DONE paying for large stacks where only a fraction of the capabilities are used.
- Open source can be used to achieve both cost reduction and vendor independence…across almost an entire IT operation. One of the customers I met was a large retailer in the
- desktops moving from windows office to open office
- Netscape to Firefox
- Netscape Mail to Gmail
- Progress DB to MySQL
- Progress 4GL to Java
- Various operating systems to Linux
- ERP system to and open source ERP system (sorry can’t name this one)
- CRM system to SugarCRM
- MQSeries and SonicMQ to FUSE Message Broker
Now they have a large pool of developers to draw from when hiring because they are using popular well known products across all their infrastructure, they have great retention of employees because they are working with current tools, they have reduced their costs of software across all their operations, and they achieved independence from one of a couple of vendors that gives them confidence in their future costs of IT.
So…this is why I think customers are great -- they make vendors better by keeping us honest.
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