The future
Open Source in the Enterprise and in the Cloud
In a couple of weeks, I'll participate in a panel discussion on The Future of Open Source in Business. In preparation for that discussion, I figured I'd write down my current thoughts and solicit some feedback. I'll talk about two important trends relevant for the future of Open Source, but there are certainly more.
First, Open Source adoption in the enterprise is trending at an incredible rate -- Drupal adoption has grown a lot in 2009 but we saw by far the biggest relative growth in the enterprise. Fueling this movement is the notion that Open Source options present an innovative, economically friendly and more secure alternative to their costly proprietary counterparts. Second, Cloud Computing is a transformational movement in that it enables continual innovation and updating - not to mention a highly expandable infrastructure that will reduce the burden on your IT team.
Two years ago, when starting Acquia, we predicted this would happen so it is no surprise that Acquia's strategy is closely aligned with those two trends: Drupal Gardens, Acquia Hosting and Acquia Search are all built on Open Source tools and delivered as Software as a Service in the cloud. Combining Open Source tools and Cloud Computing makes for the perfect storm for success. It provides real value to end-users and it enables companies to monetize Open Source. It creates a win-win situation.
At the same time, I think we have an opportunity to go beyond that, and to redefine the Software as a Service model based on Open Source values, almost exactly like we started doing 10+ years ago with off-the-shelf software. Almost all Software as a Service providers employ a proprietary model -- they might allow you to export your data, but they usually don't allow you to export their underlying code. While a lot of these services might be built on Open Source components, they have a lot more in common with proprietary software vendors than Open Source projects or companies.
There is room for Open Source companies to disrupt this model, and it is probably not something that can be done without the help of Open Source companies. Drupal Gardens provides a good example of this model.
For example, users of Drupal Gardens can help improve Drupal Gardens, simply by contributing to Drupal. By staying close to the Open Source project, everyone can help shape the service. Along the same lines, we want people to be able to export their Drupal Gardens site -- the code, the theme and data -- and move of the platform to any Drupal hosting environment. By doing so, we provide people an easy on-ramp but we allow them to grow beyond the capabilities of Drupal Gardens without locking them in.
It is Software as a Service done right -- it will offer enterprises a much more secure and low-cost alternative to proprietary counterparts and provides many Open Source projects the opportunity to have a much bigger reach. It creates a triple win scenario -- for the customer, for the Open Source project and the Open Source company -- in a way that wasn't really apparent five years ago. At least not to me.
Have you taken the 2010 Future of Open Source Survey yet? If not, please take a few moments to share your thoughts on where you think Open Source is headed.
Future of Open Source Survey 2010
Like last year, I'll be attending the Open Source Business Conference (OSBC) next month, on March 17-18 in San Francisco. Also like last year, I will participate in a panel discussion led by Michael Skok (Partner at North Bridge, Acquia Board Member and personal friend). This year, I'll be in a panel with Larry Augustin (CEO of SugarCRM, VA Linux, SourceForge), Jim Whitehurst (CEO of RedHat) and Tim Yeaton (CEO of Black Duck Software) to discuss the future of Open Source businesses. The panel discussion will draw on the 2010 Future of Open Source survey so make sure to weigh in and provide your perspective on a number of important Open Source business questions. Take the Future of Open Source Survey 2010. As a reference, here are the 2009 and 2008 results.
We've also built a Drupal Gardens site to promote the survey, share articles on the Future of Open Source and facilitate ongoing discussion on the topic: http://futureofopensource.drupalgardens.com. There is also a Future of Open Source Survey twitter account that you can follow for updates.
OSBC 2009 panel discussion. From left to right: me, Ron Hovsepian (President and CEO of Novell), John Lilly (CEO of Mozilla), Marten Mickos (CEO of MySQL). For more information about OSBC 2009, read my wrap-up blog post.
State of Drupal (September 2009)
Two weeks ago at DrupalCon Paris, I gave my traditional state of Drupal presentation. The video of the presentation is available from archive.org, and you can download a copy of my slides (PDF, 8 MB) as well.
I don't want to give away the spoiler, but essentially, the state of Drupal is strong. :) We should be really proud of what we have accomplished with Drupal 6, and what we're about to accomplish with Drupal 7. In the presentation, I also talk about what it means for Drupal to grow up, and what the next phase of our life will most likely look like.
Google Wave is "wow"
Google Wave is one of the most exciting products I've seen in a while -- it could reshape how we work, how we collaborate and how we do business. This is big. Provides me a ton of inspiration for Drupal ...
WoodWing and Acquia: moving from print to the web
A couple of days ago, Acquia announced a technology partnership with WoodWing. WoodWing's Enterprise 6 Content Publishing Platform now ships with Acquia Drupal as the default CMS, as well as a connector module. WoodWing's typical customers are traditional publishers with strong roots in print -- and with names like Time Inc, Cisco, Michelin, Citibank and many more, they have an impressive list of customers at that.
For most publishers, print continues to decline, and the web continues to grow. It is no surprise that their online strategy has become increasingly important for them. Many are in the process of optimizing their tools, processes and people for the web, rather than for print. It is a very disruptive change if you're a 100-year old organization that is optimized for print.
As publishers get settled on the web, they learn that it is not about broadcasting a message. On the web, it is about having a dialogue with your readers. As a publisher, you have to figure out how to turn audiences into participants because it opens the doors for better advertising and new monetization opportunities. Clearly, it doesn't suffice to copy-paste the content that you prepared for print into your web content management system.
As the web continues to evolve, readers will have a much richer experience online, and as a result, I believe print media will end up being a lead generation tool for the website, not the other way around as it often is today. Drupal's combination of content management and social software capabilities helps publishers to stay on top of this trend, and provides their writers and journalists the tools needed to be successful on the web.
But just like WoodWing's customers can benefit from Drupal, I think Drupal can learn a lot from WoodWing, and the issues that their customers have to deal with. As I write this blog post, I'm in Greece attending the WoodWing Publisher Conference, not only to educate WoodWing partners and customers about Drupal, but also to learn more about WoodWing's technology and challenges their customers are faced with. Like Drupal, WoodWing has a great community sharing both expertise and ideas. I really believe this partnership is a great match on many different levels.
Structured data is the new search engine optimization
Two days ago, Google announced "Rich Snippets", a move that is sure to shake up the SEO industry, and cause hundreds of thousands of people to reconsider their skepticism of the semantic web. Yes, that probably includes many of you.
Google's Rich Snippets provide summary information to help users quickly identify the relevance of their search results. For example, if you search for a restaurant, rich snippets may include an average review score, a price range, or more. As users get more sophisticated at search, they'll ask Google increasingly complex questions. Rich Snippets allow Google to stay on top of that trend, and prevents losing users to competitors.
It is very hard for search engines to understand the structure and semantics of data embedded in an HTML page. To create these snippets, Google needs the help of hundreds of thousands of webmasters around the world, and by extension, content management systems like Drupal, Joomla!, and others. Specifically, Google is asking all of us to surface structured data to their crawlers by marking up our HTML with RDFa and Microformats. When Google announced Rich Snippets this week, they really announced support for RDFa and Microformats, and the semantic web in general. This is big.
Initially, Google's adoption of RDFa will disrupt the current approaches to Search Engine Optimization (SEO). With Google entering the RDFa game, the words "semantic markup" will get redefined. Every webmaster wanting to improve click-through rates, reduce bounce rates, and improve conversation rates, can no longer ignore RDFa or Microformats. Structured data is the new SEO.
As I've written before, search engines like Google and Yahoo! will provide the killer apps (e.g. vertical search engines) that the semantic web has been waiting for. Five years from now, we'll look back and say: "All it took was some incentive for the SEO industry." ...
Rich Snippets is a natural step in making search better. It provides a glimpse into the future of search, and tempts us with the possibilities of the semantic web. Right now, Google has a database of pages. If you read beneath the lines of their announcement, what Google is really asking is for us to help them in building giant specialized databases of all products, people, places and events in the world. This provides opportunities well beyond providing rich search snippets. We're turning the web into a giant database for Google (and others) to slice and dice as needed.
For example, it is easy to see that a database of all the job applications in the world, built by crawling hundreds of thousands of independent RDFa-enabled sites, will impact specialized job sites. Or how a database of all the product or movie reviews in the world could affect specialized review sites. It might seem scary at the surface, but it really isn't. On the web, scale and reach are more important than scarcity -- you win by setting data free, not by holding it close to your chest.
For many of us in the Drupal community, Google's announcement couldn't be more timely. The Drupal community has been working on adding RDFa support to Drupal 7, and at this very moment, people from the community are gathering in Galway for a week long code sprint to get more RDFa support in Drupal 7 core. Once again, Drupal proves itself to be on the cutting edge, and is taking a leadership role in adopting semantic web technologies. As I said in my DrupalCon Boston keynote 1.5 years ago, I believe that Drupal can become a significant player in the development of the semantic web. It's bullish, and maybe even naive, but I couldn't be more excited about giving the semantic web snowball a small push.
Where Open Source, Open Data and government meet
The Obama administration recently excited the world of open source software by choosing to launch recovery.gov on Drupal. Their choice of a free, open source platform over any proprietary system is as hopeful and promising as the purpose of the website they built, which is to lend transparency to the spending of the $800 billion dollar economic stimulus money. We should be happy both that the U.S. government is embracing Open Source software, and that it is promoting Open Data.
I recently blogged about how hundreds of thousands of Drupal sites contain vast amounts of structured data, but that structure has been hidden deep in Drupal databases and never surfaced to the HTML level. To counter this, I'd like the upcoming version of Drupal to emit structured information through the addition of RDFa metadata for both common and custom content types. This could help the Obama administration with their goals around Open Data.
Instead of needing to do all of the data analysis themselves, governments should work on making data available in machine readable formats. This would have the effect of enabling citizens and organizations to query and combine that data, to answer interesting questions not asked before, and to build new services that help other citizens. Just look at Apps for Democracy.
According to Georges Thomas from recovery.gov, the Obama administration wants to do exactly that. Thomas presented some additional details on how they envisioned making all of that data available. Furthermore, they recently solicited proposals for what to technologies to use. Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the web, submitted a proposal for Linked Open Data. Various people, including myself, wrote in to express our support for Tim Berners-Lee's proposal.
To achieve these goals, and help governments transition into an era of open, linked data, Drupal has some growing to do. As mentioned earlier, we are organizing code sprints that aim to make Drupal 7 a more powerful tool for managing RDF data.
Given that recovery.gov already runs Drupal, and given that I would like to see more Semantic Web technologies in core, I couldn't be more excited. With the right encouragement and technological tools, government sites can expose vast amounts of data covering an enormous range of concepts and topics. This data will be exposed in an open, reusable form that can be searched or leveraged by organizations and individuals as they require. We, the Drupal community, have a unique opportunity to help reshape how politics is done.
Step one is to make the data available -- and that is exactly what we try to accomplish with Drupal 7 and beyond. Many of the technologies -- such as RDF, RDFa, SIOC, FOAF, Oauth, and OpenID -- are available. It's a simple matter of programming to start putting these together, and it takes projects like Drupal to help bootstrap them. Time to get our hands dirty!
