Corporate Sponsorship

It's unfortunately true, the market does need one or more big corporations to give their blessing to something in order for it to start appearing in the list of needs and ways to fix them.

Remember LDAP? Remember LDAP before Windows 2000 came out? The LDAP market grew hugely when Microsoft started talking about directories even if they never got around to implementing the actual protocol, their blessing on the concept was a good thing for the market.

Just to give a second example, would most organizations that are now thinking about Big Data would have entered the bandwagon if Oracle hadn't started talking about it?

I came back at thinking about this because of some talks I've been having about Fujitsu's role and potential role in today's market. It seems there are several people that don't think a company can be determinant as an Hardware seller only.

I find that idea as consistent as someone saying that no electricity company can generate money, the value is higher up the stack like, … Household appliances or that an oil company is sure to be broke soon, the value lies elsewhere. But, I'm willing to concede that the IT industry has to deal a lot with perspective and, well, most of IT analysts that came out on the news I read are basically ignorant fools (remember Nicholas Carr?)

So, while I don't totally subscribe that a full stack is needed for a company to succeed, is that really a show stopper?

When I started working in a media company, living it's day by day, I came across a totally different reality from my time in pure IT companies. The fact that our IT was managed by a real visionary where our job was to give managers, reporters and all the people in the company superb flexibility and excellent reaction times, combined with a team smaller than what could be considered decent, really pushed us to go for the throat attitude.

So, when selecting our tickets platform, we had in the table all the big players, Remedy, HP, CA, but, amazingly, the single best ticket platform in the market today is RT. Even if you don't consider the time it takes to implement an RT solution (measured in hours or days) against a service center deploy (weeks or months), RT is simply superior in every single way.

When looking at content management solutions, hell, we actually implemented half of them, only to throw them out. True the OSS market doesn't have the panacea of content management where one tool is the best for every purpose but, the reality is that vendors only say they have it.

Notice that no where here I mentioned the price, I wasn't paying for it anyway (the contractor already had enterprise agreements with most of the vendors) but, I did had my neck on the line on several of this choices but, it came to a point where I couldn't, in conscience, recommend commercial software that was clearly outclassed, had less features, a less resilient architecture and it would give us more trouble to implement, customize and support.

I leave to the folks at the Opensource Zealots institute the flag carrying of free speech and whatever. All I really wanted was stuff that worked, performed, scaled, had good resilience features and had a good support. Most of the stuff we got from vendors failed in ALL of this points.

And, it was with that it mind that I thought about Fujitsu's way to take the market by storm. A small fraction of Fujitsu's Professional services could, in a very short time, define, implement and productize a complete stack of Opensource Software to fill it's customer needs. In a near free way, it could became the place to go in terms of Opensource Software and, if Fujitsu could learn with the mistakes made by RedHat and Suse, it could really put itself in the center of corporate innovation.

Just some food for thought