As an employee of Alfresco, I’m somewhat biased in reporting that Alfresco yesterday announced full SharePoint integration with the Alfresco 3.0 Labs release. Even so, I think it’s highly significant precisely because of what it states about the importance of Microsoft’s continued battles with the European Union over proprietary protocols.
Most that reported on the release missed this. OStatic, however, got it dead on:
As part of complying with the EU’s demands, the company has released the specifications for the Microsoft Office interfaces, and now we’re seeing some of the benefits spill over into open source. Alfresco, which makes open source enterprise content management (ECM) software, has added SharePoint interoperability….This looks like a good move from Alfresco and lets hope the EU’s two-fisted stance toward Microsoft results in more of this kind of sharing.
Bingo, and bravo to Microsoft, whatever its intentions and pressures that resulted in opening up the SharePoint protocol. The net result is a massive win for customers. Why?
Well, for the first time enterprises can get the benefits of SharePoint-esque functionality and interoperability without having to adopt Microsoft technologies wholesale. This is the other massive news in Alfresco’s release, also mostly missed by the media. CMS Watch, however, nailed this aspect of the release, and points to the critical importance of getting out of the SharePoint thicket that Forrester criticizes before SharePoint and Office merge at the next release:
… Source:The Open Road
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CIO.com addresses the souring economy with this counsel for CIOs:
When IT directors take the time to build a business case demonstrating the ROI for these kinds of projects [training, etc.], they tend to get funded. Businesses aren’t really interested in slicing costs for the sake of doing
… Source:The Open Road
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I’m in the middle of a fascinating study by Robert Breza of RBC Capital Markets entitled “On Demand Evolution, Volume II: Insights and Ideal Practices at Leading On Demand (SaaS) Providers.” The research details the characteristics and best practices of successful sales operations and R&D at SaaS companies. I share some of its central findings because many of the same principles apply to open source, as both leverage subscription-based business models.
Just as barriers to open-source adoption continue to go down, so, too, do barriers to SaaS adoption. Indeed, some of the same factors may be driving increased acceptance of subscription-based software buys. Forty-four percent of RBC’s survey respondents indicated “no major concerns with SaaS adoption,” which is up from 35 percent in a similar survey from Q1 2008.
But someone still needs to sell these products/services. One recommendation from the report is that subscription-based vendors should segment “hunters” (new license salespeople that are paid a higher commission) and “farmers” (renewals and upsell salespeople, generally paid a lower commission) early in the company’s growth. Such vendors should also focus more on the long-term value of a customer, not the short-term initial contract payout:
The company is more concerned with farming the customer than they’re with negotiating that initial contract. An effective and “sticky” product coupled with an efficient sales model should be able to drive customer retention above 90% while revenue retention is at or above 100%. (10)
Many of these companies (Omniture is a prime example) opted to begin with “mid-grade” salespeople early on (Think: inside sales), later moving to “high-grade” sales people once the market opportunity was superior defined. The idea is to start with more junior, hungry salespeople to prove out the market, and then bring in more costly headcount to “reap” in the market once it has been established.
… Source:The Open Road
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