Open source force multipliers

Businesses that are based on open source technology are leveraging communities to get ahead of their competition. Adrian Cockcroft explores how the most successful open source-based businesses have turned the end user developer community and their partner ecosystem into a force multiplier for their own marketing and engineering teams.

Businesses that are based on open source technology are leveraging communities to get ahead of their competition. The most successful open source based businesses have turned the end user developer community and their partner ecosystem into a force multiplier for their own marketing and engineering teams. In the early days, the market was data center focused, with lower costs and better scalability to disrupt incumbent enterprise vendors. Meanwhile, the cloud-based “unicorns” and leading-edge enterprises worked with AWS to build an additional market for open source-based services, but it was small in comparison to the data center opportunity. More recently, as mainstream enterprises move to the cloud, the focus has shifted, and some open source-based businesses were caught with a weak or nonexistent service-based offering, or one priced to compete with enterprise vendors in the data center rather than cloud-based open source services. They are now being disrupted and some have responded by adopting proprietary licenses to try and protect their business. This shuts off the force multipliers that made them successful in the first place. Partnering with and leveraging the cloud vendors themselves is the new force multiplier. We’ve seen everything being tried, including acquisitions, revenue-sharing deals to integrate as core services, marketplaces integration, marketing integration, and engineering partnerships with cloud providers. Adrian Cockcroft explains how and offers a look at successful examples of each.