Matt Asay, Open Source Evangelist
Bob Zurek: Hi, welcome to Database Radio. I'm Bob Zurek, CTO of EnterpriseDB and your host of Database Radio. Today I'd like to welcome Matt Asay to Database Radio. Matt is a well-known blogger at CNET, and VP of business development and general manager for the popular open source company Alfresco. Welcome, Matt - great to have you on Database Radio today!
Matt Asay: Thanks for having me!
BZ: It's great to have this session with you, and I'm really excited about the opportunity. Let's start out by having you tell us a little bit about Alfresco, a very popular business and software solution, and some of the things you're focused on these days.
MA: Alfresco is an open source enterprise content management system. We also do web content management, so you can think of us as everything from the content management platform being used at companies like FedEx, as well as the web content management platform being used by Activision, Electronic Arts, and a range of others. Business is good; it seems like there is a healthy appetite for open source out there, not just for us but for open source databases like Postgres. So life is good in a bad economy.
BZ: With the trends in the economy, people buckle down and like to conserve their precious cash, and on the expenditures open source seems to be a good fit. Have you seen any more interesting trends in the open source space these days?
MA: There have been two big ones that I've noticed lately. One is the opening up of the web. Traditionally the web was open, but increasingly we had things like applications moving to the web, things like Facebook, that were proprietary - maybe built on open source, but their APIs were closed. We've seen an increase in the opening up of the social web. Facebook, Reddit, Myspace - all of these are now competing on 'openness,' and it's kind of a rehash of what we were doing in the offline world with the Alfrescos and Red Hats of the world over the last ten years, but it's been at a much faster pace. And the second thing is, which is something that Tim O'Reilly has been predicting for a long time, open source is just becoming standard furniture in everybody's business. I saw in a blog yesterday that Microsoft has now been accepted as committers to a core Apache project, and they've also recently announced that they'll be integrating some open source code into Visual Studio. But it's not just them. You go to the Cisco website, and they have long lists of all the open source components that they include in their otherwise proprietary products. Even companies that were once fighting it are now incorporating it. I think five years from now, even two years from now, open source is going to be thought of as standard plumbing that everybody includes in their offerings, whether they're a vendor or an enterprise customer. Ten years ago, when I started in open source, it was still scary. People thought it was scary, and weren't sure what to do with the licenses, and now it's become commonplace. I think that's good and bad. It's bad in the sense that we may forget just how unique and interesting open source is, and the value that it provides in reducing lock-in. But it's good in the sense that it means we can focus on providing value to customers, rather than on 'who's the most pure open source company.' I'm starting to see that that may not be the most productive place to have the conversation. Is Ubuntu actually a highly-useable desktop? Is Postgres ready to handle these massive applications? Those, I think, are much more interesting conversations than what we had been talking about.
BZ: As in, are you open source or are you not open source? Or commercial open source?
MA: Everybody knows that Microsoft, for example, is not an open source company. But we're all really happy that they're starting to get involved with open source, so maybe the involvement of companies like Microsoft, and eventually SAP and Oracle, shifts the conversation from 'how much open source are you not using?' to 'we're just glad to see new people in the community.' We're all going to be using open source in varying amounts, both in terms of volume of code and in terms of how strategic it is to our particular businesses, but everyone will be using open source.
BZ: What advice would you give to an enterprise about the most appropriate uses of open source solutions today?
MA: Speaking specifically to the database market, I think we are, in the open source database market, where we were early on in the Linux market, where companies are using open source databases 'at the edge of the network,' so it may be non-mission-critical. I know that EnterpriseDB has some deployments that are, in fact, very mission-critical, and MySQL would say the same thing, but I think that we still have mainstream enterprises using Postgres as a departmental server to run their departmental applications. What happened with Linux, as soon as people felt comfortable there Linux very quickly went into the data center, and I suspect we are not far off from seeing open source databases like Postgres and MySQL being used in truly mission-critical applications, and I think widespread adoption of that is not far off. And then once they realize that, that's when they're going to want commercial support. When you're just running a small departmental server that maybe doesn't matter that much to the company that's one thing, but when you're running your business on Postgres, you're going to get a commercial offering around that, whether it's support or something else. And broadening that conversation, we're seeing that on the open source applications side, although we're still viewed as half-application, half-middleware platform. Initially, where all of these open source applications are starting is in some department within a large organization that picks it up, puts it to use, finds out that it works, and then it starts to spread within the organization. That's how we've grown; we now have six of the top ten financial institutions in the world using Alfresco. And coming back to the database market, I think EnterpriseDB has a fantastic opportunity. Just as Oracle has done on the proprietary side, the database makes a lot of sense, especially in our web-ified world, as the hub of the open source ecosystem. Traditionally we have looked to Red Hat to fill that role as the hub of the open source ecosystem, but Red Hat has shown more of a propensity to hunker down and build out its operating system and middleware business. Somebody on the open source database side has got to stand up and say, "We are the hub of this ecosystem," similar to what Oracle has done with its database in building out its financials and other applications around it. I think that's a big opportunity for the open source database world.
BZ: You're a very popular blogger, and you must be proud of the accomplishments that you have achieved on the CNET blogging site. I'm sure readers are curious about what transpires as a blogger in that world. Anything you care to share?
MA: Some people wonder how I have so much time. The reality is I wake up at six A.M. or earlier and write most of the posts that go live during the day. The most interesting things that come to me I'm actually not allowed to blog, or I choose not to blog. I had one bad experience where I actually blogged on Sun's acquisition of MySQL; I had some inside information there, and blogged some of the information that I had, and got in all sorts of trouble. The hardest thing about blogging for CNET is that we do get a lot of traffic, easily over 500,000 visitors per month, and I have to walk a fine line between getting out information that could be helpful or hurtful to open source companies with which I'm familiar. I have to be honest, but I have far more discretion than some people would give me credit for.
BZ: I want to take this opportunity to express my personal appreciation for participating in today's Database Radio podcast. I really hope we have an opportunity to speak with you again about your very important industry views and perspectives around open source. This is Bob Zurek, your host of Database Radio. Thanks for listening, and wish you all the best.
