In the trenches with...Janice Smith of rSmart Group

I found this submission for the "In the Trenches" series to be intriguing. If you wanted to find someone with experience analogous to working in an open source community, where would you look?

According to Janice Smith of The rSmart Group, in academia. This may be particularly true for Janice, given rSmart's focus on open source applications in the Higher Education vertical, but I think it's telling that Janice found the same sort of collegiality and community-approach in open source as she had in her previous life in academia.

But let's hear it directly from Janice:

Name, company, title, and what you actually do

Janice A. Smith, The rSmart Group, Senior Education Consultant. I conduct on-site client assessments, develop requirements, design customizations, offer virtual and on-site training, and provide functional/technical support for an open source application in higher education and K-12.… Read more

Time Out New York communicates with Zimbra

I asked people to share with me their experiences moving to Zimbra, and I've had a great deal of responses. One, in particular, I found interesting from Time Out New York. I glommed onto this one immediately because I reference Time Out whenever I'm in London. It's the best source of information for what's going on.

Jeffrey Vargas of Time Out New York related: [Used with his permission]

Time Out New York is a weekly print publication, so we rely heavily on Macs. Out of 150 computers, about 125 are Macs. Even are servers are Xserves, for a majority of our work.

We've been using Apple's mail services in OS X since 10.2. After a messy migration to OS X 10.3 and several issues with an update from OS X 10.3.8, we were over frustrated with Apple's frugal mail services.… Read more

The secret of successful open-source companies, Part II

Last year (almost to the day), I wrote a post that detailed how JBoss went from $0 to a $350 million acquisition by Red Hat and scored a range of paying customers along the way. The research for that post was actually done in preparation for an OSCON presentation I was to deliver, which is the same impetus for this post.

One year later, my analysis of JBoss has proved to be remarkably accurate (at least for Alfresco). However, I was a little off on my timing (see the slide at right), and I didn't give enough credit to the power of open source to drive sales.

One year later, I'd add the following observations to my original analysis:

You don't need much in the way of field sales for the first three years, and maybe four, but you must balance this lack of quantity with exceptional quality. Basically, you want your field sales person (and it probably should just be one person per major geographic) to cover the big strategic accounts. It's not that inside sales can't do these but rather that you want them going for volume and the field sales person developing depth within a few strategic accounts.… Read more

In the trenches with...Taylor Dondich of Groundwork

In this installment of In the Trenches, we get back to the core of any open source company: development. Taylor Dondich is a senior developer at Groundwork. Groundwork is an interesting company because it builds on the popular Nagios monitoring solution. As such, Taylor's work involves a careful balancing act between contributing to the Nagios community while also building out Groundwork's offering around it.

I caught up with Taylor to discover how he balances the two.

Name, company, title, and what you actually do

Taylor Dondich, Team Leader, Groundwork Open Source, Inc. My role in the company is to develop the front-end technologies that present our product to the user. However, I also develop some back-end technologies and act as a technical resource for network monitoring with Nagios and other tools as well as act as an open source evangelist in the company and outside.… Read more

In the trenches with...Matt Heitzenroder of SugarCRM

I've really enjoyed this In the Trenches series so far, as I've felt like I've met new people and I've definitely learned some new things. No matter how long you've been in open source, with all the disparate perspectives open source feeds, it's hard to open your mind without having it changed by someone else. If it seems that I think I've got it all figured out, I don't. Not even remotely. The longer I'm in open source, the less I think I know definitively. I just pretend sometimes. :-)

I was therefore really glad to get this submission from Matt Heitzenroder of SugarCRM. He works in Support for SugarCRM, and it sounds like his role is Special Forces-like in its scope and purpose. Given how much time my own company spends on trying to ensure our support offering is perfect, I'm grateful to hear how others manage.

Matt didn't follow the outline I provided, though he does (mostly) answer the questions I had posed. I'm including his post because I think it's indicative of the passion that open source can evoke. Anyone can get excited by a particular technology, but by a licensing model? Curiouser and curiouser!

My name is Matt Heitzenroder. Most people call me "Roder." I join you from beautiful, sunny Miami, FL....For as long as I can remember, I have been sitting in front of computer. In the '80s, my mother made me do a "Science Fair" project on telecommunications. It was the first time I had ever seen a modem or a fax, and I was hooked. When the movie "Hackers" was released, I was just a rebellious teenager that wanted to be a cool "hacker" too.

So I did research on the burgeoning Internet on the definition of a "hacker" and found something called Linux.… Read more

A conversation with Pentaho's Lance Walters: A continued trend toward more open source

I spent a half-hour this morning talking with Lance Walter, VP of Marketing for Pentaho, a leading open source Business Intelligence vendor. I wanted to see if Pentaho's experience in the market matches up with what other open source application companies are seeing.

Indeed. The good news of open source goes well beyond any one particular vendor.

Question: I hear good things about Pentaho all the time. Can you give me a high-level update?… Read more

In the trenches with...Chris Harrick of SugarCRM

One of the first people I thought of when thinking up this In the Trenches series was Chris Harrick of SugarCRM. I've known Chris for a year or two, and have always been impressed. He's the sort of employee that any company would want, whether proprietary or open source. Fortunately for the open source world, he left Siebel to join SugarCRM.

When you talk with Chris, you don't get the sense that he spends much time mucking around in the ideological side of open source. He cares about customers and figuring out how to make them happy. And, as you'll see below, he thinks a lot about this and other issues that affect an open source business.

Name, company, title, and what you actually do

Chris Harrick, director of Product Marketing, SugarCRM. My team is responsible for communicating the benefits of SugarCRM products to open source users, prospects, customers, analysts, partners, and the media. Responsibilities include creating product messaging, competitive positioning, supporting sales, developing demos and webcasts, briefing analysts and the media, and authoring lots of collateral (White Papers, Datasheets, Press Releases, Web Site, Customer Case Studies).… Read more

In the trenches with...Jonny Brown of rSmart Group

Most people aren't aware of how vibrant the open source community is in the Higher Education vertical market. Sakai, uPortal, and other Higher Education-specific open source projects thrive in the academic environment. Oddly enough, two of the premier open source vendors in this space hail from Arizona, not normally known as the center of open source. Something in that heat must generate school-bound open source....

One of the strongest commercial open source vendors in this market is rSmart, which provides commercial support for the Sakai project, among other things. Jonny Brown hadn't taken Open Source 101 before he joined The rSmart Group, but as you'll read below, he has clearly imbibed the Kool-Aid.

Name, company, title, and what you actually do

Jonny Brown, Senior Information Architect, rSmart Group. In the very narrowest sense, my job is to find, create, and distribute to our subscribers and the open source community information about using Sakai software. For the most part, this means that I'm a technical writer - a role I played for many years quite some time ago and have never had much desire to revisit. For sure, it wasn't the nature of the meat-and-potatoes work I do (which is very detail-oriented and tends to be boring) that brought me to rSmart. Neither was it the pay check that lured me - I was happily self-employed, reasonably well compensated, very busy, and quite challenged.… Read more

In the trenches with...Ryan Morgan of Hyperic

This next installment has us "In the trenches with...Ryan Morgan of Hyperic. When I asked Javier for his recommendation on an "unsung hero" at Hyperic he suggested Ryan. I demurred once I heard Ryan's title (Chief Software Architect). But Javier insisted, informing me that Ryan had grown with the company. He wasn't blessed with executive status from Day One, but instead proved himself over time.

Since that's precisely the sort of tenacity that I was looking for in this series, I capitulated. Here's a guy who has done just about everything at Hyperic (including the accounting), and who helped to see the company through its sometimes rough transition from Covalent Technologies to Hyperic. Talk about bootstrapping....

Ryan is particularly interesting because he represents the next (people) wave of open source: developers and business people who have never known anything beyond open source. Ryan's first job was an open source company. I suspect his last will be, too.

Name, company, title, and what you actually do

Ryan Morgan, Co-founder and Chief Software Architect, Hyperic. My primary role at Hyperic is the technical lead for Hyperic's main product, Hyperic HQ. In addition to those responsibilities I frequently engage with Hyperic's larger customers to ensure their HQ deployments are successful. I'm also an active member of Hyperic's online community. Prior to Hyperic raising funding I also managed Hyperic's books, though I think that had more to do with being the son of a CPA than it did my financial skills.… Read more