OpenGeo

One of our missions at OpenGeo is to create an ecosystem where we can develop the best possible software while growing and investing in the community. We see this as a self-reinforcing cycle; as more people use our software, the more we are able to grow our business and devote more energy into improving the software, thus making it more appealing to a wider audience.

But software is only successful if users understand and use its features. And while one of our aims is to make software easy to use, sometimes you have questions that just can’t be answered by a documentation page. Even in this day of everything-over-the-web, there is still a need for answers from a real person, in a real-life classroom setting.

So, OpenGeo is now offering full-day training courses on the components of the OpenGeo Suite. First and foremost, we offer an Introduction to the OpenGeo Suite, which gives a full overview of PostGIS, GeoServer, GeoWebCache, OpenLayers, GeoExt, along with the applications GeoExplorer and Styler. We also have more in-depth full-day introductory courses on GeoServer, PostGIS, and OpenLayers.

These courses are open to all, and are designed to be accessible to a wide audience. Also, if you are one of our OpenGeo Suite Enterprise clients (Professional, Platform, or Strategic Editions), training days are already included in your package.

Below is our schedule for the next few months. All courses are held in our office in New York City, although we do offer on-site training as well.

• Thursday, March 4, 2010 – Introduction to the OpenGeo Suite
• Thursday, March 25, 2010 – Introduction to GeoServer
• Thursday, April 8, 2010 – Introduction to PostGIS
• Thursday, May 6, 2010 – Introduction to OpenLayers
• Thursday, June 3, 2010 – Introduction to the OpenGeo Suite
• Tuesday, June 22, 2010 – Introduction to PostGIS
• Wednesday, June 23, 2010 – Introduction to GeoServer
• Thursday, June 24, 2010 – Introduction to OpenLayers
• Thursday, July 8, 2010 – Introduction to the OpenGeo Suite
• Tuesday, July 20, 2010 – Introduction to PostGIS
• Wednesday, July 21, 2010 – Introduction to GeoServer
• Thursday, July 22, 2010 – Introduction to OpenLayers

We will be adding new and more advanced courses as demand dictates. We hope that our courses will be a valuable tool for any and all, whether you are a GIS professional, an enthusiast, a software developer, or a CEO.

Chris Holmes and I had a great conversation with Matt Aslett of the 451 Group (an IT business analysis organization) earlier this week.  The 451 Group has been a very useful resource in our exploration of open source business models over the past year, particularly their ominously named “CAOS Blog” (it stands for Commercial Adoption of Open Source). Anyhow it was interesting to hear what an expert in commercial open source thinks our organizational opportunities and risks are and Matt shared his thoughts yesterday on the CAOS Blog.

What gets us up in the morning and into the office? Is it building an open source geospatial software empire, and eventually rolling around in a room full of money? No, that’s not the point.

Making money is a second-order concern for our organization that enables our first-order concern: putting useful tools in the hands of governments and NGOs. The revenue from professional services and support enables the continued development of the open source software, which we want to see as widely used as possible.

So, when we learn that the Amazonian Protection System is using PostGIS and Geoserver in their applications to manage and protect the rain forest, that makes us very happy.

And hearing how scientists and conservation groups have used Geoserver, PostGIS, and OpenLayers in building a decision support system for studying marine protected areas makes us sort of giddy.

And learning that the Great Lakes Commission is using Geoserver, PostGIS and OpenLayers in monitoring the environmental conditions of the Lakes make us quiver a little bit uncontrollably.

And then we have to sit down for a moment.

These are all folks who have used the tools that our team members build and maintain, to do good in the world. They don’t have to ask permission, and they don’t have to pay us, and the world is a little more understandable after they are finished than it was before. And that’s the point.

I hope it was no surprise that my keynote at FOSS4G this week was partly about open source business models and the whole product, because that’s what I’ve been thinking about (and to an extent, blogging about here) for the last six months or so.

And the good news (to me) is that the concept appears to be striking a chord among right folks: managers and system integrators. We are getting lots of good feedback at the booth from those folks in addition to the regular stream of highly technical folks who are happy to chew the fat with our team of core developers.

On the business side, I think the system integrators are the really important ones. They can move from coming to clients with three or four different projects pulled from different places with different support options to coming in with just one infrastructure piece, the OpenGeo Suite. And on top of that, they can make use of the facilities of GeoServer and GeoExt to build nice tightly focussed business apps. The sales proposition for them with conservative customers gets a lot cleaner: the business app the client wants plus a single infrastructure piece with simple support story.

I have also been hearing tales of woe about the local distributors for the Leading Brand elbowing out independents for services work, which will seed a nice collection of disgruntled folks looking for an alternative.

So the challenge comes back to us: execute, execute, execute, on the technical side of polishing the Suite into a whole product worthy of the mainstream market, and on the business side signing up local partners to carry the message forward.

OpenGeo’s had a busy month as we have been ramping up to drive our technology and business in exciting new directions. Here is a quick preview of what is in store for us:

The OpenGeo Suite Installer. In an effort to bring open source geospatial software to new markets, we are unifying the OpenGeo Suite into one tight package. Soon we will be releasing a distribution of PostGIS, GeoServer, and GeoWebCache with a easy installer, an improved data importing interface, and an integrated Styler application based on Openlayers and GeoExt.

The GeoNode. In collaboration with the World Bank’s Central American Probabilistic Risk Assessment (CAPRA), we have been building the next generation of SDI technology with modern web principles in mind. This summer we have built a simple data clearing house with GeoServer and GeoExt. Soon we will extend it with reporting tools useful for disaster risk management experts in the field, as well as uploading and styling workflows. Keep an eye out here for updates on the GeoNode’s technical and community development.

Training and FOSS4G. We are improving our training curriculum and giving several workshops on our stack. We will have a strong presence at FOSS4G this year, and are eager to spread the news and knowledge of our latest open source developments, like GeoExt, to the rest of the open source geospatial community.

By now you might have heard the buzz about the OpenGeo Suite, OpenGeo’s newest product offering that we unveiled at this year’s Where 2.0 Conference. Now we’re sure you’re looking for the details…

OpenGeo has an open pricing structure, and clients are encouraged to tailor their support hours to meet their unique needs. Every client gets access to core developers of each component of the OpenGeo Suite. OpenGeo has committers on all the projects it supports, ensuring that bugs will get fixed quickly – usually on the order of days or hours instead of weeks or years.

Take a look at the full press release for more.

You’ll see that OpenGeo has a shiny new Press Center - we’ll be using this space to keep the world updated on the happenings at OpenGeo, so check back to learn about what we’ve been up to.

James Dixon over at Pentaho relays some good advice he heard from CIOs about how to deal with software suppliers:

Basically [these CIOs] have a policy of having relationships with two vendors for all major systems: operating systems, databases, application servers etc. This way if one of the vendors tries to force price increases the CIO can threaten to move applications over to the other vendor to reduce their dependency (and costs). Of course, dual-vendor strategy or not, anyone can threaten to change vendor at any time. But without an existing dual-vendor strategy there are obvious costs involved in switching. When the dual-vendor strategy is in place the threat is real, without it the threat is fairly weak.

In order to have a legitimate dual-vendor strategy, you’ll have to spend a bit more staff time, testing and ensuring your applications can be migrated from component to component. But that staff time should be returned in the form of price breaks from vendors.

For us in the geospatial realm, it means keeping an eye on our architectures: are we using standards for inter-component communication or are we relying entirely on the vendor to handle communication between components? The more we let vendors sell us stovepipes, the more radically we must be willing to change in order to maintain a credible dual vendor threat.

For example, a web application built on interoperable components can be re-formulated in myriad ways, depending on what vendor we are using. An Oracle/GeoServer/OpenLayers application becomes an Oracle/Mapserver/OpenLayers application or a PostGIS/GeoServer/OpenLayers application or a PostGIS/GeoServer/GoogleMaps application or an Oracle/GeoServer/GoogleMaps application relatively easily, because the layers are not very tightly coupled.

Open architectures, combined with an dual vendor strategy keeps options (both technical and budgetary) open. That’s a good thing.

You may have noticed that we have recently rebuilt our website. Here are some new sections you might find helpful:

• The OpenGeo Suite Matrix now explains the differences between our three OpenGeo Suite contracts: Basic, Professional, and Enterprise.
• The Core Development Roadmaps describe the features we plan to build into the projects we support (GeoServer, OpenLayers, PostGIS, GeoWebCache, and GeoExt) as part of our mission. You can hire us to develop these features; because they are on our roadmap we will work for a reduced rate.
• We have devoted part of our website to tell you more about who is on our team. Many of our team members are luminaries in the open source geospatial world, and we want to tell you all about them.

Take some time to explore the new website today and tomorrow, as we will be updating its content often over the coming weeks.

Back in the “good old days” (prior to, say, 2000) organizations that needed to collect geospatial information from their operational staff had a few clear technology choices:

• Build some form and query extensions to ArcView 3. Relatively cheap on developer time, but expensive for roll-out because of per-workstation licensing. Roll-out involved installing on all desktops.
• Build a desktop application using a “developer toolkit” like MapObjects. Required more developer skills, but was cheaper to roll-out. Rollout involved installing on all desktops.
• Grit teeth and build a web-based application using new-fangled software like ArcIMS. Required quite a bit of development skill, using cutting-edge web technology, and building many very basic components (zoom boxes, map frames) from scratch. Some aftermarket technology grew up to support application building, but it tended to be quite tightly bound to the application domains — you either loved it, or it was useless to you.

In the intervening years, general purpose technology for building web applications has caught up to the capabilities previously only available on the desktop. Google, and now Apple, are offering 100% web-based versions of software like spreadsheets and presentations that was previously only available on the desktop. The development effort required to build professional-quality user interfaces for the web has plummeted as toolkits like Prototype and ExtJS have become available.

Geospatial applications are following the footsteps of mainstream IT. Open source toolkits like OpenLayers allow maps to be embedded in web pages without the encumbrance of Google or Microsoft license agreements, and without building core functionality from scratch. GeoExt is tying the map functions of OpenLayers to the desktop-style interface elements of ExtJS.

The result is a new age in custom spatial applications. The web is the new ArcView, and a GeoExt/OpenLayers/Geoserver technology stack can be used to build interactive applications quickly.

And the best part is, the deployment cost is the same, whether there are 2 end users or 2000 end users. Perhaps the good old days weren’t so good after all!

As we prepare our new Enterprise offering around the OpenGeo Suite (PostGIS, GeoServer, OpenLayers, GeoExt), I have been researching open source business models. The more I read, the more I am convinced that the problem is not one of the open source company providing value, it is one of convincing customers that they are in fact receiving value.

The best discussion of open source business I have seen is the beekeeper model, written up by James Dixon of Pentaho software. It is well worth reading the whole article, but the idea is neatly summarized in this diagram:

The open source community is the bee hive. The company provides care for the hive, and processes the results into the kinds of products that customers expect. In open source, as with bees, customers are not really interested in the details of production (they may even find it kind of frightening), but they are interested in the final product.

The problem with this model, and really with all open source business models, is that customers don’t perceive the value in the non-software activities. And the reason they don’t perceive value is that the proprietary software model has conditioned them to believe that the only thing of value they receive from a vendor is the software. The documentation, the packaging, even the marketing information they show the boss, these are all perceived as zero-value wrapping to the item with real value, the software.

In fact, if you look at the expenditures of public software companies (and annual reports spell out this information) you’ll find that less than 20% of expenses are for actual software development.

When you take that attitude and transpose it to open source software, there’s a problem, because the software is free. And the extra services provided by the open source company are perceived to be, if not zero value, of very very low value relative to the software. This leads to a chicken-and-egg problem I have mentioned previously, where customers can’t use perfectly good software because it is perceived as “risky” without a professional-looking corporate entity behind it, but where they also won’t pay for the value-added service of providing that professional-looking corporate entity.

“Why should I pay so much money for free software?!?”. Why indeed. Imagine the feel of an unprocessed honey comb in your hand, the honey dripping down between your fingers and the bees still alighting on the frame. Open source companies provide value beyond bits and bytes, and that value is what shows up in the price tag.