Open Source in the Enterprise and in the Cloud

In a couple of weeks, I'll participate in a panel discussion on The Future of Open Source in Business. In preparation for that discussion, I figured I'd write down my current thoughts and solicit some feedback. I'll talk about two important trends relevant to the future of Open Source, but there are certainly more.

First, Open Source adoption in the enterprise is growing at an incredible rate. Drupal adoption grew a lot in 2009, but we saw by far the greatest relative growth in the enterprise. Fueling this movement is the notion that Open Source options present innovative, cost-effective, and more secure alternatives to their costly proprietary counterparts.

Second, Cloud Computing is a transformational movement because it enables continual innovation and updates–not to mention a highly scalable infrastructure that can reduce the burden on your IT team.

Two years ago, when starting Acquia, we predicted this would happen, so it is no surprise that Acquia's strategy is closely aligned with these two trends. Drupal Gardens, Acquia Hosting, and Acquia Search are all built on Open Source tools and delivered as Software as a Service in the cloud.

Combining Open Source tools and Cloud Computing makes for the perfect storm for success. It provides real value to end users and enables companies to monetize Open Source. It creates a win-win situation.

At the same time, I think we have an opportunity to go beyond that and redefine the Software as a Service model based on Open Source values, much as we started doing more than 10 years ago with off-the-shelf software.

Almost all Software as a Service providers employ a proprietary model. They might allow you to export your data, but they usually don't allow you to export their underlying code. While many of these services might be built on Open Source components, they have much more in common with proprietary software vendors than with Open Source projects or companies.

There is room for Open Source companies to disrupt this model, and it is probably not something that can be done without their help. Drupal Gardens provides a good example.

Users of Drupal Gardens can help improve the service simply by contributing to Drupal. By staying close to the Open Source project, everyone can help shape the service.

Along the same lines, we want people to be able to export their Drupal Gardens sites – the code, themes, and data – and move them off the platform to any Drupal hosting environment. By doing so, we provide people with an easy on-ramp while allowing them to grow beyond the capabilities of Drupal Gardens without locking them in.

It is "Open SaaS", or Software as a Service done right. It offers enterprises a more secure and lower-cost alternative to proprietary counterparts and gives many Open Source projects the opportunity to reach a much larger audience.

It creates a triple-win scenario – for the customer, the Open Source project, and the Open Source company – in a way that wasn't really apparent five years ago. At least not to me.