When Rich Green, Sun EVP for software, sat down for an interview with Al Riske, he demonstrated two attributes the writer says he is noted for: congeniality and impatience. Both were in evidence as the pair discussed the open source marketing strategy at Sun. Looking into the activities of Green and his team, Riske discovered that, as he writes, they "...aren't simply throwing source code over the wall and waiting for good things to happen."

According to Green, "It's a much more sophisticated model than just, 'Let's make everything open source.'You open it up and everybody likes your stuff. So what? Certainly in the long term it has tangible benefits in terms of brand recognition and innovation happening on our technology, but there has to be a more direct coupling of these activities to Sun's business model if it's going to justify the work," he says.

To that end, the team has shifted its focus from counting downloads to capturing registrations, Riske observes.

"The conceptual trade-off we have at Sun is we'll give you all of this technology; in exchange, we would like you to register with us so we can understand who you are and what you're doing with our technology," Green says. That, he adds, is the very core of the business model, Riske writes.

Green says that Sun's entire open-source business includes downloadable binaries with a registration opt-in, and Sun has made sure customers will discover an attractive value-add when they do elect to opt-in.

When customers do register, they provide more than just a lead, Green continues, they create an opportunity for Sun to develop a more detailed picture of a customer with every download, a picture that can be handed off to a sales rep, providing an explicit view of what additional products and/or services that customer might have an interest in.

A perfect indication of just how completely Green believes in open source comes in his remark that, "The general view that we developed internally is that everything, everything, everything is open source, and the only thing we would sell to individuals who use our technology is something called service or support," he says.

Green cites the example of Facebook, which deployed and created a thriving business using MySQL and, only when the company needed the expertise they could access with a subscription did they sign up, recognizing that there was clearly useful additional value for the enterprise in becoming a subscriber.

The move to a subscription, Green says, stems from a recognition by the customer of the truth in the assertion by Sun: " Spend money and we'll save you time." The value of the company's non-open source technologies has been demonstrated to the user.

Another example Green cites to explain the open source strategy involves the xVM Server, which is offered with the basic server management tools a customer requires. Come time to deploy the xVM Server on a larger scale, he continues, the customer may see value in the xVM Ops Center solution, which can enable the control of thousands of systems and provide savings of time and capital.

Green and his team refer to the basic open source offerings as "inner ring," while the opt-in offerings are characterized as "outer ring" solutions. Both his team and the marketing and engineering leads at Sun are, as he puts it, studying ways of making offerings in the outer ring increasingly compelling in terms of value-add, creating the payoff implicit in the inner-ring open source structure. [...read more...]

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