As part of my "day job" as a Robert Frances Group (RFG) analyst, I had a very interesting conversation with the founders of a very interesting business. The people were Stuart Cohen, former CEO of the non-profit Open Source Development Labs (now part of the Linux Foundation), and Evan Bauer, former CTO at Credit Suisse First Boston (and RFG colleague of mine). The business: the Collaborative Software Initiative (CSI).
The goal is both evolutionary and almost subversively revolutionary. The CSI wants to broker connections among what it calls "like-minded IT leaders," and use the best elements of the open source development model to create business applications. The CSI believes this could reduce the cost of building proprietary applications by huge amounts – from, say, $1 to $2 million to as low as $50,000 for each company supporting collaborative development. A "customer core team" of a few companies would collaborate with CSI principals, who do the actual "heavy lifting" needed to get the software created. Each software project will have a broad audience beyond the core team, and each will be fully supported by CSI and its partners, as released software and/or as software as a service, á la Salesforce.com, Inc.
What I like most about CSI, though, is the ability to bring collective experience, knowledge, proven practices and processes, and perhaps even wisdom to collaboratively developed applications. After all, if CSI can draw top-tier enterprises together, the people from those enterprises should be repositories of some pretty good practices and processes. And if there's anybody who can facilitate translation of those into agile and adept applications, it's Evan, Stuart, and their partners. By the way, on the vendor side, those partners currently include Hewlett-Packard Co. (HP), IBM Corp., Intel Corp., and Novell Inc. – testament to the strength of the ideas and people behind CSI, methinks.
Past efforts at collaborative building of enterprise solutions have been fraught with challenges. I believe this is largely because many such efforts have focused on developers or vendor channel partners, to the sidelining or exclusion of the enterprises that want and need the solutions. By focusing on an alternative to the traditional methods of building business-specific applications, the CSI should be able to avoid those earlier drawbacks. After all, users pursuing solutions to common problems may be easier to coordinate than vendors and resellers seeking larger markets in which to compete while allegedly cooperating.
The CSI has not yet publicly announced any applications or enterprise customers, but that should be coming soon. Meanwhile, if you work at an enterprise that might benefit from an alternative to expensive and slow proprietary internal application development, you should definitely check out the CSI – and please let me know what you think. I think it's an idea that could go from "What the heck?" to "What took us so long?" pretty quickly. We'll see…
Michael Dortch has been an analyst, 'information entrepreneur,' speaker, and writer about IT and 'the real world" for the past 30 years. After almost 10 years at the Robert Frances Group (RFG), Michael begins a new position with Aberdeen Group in September.
Dennis Byron is an analyst with ebizQ, focusing on Open Source Software as well as Business Process Management technologies.
