OStatic

By Allan Leinwand, a venture partner with Panorama Capital and founder of Vyatta. He was also the CTO of Digital Island.

I was having lunch with Kelly Herrell, the CEO of Vyatta (one of our portfolio companies) and he gave me a great quote on why the momentum of open source software is impossible to fight. Kelly said, β€œCompetitors can try to lock the front door of an enterprise and effectively stop traditional software vendors from entering the building, but it is impossible to stop free bits from coming in over the network.”

Well, technically, you could stop bits with a firewall, but I think you get Kelly’s point – traditional software sold by traditional means with a focus on account control can result in a lot of friction in the sales process. Open source software distributed over the Internet can easily find its way into an organization with little resistance and can be completely unknown by those trying to control the account.

The ability to provide a frictionless deployment model is one of the critical areas I look at when evaluating open source software companies as potential investments. Can prospects download the software easily? Is the software easy to deploy and implement in many environments? Can the sales process be completed without the intervention of a salesperson? Is this open source software likely to be seen as interesting to folks in a technology lab to work around the issue of sales account control?

If the open source software can reach the end customer easily, there is a good chance that it could get entrenched in an organization and that leads to potential monetization. Unfortunately, for traditional software vendors, the converse of that is also true.

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