Does Open Source Not Get the SMB Market, or Vice-Versa?
by Sam Dean - Jun. 15, 2009Comments (0)- Related Blog Posts
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Last week, we covered the big news from Dell that it will be offering open source application bundles to small- and medium-sized business (SMB) customers looking for low cost alternatives to commercial software. The pre-configured "SMB-in-a-box" software is only available in the U.S. for now, but Dell expects to lauch a similar offering in Asia by the end of 2009. Today, Matt Asay considers whether open source is getting the SMB market right, and he points to Savio Rodrigues' thoughts on how many SMBs still perceive open source as not secure and too complex. Those may indeed be problems, but I see the larger problem being that many people at SMBs are simply not aware of open source alternatives to proprietary software products.
This problem with lack of awareness is actually pervasive in the business community. We recently covered the results from a business survey on open source done by North Bridge Partners, for example. The survey respondents were quite sophisticated members of the open source community, and they cited lack of awareness of open source options as the key barrier to open source adoption in enterprises.
Keep in mind that those survey respondents were talking about enterprises, where there are often sophisticated I.T. managers. In SMBs, there are often no I.T. managers, with business stakeholders repsonsible for making software buying decisions. Do they know how far open source platforms and applications have come in recent years? Do they know that there is often commercial support at low costs for open source software? In many cases, it's unlikely that they do.
That's why Dell's idea is a good one, as is the Open Source Channel Alliance. Through bundles and federated collections of open source software stacks--available in the sales channel to see, and available to evaluate on a site such as Dell's--SMB stakeholders can start to get their minds around the cost savings and efficiency boosts that open source software offers them. The problem, as I see it, is awareness, and there need to be better ways to evangelize open source to SMBs to solve that problem.
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