May 2007

Jeremy Ruston has sold the company that owns TiddlyWiki, to BT and is joining the company as Head of Open Source Innovation. As Jeff Nolan says:Congratulations are well deserved, Jeremy did a great job building something that when you looked at Tiddlywiki closely is very disruptive.In the process, Jeremy has taken the wise decision to ring fence TiddlyWiki so as to preserve its open source goodness. That will keep everyone happy.Even so, I’m a little aghast at one thing Jeremy says:BT is becoming a remarkable thing: a truly internet-scale consumer company that doesn’t rely on owning “secret sauce” software for it’s business. At the most senior levels, there’s an appetite to embrace open source that wouldn’t disgrace a web 2.0 startup. I’ll be working with a great many talented and interesting people, and I’m looking forward to it immensely.Oh how I wish that second statement was truly represented at ground level. BT Workspace is a great idea, BT Tradespace is an abortion. Jeremy – first order of business. Kill BT Tradespace and knock them over the head with a Cluestick.

Jason Carter notes that Infor has acquired public sector skewed revenue management specialist Hansen…. Hansen doesn’t do that piece and used to be an MBS partner until they elected to OEM financials from Agresso…. Will Infor end the agreement in favor of one of its ERP packages? That could pose some issues as Hansen is Windows based and much of the mess that is Infor runs best on the iSeries (though you can expect the company will claim integration via it’s “Infor Open SOA” program.Or perhaps this will prompt Infor to make a move to acquire Agresso as well…I’d be surprised…. Over the years, it has acquired a solid reputation as a business partner and at present is doing rather nicely. It’s seen as a mainstream competitor in UK public sector where it has done some extremely significant deals and has recently become innovative on its pricing model. When I speak with Agresso customers, they are universal in their praise for the way Agresso works hard on the relationship aspect as well as the way the software allows these organisations to operate in an agile and flexible manner…. The press announcement is documented at NetworkWorld.Agresso is a client and no, I don’t do flack work for them.

Anshu Sharma has a thoughtful post commenting upon a free book by OpenWater about how today’s software is free, or very low cost, but that service is not…. The authors argue that we’re in an era where, with 14.9 million programmers around the world by 2008, the cost of software is much lower than in the past but that servicing software remains ridiculously expensive…. The software industry’s response to this is to consolidate – as in the case of Infor – and milk the user community as hard as possible for maintenance and support revenue. Or simply milk the community – as Sage does, leaving innovation to the open source and ‘free’ service communities…. Its solution to this seemingly intractable problem is to build what it terms service networks:Growth in service networks will result in unprecedented improvements in efficiency, predictability and reliability. Openwater has been founded to build service networks that use innovative technology born in the consumer Internet to help our customers realize these benefits…. Anshu is not so sure citing lack of incentive for some players, dependency on semantic tagging and competing with ‘free’ as significant challenges. I’d also argue that inertia and ingrained habit have relevance although increasingly I see more businesses questioning incumbent charging structures and gazing elsewhere for alternatives.