There are two big trends in ICT; Service a a Service (SaaS) and Open Source Software (OSS). And I do think those two go hand in hand and are reflecting changes that are coming towards the ICT landscape. When I say "hand in hand", I do mean that they are complementary (like people are in a relationship) but also that the are in contrast of each other (like in many relationships). It is my opinion that you either outsource
(parts of your) IT activities, or build the solution yourself. You will either use a cloud to deliver your needs, or make your own cloud. It will either be service from the Microsoft's or you will have to build and manage the solution by yourself. You either well use a cheap commodity service with limited customisation to have the complete freedom to fit the software to your business objectives. Let me try to make clear why this is my opinion and how this influences your role as a user or provider of ICT services.

Recent trends have shown that release cycles of software have become shorter and shorter; to keep ahead of our competitors you have to be able to release early and often.

Release early and release often as a way to be able to quickly add new features for the future, fix problems for the current software and to prevent that software becomes obsolete ("end of life"). The perpetual beta as the new adagium. Where flickr was able to deploy during it's booming period a new codebase every 15 minutes, Microsoft was able to make a new operating 7 years. One is using the "service" (cloud) way of offering it's software, the other is using the "fat client" approach. So on one hand proprietary fat client software s facing competition from cloud based services. Sure Google Docs is not as feature rich or reliable as the Office suite of Microsoft but most agree that this is just a question of time and network reliability; in due time Google Apps will be good enough for the masses. Mind you, most if not all cloud services are proprietary and are doing well; salesforce as the most prominent example.

On the other hand, proprietary software faces problems from the Open Source alternatives. OpenOffice.org is a real competitor for MS-Office, the Ubuntu distribution beats Microsoft in many areas and MySQL is giving the absurd licence fees of Oracle a hard time. If proprietary closed source software wants to stay in business, they have to move. Not to a "long tail" niche but in the other direction, to the left side of the tail where you can offer a highly standardised yet customisable version of their product. That way they are able to release early and often and go for a low margin per product sold but sell a lot. So I do think that closed source software has to move towards a service model, away from the client into the data centre.

This means that the other trend (Open Source Software) -that has written "release early and often" written all over it- will dominate the Do It Yourself area. OSS will be used by people and companies that have time and resources to fulfill their needs via highly customisable software. You will see this first with applications that are by nature webbased; the can move to the cloud with less legacy baggage. Software with much interaction with local legacy products will follow later, much later in some case So Office Automation for existing companies will take some serious time to migrate to the cloud since hybrid solutions (some data local, some in the cloud) will be rather expensive and complex to many from security, identity and manageability point of view.

One of the webbased applications that will dominte the "DIY" will be Drupal. It i already the best Content Mangement System ("looking outside") on the market and it is moving more in the direction of the core of business processes ("looking inside"). Drupal will more and more be used as both a frontend system and a backend system; a system where you can aggregate and enrich data for internal use that can be pushed towards for example an external Drupal site.

If you follow this logic (proprietary moving towards commodity cloud service, Open Source solutions towards customisable client service) you might conclude with me that Open Surce CMS-es have nothing to fear from closed source CMS-es like sharepoint. Sharepoint will be the shell around your office data if you want to use that from a cloud perspective, Drupal will be used by enthusiast and enterprises that need more power and have more resources to kickstart and operate that power.

So some people will use an iPhone and the cloud service "Mobile me", others will build Android. Some will use digital TV solutons from their cable providers, others will build MythTV. Some will run an OpenID service themselves, others will use it from a Google/Yahoo! And some will use voicemail (the most used cloud service in the world) and others prefer a local answering machine. I, I use all kind of differtent services, cloud and local, like most people will do.

PS: This posting as very late for last years' Drupal prediction posting or very early for next year, whatever makes more sense to you

PPS: Sure, you can have Open Source "SaaS" solutions as well, for example hosted and managed Drupal instalations but it will be a niche crossover, if that makes sense to you. Also, when I say "build", it can also mean "let other build", aka buy.

PPPS: I do think that SaaS is a complete wrong term; it is a technological acronym. First, people do not want "Software" as a service, but they want a service (as a service). As long as the ICT things about acronyms like SaaS, true adoption of using a "Service as A Service" will only stall. It is time to stop the technology lingo where it should stop; at the door of the customer and think of services instead of software. Second, Software as a Service is a very limited view on what truly can be accomplished with services; it might be disk capacity from the cloud (like S3, Storage as a Service), it might be CPU capacity (like EC2, CPU as a Service), it might be housing (Rackspace as a Service), hosting (Linux box as a Service) or to give an everyday example we are used to, voicemail (Answeringmachines as a Service). Therefor I plea to stop using the term SaaS and use XaaS ("Anything as a Service") or use SaaS for the acronym "Service as a Service", whatever makes more sense to you.

Selling Drupal. Not a contradiction but not as easy as selling a license of a proprietary CMS. Selling something that is "free" (gratis) seems like an odd idea to many. So how do we get our beloved Drupal CMS spread in a broader range that home blogs, new media sites and the like?

Well, some prospects have functional requirements for their CMS like "It has to start with a D and end with Drupal". Usually there is a passionate user somewhere in the ICT department that convinced some people to go for Drupal. And while this technocratic approach does have its drawbacks, it is a good way to gain more ground and bring Drupal on a higher level.

But most of the time the prospect "just wants a CMS". And since there are zillions of Open Source CMS-es it is hard to choose. Most OSS CMS-es do not have a local "sales" so the company will end up with a proprietary CMS that is years lagging, only have a dozen developers and a couple of hundreds users but with a sales person that is a member of the same club as the CEO.

However, now most bigger companies are moving towards their third CMS implementation, people know what they want from a CMS and people are actually looking for an Open Source CMS and hence an Open Source implementer like my employer is in the Netherlands. And those bigger enterprises all read Gartner, Forrester, MetaGroup and other IT research and advisory companies. I have a very strong opinion about those companies (just echoing yesterdays news for companies that will be in today by tomorrow) but that is a different story. In the boardroom magic quadrants, hype cycles and two by two tables are the goal for any powerpoint wisdom, so if you want to be in the boardroom you have to play chess on the management chessboard; a 2 x 2 matrix.

CNet (writing many rtiles about Drupal in a positive way!) has a piece called Forrester calls out Alfresco and Drupal as the top-two open-source WCM systems. This is really /great/ news, instant boardroom Fähigkeit for Drupal. Forrester says so so we need Drupal!

You can read the excerpt of the report over at Forrester:

This document answers frequently asked questions about the role that open source plays in the WCM market.

You have to pay for the real article but even without reading 20 pages about community, functionality etc, I think it is fine to say that Drupal will be a word you can say in the boardroom from now on. "Could you please fill my cup with some coffee Drupal's" for example.

Thanks to Kieran and others who gave input for the report

The (dead tree) newspaper sector is not particularly known for being innovative or getting up to speed. In fact, it seems that they only look at each other; what system is newspaper Y using, we have to get that as well! As if online the newspapers are competing with each other. They are, but more important, they are competing against every single website in the world. People only have x hours per day to get the latest news or backgrounds per day, and every minute spend on a blog or on a wiki, cant be spend on the Great news paper website.

It seems that the newspaper sector is waiting for the result of The Record Industry versus The Internet and will decide after that has been settled (in a year or 5 ) what they will do online. In the mean time, there is -or so I have been told- something going on on the Internet that is called UGC. Based upon the old credo If You Don't Like the News...Go Out and Make Some of Your Own, these blogs, wikis and other 2.0media are far cheaper to produce and have more knowledge on the subject; hard to believe for Mr. Journalist but true.

But the newspaper industry is still looking at their own navel. At my former employer, I had nearly all Dutch newspapers as a customer and I also visited some "independent" newspapers from the UK and "world" newspapers from Germany. And while all these newspapers where experimenting with new technologies and ways to generated income and bind readers (and let them become writers) at the lower levels in the business units, at the corporate level, the CTO's and CIO's were still full of the proprietary nonsense CMS-es. And they had to be, since they were taking on boat trips with lots of beer and "no cameras" by the proprietary CMS vendors. I once saw a very ugly site that was rather expensive; around 500K euros (800k dollars) that could have been made in Drupal for less then 1/10 and more then that, be a lot better, faster and hipper.

Recently however, I see lots of old media switch towards Drupal. And not just as a CMS or even CMFramework, but as an Enterprise Service Bus. A central hub were all data is aggregated, enriched and send towards another medium.

If you read the news, three things striked me:

NEW YORK The New York Sun has begun using WoodWing's Smart Connection Enterprise editorial solution from WoodWing, headquartered in Zaandam, the Netherlands, with U.S. offices in Detroit.

The paper's WoodWing editorial content-management system has been used in conjunction with Drupal, an open-source Web application framework, as the publishing platform.

Launched in 2002 as New York City's first new general-interest newspaper in two generations, and with a Web site designed by Danilo Black, the Sun now claims an online and print readership of more than one million.

And the three things were:

1. The NYSun is indeed running an old version of Drupal. Good for them! (well, good for them running Drupal, they might want to upgrade)
2. There is a Dutch company Woodwing (running Drupal) that is rather big in the media and has 4 offices worldwide
3. They actually have a rather good slution for the media.

Although their 3 tier graph on this page is a lot of BS!

It is not that the NYSun is a very big site but the cracks in the proprietary CMS world are getting bigger by the day and every newspaper switching towards Drupal, is a good thing. Because in 3 years time, there will be a lot of action, jobs and money to be made in the combination of Drupal and old skool newspapers.

The short story:
I will join Dutch Open Projects, DOP.nu. A 20 person PHP shop that offers SugarCRM, Joomla!, Symphony, Zend … and Drupal in the Netherlands!

The long story:
I started working in 1996 at PinkElephant, a student founded IT company in the Netherlands, hence the name. My first job was as a contractor to help out at one of the Global Network Management Centre’s of AT&T in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. I think my first GNU/Linux slackware installs date back from that time. I learned a lot about Unixes, Cisco’s IOS, TCP/IP and managing firewalls. Remember that back in the mid 90-ies, the concept of "firewalls" was still catching on, it was for sure not a widespread best practice. I even remembered a funny trick back then, SGI (for the youngsters, think a hip machine like a Mac) was still a widespread used Unix and running many websites. You could use telnet (yes, unencrypted telnet!) towards such a box and login as the line printer daemon (lpt) that had default no password and a shell! All you had to do was use your favorite search engine, atltavista back in those days, and "google" for "powered by SGI" and you were in.

After my contract at AT&T, I worked internally at Pink’s emerging internet division. However, there was not much internet there, mostly managing Novell boxes. I disliked office automation in general and Novell in particularly so while I liked the young creative people, I went over to UniSource somewhere around 1998. Unisource was part of KPN. KPN just made the shift of a governmental owned telecom provider that had a monopoly on landlines towards a "commercial" company and UniSource was the datacommunication’s department. We managed dial in connections for nearly all ISP’s, managed the backbone of the Internet in the Netherlands. Like all providers UniSource was building a new network and when we rolled the network out, AS21286 was the fastest internetwork cloud in the world, using Packet over Sonnet with 2.5 Gbs per second in the core over Cisco 12016’s. Such a record was in those days beaten in a week, since everybody was rolling out "the new network". While I was in the networking team, the Unix team was only 5 meters away and I learned a lot about for example scaling transparent proxy’s as well.

Around 2000 I rejoined PinkElephant again, now part of Roccade and called PinkRoccade. I designed the new Internet infrastructure for them and was project lead for implementing it. I created a new AS and made the internet connections resilient via BGP4 and two independent upstream providers. After implementing this, my chief was smart enough to make me the manager of the network group and the Unix group. While I started managing the groups existed of only a dozen people, one year later I managed 30 people. During this time, around 2000/2001 I played around with PHPnuke and very soon after I stopped using that spaghetti code, I came across the drop.org website. Ever since that moment, I am more or less "active" in the Drupal community as a non coder. I had several functions after that moment, lead architect for a huge (20k plus seats) Server Based Computing environment, overpaid Business Consultant, speaker and for example active in (pre)sales. And during all these functions, I kept aligned to Drupal but never did anything with it professionally. I tried multiple times to introduce Drupal in my company and some customers. But the timing was wrong and the tool didn’t fit my employer at that time, who is one of the biggest Microsoft implementers in the world.

A year or so ago, I was fed up with my employer. I will not go in to details about why I wanted to leave the company since that would be very unprofessional but two things were most important and I would like to point out. PinkRoccade was bought by Getronics and Getronics lacks any kind of vision; the people in charge are basically there because of a bet gone wrong I presume since they must have been one of the most empty heads I ever met. I like to think / act that all people I meet are smarter then me but that was not the case at all when I spend some time at the headquarters of Getronics. The other reason is that the lack of vision of Getronics shows most when it comes to the IT; they focus completely on Office Automation, the desktop and hence on Microsoft products. In a world that is changing to services instead of clients, de jeure standards in stead of de facto standards and open instead of close, a wrong vision were I don’t want o be part of anymore. Luckily my network (see linkedin is after more then a decade in ICT with lots of contacts with customers and vendors good and –not to brag- I get a call from a headhunter every week or so. So when a small company that is implementing exclusively Open Source solutions came across my path, I decided to go there; I am joining Dutch Open Projects (dop.nu)! Nu btw is "now" in Dutch so it was a popular TLD some years ago in the Netherlands.

DOP is a 20+ person company, specialized in PHP. We do frontend (Joomla!, Drupal), midoffice (Drupal, Zend) and backend (SugarCRM, Symphony) implementations. I will be evangelizing Drupal for customers, working on sales, doing consultancy and leading projects. And hopefully, have a good time.

I always worked for employers with a couple of thousands employees, PinkElephant 1.500, PinkRoccade 10k, Getronics-PinkRoccade 20k and now Getronics-PinkRoccade is part of KPN that has some 30k employees. I am really looking forward to working over at DOP with only 20 people. No more making business plans in powerpoint (we use OO.org and don’t plan that way) but doing and making business in a more agile.

Now –after some 6 or 7 years of helping the community- it will sure be different to make money with Drupal. I hope that I will be able to keep the same independent attitude I had in the past as a Permanent Member of the Drupal Association. Please correct me anytime in the future if you think that I am mixing the community and business, slap me, hit me and correct me. I need you to do that. Ooh, and thanks to all of you who SMS-ed me, send me postcards and mail to congratulate me. I really appreciated that. And I sure will miss my nice colleagues over at Getronics-PinkRoccade, Dr John and Alessio to name two.

I was planning on making a videocast but the amount of post production was too much, kudos to everyone investing so much time in them!

On freelanceswitch.com you can find a good read on hw to charge your client for the services you deliver (got it via a friend who is a free entrepeneur and a PhD as of yesterday). While all that is said in the posting is true, the best remark came from Michael Martine:

Slap the client in the face as hard as you can, then tell him your rate. If he’s shocked that you slapped him, you’re not charging enough.

(from Anil Dash. Sounds like fun, happy slapping!