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In the midst of this explosion of Web-related technologies and infrastructure, the marketplace remains fiercely competitive. Furthermore, there are a lot of dollars out there for investment in companies in this explosive marketplace. IDC projects that over $260B will be invested in Web infrastructure companies in the same time period. The real litmus test, however, will be an upstart's ability to pull ahead of the pack of existing and newly funded companies. To
achieve this, Open Source companies will require higher standards, better technologies, and
more robust solutions.
The early success by Open Source projects such as Linux, Apache, and SendMail were based on these points of excellence. Nonetheless, as the dollars being invested in Open Source have escalated, the stakes have grown equally high. It's getting a lot tougher for a young Open Source upstart to compete with entrenched competition-of both open and closed persuasions.
So how does an Open Source upstart like eGrail (Bethesda, Maryland) hope to compete in the Web content-management marketplace with firmly established giants such as BroadVision, Interwoven, Vignette, and Allaire? Furthermore, how could its use of Open Source scripting language PHP hope to compete against the cult-like following of Allaire's Cold Fusion?
Having spent a good deal of the summer working with the eGrail team on its Open Source strategy, the answer can found in the commitment of their CTO, Al Brown, to Open Source. The path of Open Source allowed for the rapid evolution of a company committed to the developer community, while leveraging commercial deployment in this fierce marketplace. eGrail competes against well-established giants by having a superior best-of-breed solution that is specifically focused on Web content management.
In particular, eGrail gained ground by building the fundamentals of its architecture using Open Source components, focusing on Perl and PHP. Its platform-neutral product can be deployed across multiple operating systems, as well as a scripting language-agnostic product that allows for the interchangeability of PHP with other standards. This focus is both timely and appropriate, while the large competitors attempt to expand and redefine their corporate mission to support recently inflated market capitalization.
Yes, there are other solutions and new entrants into the Open Source content-management space. What makes eGrail particularly interesting to watch, however, is its commercial success, while coping with the management of its Open Source release(s) since August, compounded by expansive growth, from seven employees to over 80 in less than six months. There's reason to believe that its heart remains true to the community and that the company will get it right. The eGrail team seems set to continue releasing best-of-breed technologies as it carves out new territory. eGrail, in the end, represents a case in point for which there are few precedents. Its ability to succeed will create more opportunities for Open Source companies to be financed and adopted as infrastructure standards.
We need to observe newer companies pushing the envelope for commercial optimization of Open Source technologies in the infrastructure space as they compete with the big guys to gain ground and market acceptance. Their success will be predicated upon their ability to manage market demands for the best solution. The challenge will be to maintain their edge.
In future columns, I will assess the way still other companies manage their commercial efforts with their Open Source contributions. These exercises will yield some useful patterns, as we all attempt to gain a richer view of the next generation of companies.
-Michelle Kraus is a Menlo Park-based Internet expert whose specialty areas include search-engine and server technologies.
EGRAIL'S COMPETITIVE WEAPONS
· MySQL DBMS support
· Open Source scripting technologies (Perl, PHP)
· Disaster recovery at object level
· Management at site level
· Multi-byte feature set
· Multi-byte character set
· Multi-language, multi-format
· Scalability
· Documentation
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