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The Inevitable Unbundling of Software and Support
2/27/2004
These include Sakai, Fedora, Navigo/AAM, ePortfolio, VUE, LionShare, and others—all written for education, by education. Many of these will provide support markets for OSSPs to achieve needed economies of scale. Projects that use the OKI Open Service Interface Definitions (OSIDs) or the forthcoming Sakai Tool Portability Profile will also help OSSPs build solid economics in support.
Not all open source projects will succeed, and not all OSSPs will develop the competencies to compete profitably in this new era. Some administrators perceive this as imposing greater risks on universities than the current bundled model. I contend, however, that unbundling actually hedges a university’s risk as it has more options. It can switch OSSPs, develop in-house competence if OSSP pricing becomes unfair or they fail, or even leverage an OSSP relationship to switch to different open source code should that ever be necessary.
For example, when Red Hat recently moved to increase academic support fees and impose migration timelines, one major university dropped Red Hat’s support services and contracted with a different vendor to provide security patches and updates for Red Hat distribution at a considerably better price. For application software, consider the actual lower risk of navigating among unbundled options versus the costs of trying to switch among the leading bundled application providers that pervade the marketplace today.
Market Segments Will Choose
Finally, assertions of open source versus commercial with only one winner are overly simplistic and distracting. Open source and OSSPs are a complement to, not a wholesale replacement of, traditional bundled software models. Open source creates a continuum of IP and support choices beyond the traditional discrete choices of “buy it with bundled support” or “build it and support it all yourself.” Market segments will choose among open source, blended (OSSP bundling an OS product), and traditionally bundled value propositions to best suit their needs.
Bundled propositions from vendors—based on proprietary, open source IP, or even a mix—will clearly prevail in some segments. Some universities will buy a bundled open source application with a support package from an OSSP while others will choose no support or only ala carte services from an OSSP and do it themselves. Others may decide that the current bundle of proprietary IP and vendor support serve their needs as well.
Unbundling is good for higher education. It will sharpen the value propositions, increase choice, and provide a healthy set of options for serving our dual challenges: working within sustainable IT economics while addressing the requisite frontiers of innovation.
Wise administrators already reject the flawed assertion that open source will make software free. Likewise, they should also reject the equally flawed view that IP and support are only viable as a proprietary bundle. Now is the time to align an institution’s IT strategy to take advantage of new options for software and support.
Brad Wheeler (bwheeler@indiana.edu) is associate vice president for Research and Academic
Computing in the Office of the Vice President for Information Technology at
Indiana University.
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