As a student of the questions that prospective customers ask during the sales process, these three have popped up too many times to be ignored. Even more interesting is that they have often popped up in quick succession:
1. Is the solution open source?
2. Will it work with Windows Vista?
3. Can I connect with my Mac at home?
The context here is the broad arena of content and document management, where the current pace of change is blindingly fast for both the enterprise and small business. It is also an arena where all of these questions are perfectly valid. It is, however, the combination of them that offers the most industry insight.
Let's look into it further. One conclusion to draw is that Microsoft still very much owns the desktop in SA, and is likely to hold it for some time. Another is that open source is gaining traction as a concept, even if its true meaning and application is misunderstood by small-business owners in most cases. A third is that there is always one Mac user somewhere in any office these days.
Elastic desktop
An analysis of this now frequent set of questions is that there is great concern among small-business owners in particular and IT managers in general with respect to flexibility on the desktop (client-side).
It is paramount that current Windows (and Mac) users can access the full functionality of any document management suite, and a factor in the procurement decision will be an ability to run the full functionality on a Linux desktop further down the line.
While there seem to be very few taking the "migrate to Linux" plunge right now, there is certainly awareness of the possibility that it might make sense in a few years' time, and current procurement decisions must allow for this if at all possible.
Interestingly, there is a whatever-you-think-is-best approach to the server side environment and a sense of trust in the vendor that the server side of things will perform and deliver on the user experience that has been demonstrated. That said, it appears there is recognition within this market that an area where costs can be saved in the short term is the server-side stack (operating system and database) through open source offerings.
Making distinctions
While there seem to be few taking the "migrate to Linux" plunge now, there is awareness that it might make sense in a few years.
Josh Adler is a director at Prefix Technologies
Unfortunately, clients seem to ask these three aforementioned questions without separating their thinking into the server-side and client-side environments. By doing so, they are going to be short on context and long on questions during any discussion of this sort with any software vendor, when it comes time to assess the overall value of the offering.
Companies have work to do in educating clients, particularly in the small business sector, to empower their decision-making in these cases.
This thinking is fundamentally a cross-platform requirement from clients, asked in a roundabout way. The key insight is that it is cross-platform and not necessarily open source solutions that many clients have in mind when using the terms during these consultations, and it is up to the IT industry to educate customers effectively as to what it all means.
Ultimately, what most clients are looking for is peace of mind that the solutions procured today will still work should they migrate to alternative operating systems in the future on the client-side. Truly cross-platform solutions do exist, and may (or may not) be open source.
Freedom of choice
By the same logic (possibly that of the majority), open source software offerings in the content and document management space are not truly cross-platform. In fact, many of the enterprise open source solutions depend heavily on thick-clients that run only on Windows.
The key frontier for application software developers today is to create truly cross-platform solutions. By doing so, they will enable the free market to determine the best client and server-side platforms going forward, and pressurise operating system developers to work towards common standards for the benefit of all.
It really is about the freedom to choose...
* Josh Adler is a director at Prefix Technologies.
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