Open Source and OpenAvenue
Open source software has arrived. The "why" of open source has been proven by the broad commercial acceptance of high-profile programs such as Linux, Apache, and Perl, and the well-publicized success of Red Hat, Inc. (Nasdaq: RHAT) in turning Linux into a commercial product. But a crucial step must be taken to continue the viability of the public development model, the "how." Open Avenue provides the "how" for enabling the "Open Industry," the rapidly growing community of developers, owners and users of publicly developed software, including open source, shareware, and freeware, as well as emerging hybrids of open source components as parts of commercial programs.
OpenAvenue is the leading enabler of the Open Industry through its unique global collaborative infrastructure of Web-based technologies and services that turn the process of public development into a commercially viable platform. Our platform makes it possible for a worldwide community of software developers, users, information foragers and support personnel to access a large pool of hosted project content (source code, documentation, support documentation, FAQs, etc.) to learn from it, and to cooperate with others to modify it. By aggregating community around project content, OpenAvenue becomes a unique open source marketplace, with the ability to intermediate e-commerce and services to the community, including recruiting and the brokering of paid development projects.
OpenAvenue's robust new platform will drive the next phase of the Open Industry's growth by enabling large companies to incorporate open source software into their business. Until now, companies that require a particular software component or application to be built have lacked a reliable way to bring projects to an international pool of developers with the necessary incentives and controls to ensure commercial viability. And until now, developers have lacked an efficient way to collaborate on these projects and contribute to the knowledge bases around them. They have also lacked the necessary infrastructure of tools and services to manage development life cycles for these projects, as they would expect in more conventional development environments.
By solving these infrastructure problems today, OpenAvenue can lead the Open Industry across the chasm that currently separates the "movement" from the larger world of corporate software developers. As a result, OpenAvenue is uniquely positioned to become the new standard for delivering "hosted" or outsourced technologies and services to the evolving development organizations of the future.
OpenAvenue and the Software Development Industry
Many industry experts believe open source movement will have a dramatic effect on the conventional software development organizations within the Information Technology (IT) departments of large global organizations. The driving force behind this belief is very simple: when developers via the Internet (or corporate intranet) can access, modify, and redistribute the source code for a software project, it can evolve at an incredible pace when compared to conventional proprietary software development. The quality of the code can improve through the efforts of a larger pool of motivated talent; enhancements can be more rapidly incorporated and redeployed to the user community, resulting in a significant reduction in overhead costs; and the feedback loop between user requirements and programmer delivery being dramatically shortened for faster response to today's accelerated time-to-market imperative.
Another key factor is the crucial problem faced by IT organizations in attracting and retaining "all star" development resources. Application development managers are being driven to find ways to outsource the development of critical software components, in order to keep up with the growing demand for new Web applications, which are the centerpiece of today's e-Business initiatives. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, U.S. organizations spent $180 billion last year on contract and salaried software development. One of the most effective solutions is to expose their projects and components to a worldwide pool of talent represented by the OpenAvenue community.
Just as the Application Service Provider (ASP) model (application outsourcing, or hosting) will impact the way these organizations procure and maintain enterprise applications from software vendors such as Oracle and SAP, it is believed that IT development organizations will also require that vendors and other service providers host many of the life cycle management tools and services that IT commonly purchases today.
OpenAvenue is in a unique position to offer the solution. Our concentrated effort in supporting the vastly-larger open source community, will "prove" our model, positioning us to deliver a proven global collaborative platform to the commercial IT world, providing a cost-effective way to host and manage the application life cycle. |
