Presentation from the Eclipse Marketing Symposium

As I have previously mentioned, this past week we hosted the fourth Eclipse Marketing Symposium at Eclipse World.  I have posted the presentation slides from all of the speakers.  To recap, the sessions included:

• Getting Developers to Listen – Matthew Schmidt from DZone/JavaLobby
• Actuate Case Study - Rich Guth from Actuate
• How to Get Good Press – Alan Zeichick from SD Times and BZ Media
• Social Networking and Developer Relations Programs – Pieter Humphreys from Oracle
• Leveraging the eclipse.org Web Site – Donald Smith from the Eclipse Foundation
• What are Developers Using in Eclipse? – Ian Skerrett from the Eclipse Foundation

We are doing another marketing symposium at Eclipse Summit Europe on November 18.  If you are interested in attending,  RSVP to members DOT meeting AT eclipse.org.  You must be an employee of an Eclipse Foundation member company to participate.

The news from Eclipse World

I’ve been watching too much cable news while at Eclipse World.   The reporter instinct in me, sent me out to find what is new at Eclipse World.

I spoke with a product manager from Electric Cloud about their new product release, Eric Clayberg about his upcoming new version of the popular Eclipse Plugin book, Naci Dai talks about a new courseware project for WTP and finally Doug Clarke on the EclipseLink release.

Listen in…

Who is speaking at EclipseCon?

Scott Rosenbaum, the program chair of EclipseCon 2009, is here at Eclipse World.  I asked Scott who are the keynote speakers at EclipseCon.

Listen in….

A tools platform for cloud computing

Earlier this week Tim O’Reilly published one of those famous ‘O”Reillian’ essays that I think people we reference over the years, called ‘Web 2.0 and Cloud Computing‘.  O’Reilly breaks down the cloud computing landscape into three categories: 1) utility computing, 2) platform as a service, and 3) cloud based end-user applications.

In the essay, Tim discusses the importance of nurturing a developer ecosystem:

“to the extent that developers become committed to the platform, there is the possibility of the kind of developer ecosystem advantages that once accrued to Microsoft.”

and

“The key question at this level remains: are there advantages to developers in one of these platforms from other developers being on the same platform?”

For obvious reasons, I am a big believer in the power of creating a strong developer ecosystem and the key is having tools to make it easy for developers to develop and deploy applications.

At the same time, I’ve noticed a consistent trend towards Eclipse-based tooling for different clouds.  For example salesforce.com just announced the release of their Eclipse-based force.com IDE, you can use Eclipse-based PyDev with Google App Engine,  Aptana Cloud provides some interesting tools for cloud computing,  Cloud Studio allows you to deploy OSGi apps to EC2 and even Microsoft is talking about provide Eclipse plugins for Azure.  I am probably missing other examples, so feel free to leave a comment with other Eclipse based cloud tools.

This got me thinking about the possibility of creating a common tools platform for cloud computing.  Imagine a platform that provides the core services for developing and deploying cloud applications.  Cloud specific providers could then extend these services for their specific cloud.

Very similar to what the Eclipse Web Tools (WTP) project has done for creating Java EE applications.  Eclipse WTP provides a common set of wizards and then each Java app server provides a plugin that extends WTP for their specific Java server.  Or even how the embedded runtime operating system market has embraced the Eclipse CDT project as a common C/C++ IDE.  Each RTOS vendor takes CDT but then extends it with platform specific plugins.

It seems like a common platform would help accelerate a cloud computing tools chain and developer ecosystem.  Cloud providers would benefit from a consistent platform for their tools; instead of developing plugins for different tools providers.  Cloud tool producers would benefit from leveraging core/commodity services that allow them to differentiate on value add features and potentially target multiple cloud providers.  Sounds like a good strategy for a cross-industry collaboration at Eclipse.

I guess an exception to doing this at Eclipse might be that Eclipse is perceived as Java centric and Cloud Computing appears to be a lot more than Java; actually Java doesn’t seem to be front of mind for lots of the clouds.  In fact, I think Eclipse support for multiple languages, like AJAX, PHP, Ruby, Python makes it an even better option for a cloud tools platform.  Cloud computing is multi-language, so the cloud tools platform will have to be language agnostic.

The final questions is who would lead such a project at Eclipse.  That is a good question and I don’t have a clear anwser.  However, if past experience is an indicator it will probably be a cloud provider that really understand developer ecosystems or a cloud tools provider that want to have a first mover advantage.

So what do you think?  Does a tools platform for cloud computing have a future?

Actuate’s Open Source Business Strategy

We just finished the Eclipse Marketing Symposium at Eclipse World.  One of my favourite presentation was by Rich Guth from Actuate.  Rich did a great job describing the  Actuate open source business strategy and the success they are having with BIRT Exchange.

Some highlights:

- Actuate generated $8 million in revenue from OS activities in 2007 and are on track to double in 2008.

- The BIRT Exchange site is successfully driving down the cost of lead generation to $50 per qualified lead, as compared to hundreds of dollars for a traditional marketing approach.

- Currently converting 1% of Eclipse BIRT users into Actuate customers but they hope to raise this significantly.

- Actuate’s core market is in the financial services industry.  However, their open source strategy has introduced them ito new industries such as manufacturing, telecom, retail and hostpitality.  In fact, 75% of BIRT users are outside of Actuate’s traditional industries.

I really appreciate Rich and Actuate sharing some of their business strategy.  Rich’s presentation slides are online and we have written a case study about Actuate’s success.   If you are developing an open source strategy for your company, I would highly recommend taking a look.

Eclipse Planning Council

I have a new video camera that I’ve brought to Eclipse World.  I hope to talk to a number of people at the conference about what they do with Eclipse.

In this video, we talk to different members of the Eclipse Planning Council that met here at Eclipse World.  We asked them what was the most important thing they discussed during the meeting.

Listen in..

BMW wants to build an open source computing platform

Via Matt Assay, it seems BMW is looking for partners to create an open source computing platform for the cars multimedia and entertainment systems.  Now that would be very cool project to do at Eclipse. 

I wonder if BMW would like to come to Eclipse Summit Europe and participate in our Automotive Symposium?

A Busy Week for Eclipse in Mobile

This was a busy week for the mobile phone industry; RIM had their developer conference, Symbian had their conference and Google made available the code for Android. The cool thing about all of these events is that Eclipse played an important role as the developer tools platform.

• RIM announced a new version of their Eclipse-based tools and plug-ins.
• Symbian announced their Symbian Analysis Workbench (SAW) for optimizing C++ code running on Symbian OS.  There was also a lot of discussion about setting up the Symbian Foundation and open sourcing the Symbian operating system under EPL.
• As part of Android, Google provides a set of Eclipse plugins for building Android applications.   The nice thing to see is that Eclipse tools appear to be getting good reviews for Android.

Of course Motorola and Nokia are also big supporters and adopters of Eclipse in their developer platforms, so Eclipse as a platform in the mobile industry is looking pretty good.  Now getting Apple to use Eclipse for the iPhone would be nice but it seems some people are figuring out how to do that.

Is Community and Commercial Open Source Possible?

Matt Assay asked the question ‘Is commerical open source possible?’, citing an article about Larry Lessig comments about mixing community and commerce.   I have not read Lessig’s new book ‘Remix‘ but it seems he claims community and commerce don’t mix.  Money quote:

Money in the sharing economy is not just inappropriate; it is poisonous. And ‘helping out’ is not just rare in the commercial economy. It is downright weird.”

In Matt’s response I think he is correct to say:

I don’t think, however, that the conflict is between community and commercial. The conflict arises when a company tries to feed its community and commercial customers from the same bucket of bits.

This is actually the secret of the Eclipse Foundation; we help establish the buckets for the commercial customers and community participants.  Organizations are able to collaborate and share their work in an open source community.  The Eclipse Foundation, through our governance model, development process and license establishes a home for this collaboration and community.

At the same time, companies can build commercial products on top of the Eclipse technology.  They are able to offer their customers valued add technology and services to their paying customers.

Community and commercial definitely mix for open source but you need to do it carefully.   We see this model repeated over and over within the Eclipse ecosystem and we seem to be getting pretty good at it. 

Announcing Eclipse Banking Day in NYC

We are very excited to announce a new event, called Eclipse Banking Day in NYC, on December 9, 2008 in New York City.  This event is for architects, development managers and senior developers who work for a financial institution and use Eclipse.  It is an opportunity to learn from Eclipse experts and discover what leading financial institutions, such as JP Morgan, Morgan Stanley and RBC Capital, are doing with Eclipse.

A detailed agenda is available here.  There is no cost to attend but you need to work for a financial institution and pre-register.

So why are we doing a Banking Day?  Over the last couple of years, it has been apparent that Eclipse is used extensively in the financial industry.  Financial institutions are using Eclipse as a platform and various Eclipse frameworks for their internal applications.   It is also apparent that a lot of the institutions are doing similar things with Eclipse.  It just seems like a great opportunity for peer to peer knowledge sharing, learning and collaboration with the industry.  Our hope is that this event will be a great starting point.

Eclipse Day in NYC builds on a very successful event we did in Frankfurt in September.  We also plan to do a Banking Day in London, most likely in early February, so if you would like to participate in the London event, send me an e-mail.

Of course we are getting a lot of help with this event.  Morgan Stanley has agreed to host the event at their location in Manhatten.  Also, our sponsors Actuate and Sybase are helping to make it possible to have it as a no-cost event.

If you are interested in attending, register now.  Space is limited and on a first come first serve basis.