While I was at IBM I started to become interested in Open Source technology and its impact on the software market. As I learned more and more, I got excited by the prospect of collaborative innovation and subscription business models. I was super excited to get hired to the JBoss team to pursue this interest further.
Red Hat fiercely stood by their open source principals which was great on many levels but made monetization of free software a big challenges. Why buy something when you can download it for free. Why pay for support when it seems your developers are happy to participate in forums online.
To be honest, in the beginning JBoss was kind of floundering. And, the competition was catching by offering "free" software that was effectively neutered versions of their enterprise products. This provided an alternative roadmap to our low friction open source model..
That wasn't the only challenge, JBoss was really low cost and that hindered us in two ways:
1) It gave a perception that we were "cheap" and therefore not good enough.
2) The Red Hat salesforce and partners wanted bigger ticket offerings
The team had a novel idea which was to change product perception with packaging
One of the complexities of open source software at the time was integrating it all together. It was hard to do and often times versions did not match up creating all sorts of issues. Red Hat was starting to realize that by providing a suite of integrated tools in a bundle you could solve a LOT of issues.
1) You could provide support the means to set boundaries vs an infinite set of combos.
2) You could provide bigger ticket items to sell with a lot more functionality for the price.
3) You could create a perception that the enterprise product was more than the respective pieces.
The results were massive a Red Hat began to take share from IBM and BEA very quickly. The repacking led to a whole new level of focus from the Red Hat sales and marketing teams, our support costs were mitigated as we grew rapidly and our revenues grew FAST.
It just goes to show that sometimes you have all the pieces but just need to look at the market in a new way.
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