Building a Commercial SW Company With Open Source Technology

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Building a Commercial SW Company With Open
Source Technology

• Dave Anderson
• 27 April, 2005

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I am going to present

• How to make a successful open source project into
  a successful commercial company
• not how to open source a failed commercial
  product
• How open source influences a commercial company
• The annotations are the presentation

• Things unique to combined open/commercial
  companies
• Where does Sendmail go next?

Annotation boxes for open source issues
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Company Profile

• History
• Open source sendmail MTA by Eric Allman in 1979
• Sendmail open source licenses in the many
  millions
• Commercial company founded in 1998
• Headquartered in San Francisco -- Emeryville, CA
• Worldwide operations
• Investors include Morgan Stanley and Intel
• 7 years of consistent annual growth

Rich open source history
Grown with capital from big investors
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Company Profile

• Pioneers in email security
• 60 of all internet email relies on sendmail MTA
• Sendmail is the foundation of email security
• Setting new email standards with partners -
  Sender Authentication
• Signed messages
• Leaders in enterprise email
• 7 out of Fortune 10 use Sendmail commercial
  products
• 50 of the Global 100 use commercial Sendmail
• System of choice for government and financial
  services

Open standard and open source implementation
Measure both open source and commercial
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Company Approach
Open source can help you solve a problem

• Full email infrastructure for large enterprises
  and service providers

• Total email security
• Integrated mail processing
• Large-scale mailbox systems

Open source programmers like the fun part,
coding. Many avoid boring stuff like
documentation. Commercial users need in depth
documentation, Eric Allman.
Commercial product then must solve the whole
problem
A total platform for email processing
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Rising Complexity
Total Messaging Control
Open
Open
Value built on Open Source
Hard Problem The next enhancement of open source
duplicates the commercial version
Some Open
Commercial architecture often evolves from the
open architecture
Our open source base
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Sendmail Products in Action
Our customers systems often combine both
commercial and open source
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Professional Services and Support

• Over 1,000 implementations
• Largest mission critical email systems in the
  world
• Best practices
• Proven methodology
• Worldwide 24x7 support

• I have personally dealt with various support
  organizations, and not a single one can compare
  to the structure, responsiveness and experience
  of your support engineers.
• -- Douglas Pitek
• Enterprise Application Services
• The New York Times Company

Services create differentiation
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Unique Issues

• Priority of Open Source vs. Commercial
• Simple - commercial wins except
• Keep open source competitive
• Drive emerging standards network effects
• Differentiating Commercial and Open Source
• You need a differentiating concept not just
  individual points
• For Sendmail it is management tools
• Enhancing Open Source
• Instinct is to fix the weakest areas of open
  source
• THATS RIGHT but maintain the differentiation
  concept
• Dealing with Security Exposures
• This is nasty
• Commercial customers need more warning than open
  source
• Releases from other vendors
• Open community does not always have the
  experience to understand why decisions are made
  teach them, be open!

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Where does Sendmail go from here?

• Release a new version of the open source
• Best MTA for Reliability, High Performance
  Sendmail X
• Commercial solution has grown to so much more
• Complete email processing
• Security Policy AV, AS, Filtering, Archive,
• Workflow Processing email is the corporate
  transaction
• Solutions built with services and products
• Commercial comes first butAs profits grow we
  fund more open source too.

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Summary

• You can combine open and commercial business
• Must have clear concepts and policies
• It will be hard work. Communicate openly.
• Open to commercial to open is a natural evolution