Open source contact management for Government

How to create outlook signature

I'm veteran of the open-source vs. proprietary software Wars I'm also the CEO of a very successful open source company in the UK I've been kind of my theme has been driving open-source adoption for about 20 years and I've got to tell you straight away it's all over we won so about driving open-source adoption it's not necessary anymore that's one of the key takeaways that I want you to know we won the argument we want it philosophically we want to technically warm up in every available why it is mainstream so what I'm gonna do today if it's ok with you if it's not tough but what I can do today is I'm gonna share from my personal experience 20 years and specifically my experience of running an open-source business and really some hopefully insight see in what to do and what not today I've made all the mistakes available and I'm gonna talk a little bit about some ways if there is some overlap with marks talked earlier then then that is because some of this stuff was slipped through and because it's real the kind of stuff that he's saying so that's what I'm gonna do ok so about the advocacy and just a couple of things I've said 20 years I formed something called the open source consortium back in 2004 I'm no longer with it I was with it for a period of time it still goes on it and it was all about advocating to the UK government and we kind of brought the issue front and central to that after I left the the OSC I did a lot of private consulting and actually did a lot of work with some people chuckle Ryan silver who at the time was the economic adviser to a chap called George Osborne who later become the Chancellor of the Exchequer and I did a lot of work with a guy called Liam Maxwell and bunch of other people around there and really helps them to understand open source open standards and had quite a bit to do with what became the government policy on the area on the issue so I've had a lot of frontline experience and when I say we won honestly we won so I'm not going to talk about that um in terms of business I'm gonna tell you a few of the things that I do and that's not because I'm clever and all that kind of stuff but I am I'm not because my company successful but it is but simply because I promised in the introduction that I was going to talk about the kind of open source businesses or act that are out there and the kind of things that people are interested in at the market and the kind of scale that people are doing things that now as well now I have to reveal some of my biases upfront my company we're not a company that generates code actually we are but we generate it accidentally as a byproduct of doing business and we contribute just freely to a bunch of projects so it's a bunch of projects that our code has ended up in but that's not where what we're about we're not that kind of company not knocking that kind of company I think they're great they're sort of my sequels and all over the world fantastic business model that isn't ours our business model is very very broad-based and it's basically we came to the conclusion which I am strongly going to advocate to you later on are the open source however you do it is the services based business and I'll come back to that later so that's what my company does I'll give you some specific examples so that you can pick it up a bit so we don't do hyper clever stuff like the Internet of Things and the cutting-edge stuff we're right in the middle of the market and the kind of things that people are actually adopting and what they're actually using on a large scale in open source in various different areas we work in private sector and we work in the public sector about central government and local government and the first thing I want to tell you about in the private sector is it was my assumption many many years ago that open source was like the small play and that it was for small companies and they were the kind of people who are likely to adopt it it's not true that the biggest companies in the world are adopting it and in your own business these I strongly encourage you to think big because it's just as easy to service a large client phrase emotinal dig your way in here is just as easy to service a large client as small one in fact it's often easier many many years ago we did a bunch of stuff in the schools where they smoke I'm not knocking scores I think they're fantastic but there was so much hassle working with they have so many demands small size organization it's just the same level of demand in a large business yeah so to give you a few examples in just the last year what I'm trying to get across to you is that the open source market now is easy we did win the argument and honestly people out there are flooding to it of all sizes and you just need to be in a certain way and interact with them in a certain way and you will get the business at whatever scale I started off my company 20 years ago 18 years ago with the tenor an honor desk on nothing special have built a company entirely from scratch organically and you can do the same thing yeah so I didn't start off with billions of pounds of backing or anything in the last year we've been working with companies such as RS Components which was I was excited when I got the phone call from them because I spent so much of my pocket money when I was a kid on break at logs we like a several Bloody Mary that's right you know what I mean I mean even if we work for the room 10 years it might make back what I spent with them over my teenage years but these nice huge company they're not just UK they're into international all over the world absolutely massive and they have rebuilt their entire ecommerce platform or an open source software and they were looking for somebody to both help them with the development of that and to support it my company is primarily a support organization now we went from consultancy into support we still build projects we still do support and stuff that kind of stuff but we're all about 24/7 support and they were looking for somebody who can do that fantastic that has developed on to multiple other things as well they've got really into configuration management and they've just commissioned us to do a project to puppy toys their entire infrastructure and build puppet manifest to deploy all of that not just in their e-commerce tag but across the whole board and anyone not into a configuration management get into it it's fantastic huge business in there enough on that a couple of weeks other examples we do a bunch of stuff for Gatwick Airport if you've ever gone through the airport there or all of the screens in there it's powered by open-source software in the background and squared and also rather different bits pushing out not the flight information but the other ones that push out all the adverts and all of them all the updates and all the all the stuff that they do giving you some examples of the range of different things that are out there we've done a hell of a lot of work for a company called ultra map which have been taken out or they were part of when we came across them ba a huge defense company and essentially what they do is they build a custom application which tracks in real time shipping around the globe based on all the information phase this stuff goes into an open-source database and it's got an open-source presentation stack and the whole lot and they sell this information out to you people interested parties we want to know where ships are at any particular moment in time somebody mentioned earlier today SEMA Whole Foods we've done a bunch of stuff with them over the years their entire infrastructure the whole lot is open source they sort of got proprietary desktops but everything they do in the background all the network services all of the email all of the file and praying to all the directory services all open source software enough on the companies in the public sector arena both in the real big thing in government circles at the moment especially in UK government is the whole digital agenda and they're all they're all into their digital what that means is websites with services attached to them so a few examples of this we run and manage food gulf for the Food Standards Agency not just the front end which has been transitioned into a true pal from proprietary contact management but all the backend systems that feed that they're a huge document repository there are tens of thousands of documents presented through the size there's a bunch of applications in finding local places that do food and their rating and all kinds of stuff and it's all powered from open source databases lots post grades in there lots of elasticsearch Apache Solr for doing the Enterprise Search a game huge market in enterprise search in the government space I want to move on it's already taken me enough time on this and just a final example I hear still here on the advocacy front so okay yeah we've got into the government but you can't get into the NHS they're really resistant to open source nonsense we've been working off for several years on a multimillion-pound project in the NHS which gets launched in a couple of weeks times the listen out for multiple NHS trusts aggregating clinical data decade's worth of clinical data into an open source Big Data back-end and using open source analytic tools a researcher based all to look for patterns Big Data fascinating people have been applying it for years applying it to shopping right retailers applying it to shopping and they know about your purchase patterns before you do because they've got all of this aggregated data and they've searched it for patterns imagine applying that to some more life-affirming things happening so what I'm saying is I'm not you know I don't don't claim to have a hotline to her upstairs you know and not my the guy in the local pub you know the guy knows everything about everything you know we can solve immigration when you're doing this and all that kind of stuff but I do have some experience in this area and I want to share some thoughts and some tips on procurement see my fundamental premise is that in this market for open source where we have one the only way that you can mess up is by being weird honestly if you apply some basic common sense and some basic business principles which have been understood for decades you will be successful in it so I'm going to a few things out there and I noted these down earlier because Marc Staal my best points who said as a gay you diddly to this one number one stay away from politics and philosophy okay now I'm not when I tell you this stuff I'm also talking to me because I love politics and I love philosophy I absolutely adore it and it's open source people we kind of thrown that way we are deep thinkers we have thought about social issues we have thought about philosophical issues and it's kind of natural water for us to swim in but businesspeople hate it honestly they hate it except when we don't a few of them do but my recommendation is you have that conversation out in the down the pub but it's the most part stay away people will think that you're boring weird unprofessional or something like that and less if you're lucky if you're unlucky they will simply stop talking to you and you'll be wondering what happened to this sale remember I'm talking to me as well as you so some of my points might sound a bit confrontational but I do all of the stuff I spent decades talking politics and three more of those nobody likes a smartass nobody like somebody can condescending and doing morally superior thing when you think about religious conversations and religious converse that is I'm sorry guys but that is how we can come across on that front so don't do that don't pop with four stories on myself to say I'm not just telling you off it's me on this one but back in the day when I founded the OSC of this is ancient history right we did a very very successful campaign against the BBC's iPlayer it what first high profile campaigns and we beat the hell out of these guys and the proprietary nature of it and the BBC Trust took us up on it and they say the BBC are really naughty and they've got to do an open-source version and all this kind of stuff but while this was going on in my day job in my company serious I got invited in by an outsourcing company see if we could help out with with some projects they day so I got there and I sat down at the table and all that when I said so what's this about we've done the MDA they say well we're running a bunch of infrastructure for the BBC and they want me and we want to talk to you about it and it's like I'm sorry I've got to go and I'd literally had to stand up from meeting and walk out because the conflict of interest right on the flip side and a positive story of where it's worked the project I told you about in the NHS the data project we've been working with them for years about four or five years when we first got in contact there was a tiny tiny tiny amount of open source in there they used it for the front of the presentation stack so they had a patchy and a java application server for actually serving all the interesting stuff was the databases nor the enterprise search was done in proprietary software not naming any of that and rather than doing the moralizing and the politics and the oil you shouldn't use proprietary and all that kind of stuff we just went with that and said yeah that's right fine it's absolutely fine and we spoke about looking after the open source bag and we spent the time over a period of years to gently educate them without making them wrong and moralizing and all that kind of stuff and they finally got to the point and I know it's a patience game you were mentioning persistence as well but we won the whole stack is now open source all the proprietaries got on me it's worth it it's really really worth it I think we've done enough of that one jargon keep joggin amongst yourself plain English for customers again mark made this point as well it's it's a waste of time and it's all it's all ego yeah so yes we're a specialist and we're in a specialist area and it makes us feel better if we're using jargon and look how clever I am nor that kind of stuff customers hate it they absolutely hate it they don't like feeling stupid okay they really don't and it's very easy while using a lot of jargon to intimidate people and make them feel stupid in this way I was the worst at this stuff I did it all the time and I encouraged it in my company as well which is an absolutely huge mistake and I can't tell you the amount of customers that we lost on it we used to work for very very large opticians okay we used to work for Specsavers and my guys would talk down to them and they would talk down to the engineer's there and so we just we're but we actually they generated the notion and and I bought into it as well over there and stupid things like that and this is customers we're talking about right and they pick up on it and they did pick up on it so guess what they didn't renew with us well big surprise there really big surprise there on the other hand okay so think about this they don't like fear like feeling stupid flip it on its head and rather than showing people how clever we are with the jaw Gorman I understand me all the levels of the tcp/ip stay or whatever hell it is how about making them feel smart by simplifying and translating make them feel smart by them quickly understanding what experts need gobbledygook to understand I saw they since so many time time so done it recently we do a hell of a lot of work with the check show Greater London Authority and we were doing a customer review a few weeks ago with them on some of the stuff we look after them and they just one of the guys in there mention that they don't understand it I said have you got a real well we went off to a room and I explained it in very very very plain English to him sure it was simplifying the concepts but it was real and they got it and guess what guess who they want to move ahead with doing the consultancy ways and doing the implementation with it's not rocket science guys the reason but my biggest political success was after I left the OSC and I got a phone call a few weeks after I'd resigned and stood down and it was a chap called Rowan silver and I didn't know who the hell he was at the time but he said you know I'm a economics advisor to George Osbourne and we want to talk to you about open source and said I'm not interested I don't do that anymore you guys aren't serious you actually said well actually we are and I spent a long long time with them not using jog on and simplifying very very plain English and translating into terms that they were interested in yep so how much is this gonna save off of GDP how much can we lost the bill and all that kind of stuff and I'm not gonna do this point to death but you get it with great respect yep explaining the difference between the GPL and BSD you gets you shown the door fast right except when they ask I think you made the point anywhere I love that stuff I love you know I love all of that stuff and I do get involved in those conversations but if it's your opener they will kick you out you're nothing Edd's from the experts here I'll qualify that sometimes more colluded it to it earlier as well sometimes it comes up in the procurement or sometimes it comes up with people you know what about the legal issues on all that kind of stuff and I tell you the simplest thing to do is say hey look it's really not a problem I will introduce you to the experts find this guy phone simon phipps from the OSI phone one of them and get them in they would love to go into the organization and explain the difference between the GPO and B estate until the consultancy with them and you look like a hero you've just introduced them to the world's leading experts on this stuff and you'd love that phone call wouldn't you right simon phipps that the OSI would love that phone call how are we working with client and they want to know a little bit about the open source licenses would you be interested sighs its yeah right and you look like a world expert but don't lead with them okay I'm very guilty of race in fact we've been doing it listen here don't refight battles that are long over because you just look insecure nobody cares that Steve Ballmer used to call Linux cancer or an eightieth America that kind of stuff some of the younger guys probably don't remember this an emo veteran though the other sort I care I was there right but nobody wants to hear about it anymore unless they don't it's a story over lunch I was chatting with mark about a very deep end in BJ about a very dear friend of mine actually works me I'm not going to make Amy's name but he constantly rehashes all of that the past open-source wars and all that kind of stuff and you know you wouldn't invite him to a party let's put it that way what customers really want well I'll tell you that it's not about the philosophy and all that kind of stuff customers are fascinated by running their business they just want to run their business they just want to do the job of their business that's it they do want to cut the cost they do want to do it efficiently they want to work with people they don't need to like the person but they need to work they want to work with people who are compatible with that who can give them good advice who can listen to what it is that they want and not push their own agenda on them and who can help them to achieve that yeah that's what businesses want they don't care about philosophy I told you this specs over story who's scared of my engineers felt looked down on we lost the account we did a bunch of work for Bristol City Council and a bunch of you will record route will remember that Bristol were famous for being the first people to implement OpenOffice in their organization 5,000 desktops we were the guys he told not to really sorry that wasn't a foregone conclusion but they brought a scene to do a bunch of consultancy for them we investigated the matter and he was the wrong solution for them for some very very real reasons I'm sorry if this is unpopular but it's true it was not right for them so they moved out of it however we identified the areas which were right for them and now their digital infrastructure is all based on open source they're all gone down the bellroad their document management is all based on alfresco and they've got tons and tons of open source in there we have to 5 minutes ok we have to be a realistic yeah yes I wanted a 5,000 s key implementation of OpenOffice as much as you do by having spent the time in there weeks and weeks examining all the things that connected to and all the things they can do because of Ayrton people they couldn't talk to you this was prior to the Cabinet Office and that work the camera office were doing in ODF as well which by the way was informed by the Bristol Bristol case it was not the right solution for them but other areas were customers really do know what they want better than we do so ask yeah in the NHS we were working with another company I'm not going to name any names but we were working with and we're still working with another company in there and subcontracting a bunch of the staff and this particular company were pressing a analytics product that they develop it's an excellent manager analytics project product but it was not for this iteration of the project the NHS politely said we don't want to leave that and they were spending hours nails nowadays developing this particular product which was never gonna get a look at and then ran into trouble later on in the project and say well we can't afford to keep doing them you've been spending all the time on there you don't want to hear this and I'm not gonna tell you but you've got to stick to exactly what the customer wants norton search your own living agenda finally the point that I want to get across most of all and if you take nothing else from my conversation today take this one away you are not a technology business you're a customer service business if you're in open-source your product is freely available on the internet they do not need you you can and some open source business models are an attempt to lock you in by being the only originator of that code and so on and so forth sure you can play all of those games but to do open source purely you cannot lock them into your product the own what can you lock them into it well the way that you look after them you are a customer service business not a technology business I'm not saying you don't do technology I'm saying you do customer service better open-source software doesn't change all of the rules of business it changes some of them and primarily about shifting economic power from producers to consumers that's the primary effect it has out in the business market yeah so the only thing you've got against that economic power is your customer service you have nothing I think yeah although I would say to you it doesn't throw out all of the rules of business you have to have the other pieces as well just because you're an open-source company doesn't mean you can ignore tried and protested sales techniques tried and tested marketing techniques you have to do accounting you have to do HR yeah it doesn't change all of the rules on that but above all of those customer service train your people engineers I used to be the worst at this yeah I used to be extraordinarily geeky Engineers naturally you want to chat on ILC or on email or stuff like that train your people to talk face-to-face pick up the phone to to customer service trainings and do human interactions and all that kind of stuff I'm out of time aren't I [Applause]