Tag: opentext

Q & A with OpenText’s James McGourlay

Photo of a big question markI had the opportunity to ask James McGourlay, OpenText Executive Vice President, Operations, a few questions about this week’s announcement that OpenText would begin offering support for Alfresco Content Services.

What follows is a list of questions I submitted to James followed by his answers, which I unfortunately received after the deadline we had agreed to for the publication of my blog post on the subject.

Jeff Potts: OpenText has many large ECM platforms and products in its portfolio. Alfresco is as complex as many of those. What can you point to that establishes your ability to support mission-critical workloads on such a complex platform, especially given that no one associates “OpenText” with “Alfresco”?

James McGourlay: OpenText knows ECM and Content Services. We specialize in supporting and maintaining enterprise software for mission critical systems at many of the largest organizations in the world. As such, we also have the global infrastructure and systems to provide enterprise-class services for docker installs/containerization, global call-intake, service level targets, etc.

Jeff Potts: The press release says that, “OpenText has put in place a dedicated team to manage and contribute to the Alfresco open source community”. How big is that team? What types of roles do you have on that team? e.g., First-level support? Engineers? Are there any community managers on the team? Will the team be developing new features? Or is the focus exclusively on bug fixes?

James McGourlay: We developed this service to help customers – including joint OpenText and Alfresco customers – protect their investment and get the most out of their Content Services. Level one support is not our focus. Our offering starts at level 2 support, with seasoned, experienced professionals that know how to set up environments and do detailed service. Our support professionals have been doing sustaining maintenance for enterprise software for 20 years or more in many cases. They are expert on trouble shooting, patching, enhancing, and releasing patches and fixes to provide support through level 3.

Jeff Potts: The OpenText fact sheet says: “All open source fixes are submitted to the community for consideration in the next release. OpenText will maintain the fixes it submits until they are confirmed in an Alfresco Community Edition release.” What does “fixes are submitted to the community for consideration” mean? How will that happen? Where will the fixes be maintained? In a publicly accessible repository? Will this be run as a public open source project? Has OpenText ever submitted any fixes/changes to Alfresco? Do you anticipate any hurdles given that Alfresco Software, Inc. employs 100% of the Alfresco committers?

James McGourlay: Any code we develop that is derivative work of Alfresco Community Edition we will submit through the Alfresco community committer program. It will be up to the Alfresco community to act on this work or not. However, we will maintain all our fixes in the OpenText OpenSource Edition for Alfresco, that will be available to our customers that subscribe to the OpenText OpenSource Support for Alfresco program. It will not be publicly available.

We have not yet submitted fixes, as we are just launching this service this week. Any bugs we identify we will report via the issue tracker and we will submit our proposed fixes to the community. We are also looking to complete fixes as requested by our customers. We hope that Alfresco will treat the fixes we submit as any other community submission and it will be up to the community to determine if they also believe there is value there.

Jeff Potts: Will OpenText provide any features to the community that are currently only available to Alfresco Software’s enterprise edition subscribers?

James McGourlay: Our intention is to enhance the community edition based on the needs of our customers that subscribe to the OpenText OpenSource Support for Alfresco program. So, our customer needs will be the driver of all changes and enhancements we make.

Jeff Potts: Will OpenText make its branded edition of Alfresco Content Services freely available under an OSI-approved license? Or will it only be available to paying OpenText customers?

James McGourlay: As mentioned previously, while we’ll submit fixes and enhancements to the community, our OpenText OpenSource Edition will only be available to customers that subscribe to the OpenText OpenSource Support for Alfresco program.

There you have it

So, although OpenText got these answers to me nearly a day past the deadline, at least they did eventually respond to every question posed, which I really appreciate.

For the community, we now know for sure this is a private fork, but it is good to see that OpenText will contribute fixes via Alfresco Jira. That could be a good thing.

Their plan to offer support sounds dubious, but the mention of “joint” OpenText and Alfresco customers is sensical…if they have customers who have both products, why not offer to support both. I’m still skeptical that an Alfresco-only customer would ever consider it, but we’ll see.
Photo credit: Big Question Mark, by Benjamin Reay

OpenText offers to support Alfresco customers

Barn with dubious sales pitchOpenText announced this week that it would begin offering support for Alfresco Content Services. The announcement comes about a month after Hyland Software announced their intention to acquire Alfresco Software, Inc. (see my blog post).

UPDATE: After the original publication of this post, OpenText got back to me with answers to my questions. I’ve updated the post to reflect that, and I’ve posted the Q&A verbatim, here.

Alfresco sells services and support for their software, Alfresco Content Services (ACS), which includes a handful of features available only to those who purchase a license. In addition, Alfresco Software distributes a “community” edition of ACS freely-available to everyone under the Apache License.

Both Enterprise & Community Edition

Based on the announcement, OpenText will provide paid support to both enterprise and community edition customers. But if someone is already paying for support for enterprise edition from Alfresco Software, why would they pay an additional maintenance fee to OpenText, a competitor, for support of that same software? It’s hard to imagine how a customer would be able to justify that.

Providing support for community edition makes more sense. Alfresco does not offer any kind of support for community edition beyond what customers can get by reading forums and blog posts, and Alfresco actually forbids its partners from selling support and services around community edition. OpenText will try to fill that gap.

There is already a large community of non-partner service providers who have built businesses providing professional services to both enterprise edition and community edition customers (Disclosure: I am one). The challenge for OpenText is that they have yet to establish any credibility regarding their ability to provide support for Alfresco. They are trying to convince customers that they can basically walk into the room cold and throw enough resources at any problem to resolve it successfully.

The press release hints at how they will do this, saying, “OpenText has put in place a dedicated team to manage and contribute to the Alfresco open source community”. How big that team is, who it is comprised of, and what exactly they’ll be doing is not discussed in the announcement. So I reached out to James McGourlay, OpenText Executive Vice President, Operations, and that Q&A can be found here. The short answer is that the goal of the team is to provide level 2 support by leveraging OpenText’s experience in other ECM platforms to address Alfresco issues.

How will they collaborate with the community?

OpenText’s announcement may sound like they want to participate in the community, but when one of the community’s leaders asks to hear more about their plans, they aren’t forthcoming. So, we can only judge them by their actions. An Alfresco employee with visibility into the company’s issue tracking system confirmed earlier this week that OpenText has never filed a single issue, which is the generally accepted mechanism one would use to contribute fixes to any open source code base. I’ve never seen them at an Alfresco conference, in a chat room, or in the forums. That does not sound like a company that is ready to engage the community.

I reached out to OpenText to ask them how their community contributions are going to work. You can read the full Q&A here. OpenText says they have not yet filed any issues because they have only just launched the service. They plan to contribute fixes back to Alfresco via the Community Contributor Program.

Their own Alfresco distribution will not be public

If OpenText plans on “contributing to the Alfresco open source community” exactly how they plan to do that is important for the community to understand. OpenText says they are offering their customers a branded release of community edition. Branding is easy enough to add, but is it a fork? If you read the fact sheet that OpenText provides, it sheds a little more light:

“All open source fixes are submitted to the community for consideration in the next release. OpenText will maintain the fixes it submits until they are confirmed in an Alfresco Community Edition release.” –OpenText

This sure sounds like OpenText will maintain their own fork of Alfresco and that they will contribute changes to Alfresco for inclusion, upstream. It will then be up to Alfresco Software, Inc., for whom 100% of the ACS committers work, to decide whether or not to merge those fixes.

The key question for the Alfresco community is whether the OpenText fork will be a private fork or a public fork that they will run as a true open source project? If it is a private fork, then this isn’t really about open source or the community at all–this is instead about OpenText taking a marketing jab at Hyland and Alfresco. If it is going to be a public fork, well that would be huge news. Alfresco has always kept its community at arms-length when it comes to commitorship. But I highly doubt that OpenText, a proprietary behemoth who has existed on a steady diet of other proprietary ECM vendors (Documentum, Interwoven, Hummingbird, RedDot, Vignette…), is looking to start and invest in an open, collaborative ecosystem based on one of their competitor’s products.

After publication of this post, OpenText confirmed that they will maintain a private fork of Alfresco, distributed to their paying customers, so there will be no opportunity for the community at large to collaborate. However, the community might ultimately benefit from the contributions OpenText makes.

So is this all just snake oil?

At Alfresco DevCon, an online conference that took place online in August, John Newton, Alfresco’s founder and CTO, made an off-hand comment about going after OpenText and how great it would be to take them down, especially after they “captured” Documentum, a company he also founded. I could be wrong, but this announcement from OpenText just smacks of marketing chicanery aimed at throwing FUD into the market surrounding the Hyland acquisition, and basically telling John, “If you want some, come get some”.

Photo Credit: Snake Oil, by Eddie McHugh

OpenText administers Vignette mercy killing

OpenText issued a press release today saying it would buy Vignette for $12.70/share. Vignette has been struggling lately losing customers to complex and costly upgrades and laying off employees (CMSWire post) so I see this as a mercy killing of sorts. Naturally, OpenText views the acquisition more optimistically, saying it will “extend the breadth of our offerings and further Open Text’s positioning as the leading independent ECM vendor in the marketplace”.

I’ll be curious to see exactly what OpenText plans to do with the technology. I don’t follow them closely, so I’m not sure what they were after. Vignette’s Portal? Their collaboration stuff? I have no idea. I’m sure we’ll see some analysis today in the blogosphere.

I’ll bet we’ll see an increase in Vignette customer churn as is often the case in these acquisitions so this should be a good thing in Open Source ECM Land.