Are you part of a community……or an Open community?

This article is a continuation of my first article focusing on “Open” as a concept.

Is there a distinction between a community and an open community?

Let me illustrate the difference via my first visit to SUSECON.

One of my Global Systems Integrator (GSI) partners was flying in for the day. I bumped into our CTO randomly, introduced myself and chatted to him whilst scuttling between meetings. I wanted to put him in front of my contact and he agreed to move an internal meeting around to do so. 

At the meeting we discussed a gap in the market around a cloud management portal  (CMP) that would make our combined offering even more compelling. 

We don’t have a CMP and where we don’t have a solution we partner. Following the meeting closed I wheeled the GSI to meet the afore mentioned ISV partner CEO who was at SUSECON.  The GSI explained the rational and together they are agreeing the fundamental business case to invest in the necessary coding project to develop the required functionality. 

Back to the initial point in my first article. Open source software that is relevant can’t be achieved without Open collaboration ideally between a supplier and a customer or customer advocate in this case. 

OK, this example is not an Open source project per se but I’m not naive enough to think that every open community collaborative effort has to result in the creation of open source software. 

Similarly on the first day I hosted partners during the partner only summit, sat down randomly with a partner and the global head of services introduced himself to me. An opportune moment to introduce a services partner I was hosting. They are now discussing working together in a standard vendor delivery partner model but why stop there? The GSI’s I work with typically engage the capacity of the services, integration and management model (SIAM). They don’t mind priming or following in order to deliver according to the solution tower as long as they are relevant enough to have a seat at the table. I spoke with one GSI who said they lost $100s milllions pipeline in multiple bids they were engaged in but then said, its ok we won some and if we won it all we wouldn’t have the capacity to deliver. I’m working with these GSI’s and delivery partners in a shared risk, shared reward basis so that they generate opportunity by aligning resources to address expanding markets.

This is where SUSE are leading the in the area of open communities. 

1. Open communities require leadership, transparency and momentum. This is rarefied atmosphere and as a result often attract like minded people – at SUSECON I witnessed a leadership team that are emotionally intelligent which is a culture that is passed through the organisation fostering long term trust based partnerships. 

2. The portfolio launched at SUSECON, containers as a service 2,  cloud application platform PaaS and the momentum we can build within this market is great news for the SUSE community. 

3. The SUSE community is an Open community in every sense. shared leadership in different areas and collaboration across SUSE, ISV’s, GSI’s and delivery partners in order for us to win business together.  

To take these often complex solutions to market it’s just good business practice to work with a rich and diverse partner ecosystem, not just for the sake of our bottom line due to shared investment but because we can grow and scale together to address a rapidly expanding market.

I personally look forward to building these open source practices within the SUSE Open community. 

In my next article I’ll be contesting the logic behind mode 1 (production) and mode 2 (test) environments. Why have separate environments when you can unify through a single platform…….?