Better Options Coming Soon?

CIOs considering precertified suites right now face a big contradiction: Although preintegrated suites make the most sense for smaller enterprises willing to trade off flexibility for lower maintenance costs, vendors so far have aimed the offerings at the big guys. That mismatch could keep these suites off the table for many CIOs, for now.

For example, Unisys targets its Oasis offerings to large enterprise customers such as Fortune 500 financial services companies. One reason: It costs too much to sell to smaller companies given what they're likely to spend, says Unisys's Shadman.

And although OpenLogic offers several preconfigured stacks, it concentrates on large companies, notes Kim Wein, vice president of marketing.

After surveying customers, Hewlett-Packard says it found little customer demand for preintegrated suites, so it offers "blueprints", standardized do-it-yourself guides for integrating the open-source components it provides, as well as full-blown custom integration services. HP makes its consulting services available to smaller companies through resellers. But the cost of the software support is the same as for a large company, notes Jeffrey Wade, worldwide marketing manager for HP's open-source and Linux organization.

Looking ahead, analysts expect additional open-source suites aimed at the mid-market to emerge, bringing in more appropriate choices for CIOs.

Application and operating system vendors will ultimately drive open-source suites, rather than consulting firms or middleware-oriented vendors like SpikeSource and OpenLogic, the 451 Group's Zachary predicts. Companies like Red Hat and MySQL have years of experience supporting their open-source offerings, which interact with many other tools, so they'd be natural suite providers, says Judith Hurwitz, president of the Hurwitz & Associates consultancy.

It makes sense for application vendors - such as database, CRM and accounting app makers - to incorporate open source into their wares, delivering preintegrated suites on CD or even preinstalled on a server, Zachary says. After all, he says, long before open source, vendors have done that in the mid-market with proprietary software for everything from managing dentists' offices to handling auto parts retailers' accounting.

Meanwhile, CIOs should define their needs before evaluating today's suites. Large enterprises can ask if the new open-source suites fill key application needs at less cost than the do-it-yourself or externally customized approaches. Encourage vendors to meet those key needs: By shaping the demand, CIOs have a better shot at getting truly useful integrated suites, AIG's Stumpf says.

SIDEBAR: Open-Source Suites

Red Hat: Offers the JBoss Enterprise Middleware Suite, with the JBoss application server, plus tools for portal management, business process rules management, caching, distributed transaction management, messaging and development.

SourceLabs: Offers the SASH stack for Java middleware, comprising Spring Framework for business logic and component integration, Apache Axis for Web services, Apache Struts for Web application development, and Hibernate for object-relational mapping and data abstraction.

SpikeSource: Offers three preintegrated middleware stacks: the LAMP Stack (composed of Linux, Apache, MySQL and a choice of Perl or PHP) for Web sites with dynamic database-driven content, the Tomcat-based Servlet Stack for dynamic Web sites written using Java-based Web technologies, and the JBoss-based J2EE Stack for Web applications using Java Servlets and Enterprise JavaBeans.

Unisys: Offers three Open and Secure Integrated Solutions (Oasis) suites - one for application servers and two for open-source databases - using technologies such as the JBoss application server, and the MySQL or PostgreSQL databases. In the application server, Unisys includes its own Java virtual machine, designed for high-transaction scalable environments, and its own application-level security software.