InfoWorld: Are there any restrictions as far as which of the open source licenses you support at SpikeSource?
Polese: No. We basically tack on the licenses that are already attached to, associated with, those components.
InfoWorld: Do you carry any Sun software?
Polese: We are not currently certifying with Sun software, Solaris, but that is on our road map.
InfoWorld: I don’t know if proprietary is the right word, but say, for example, with Linux distributions, if you get an enterprise package
from one of the major vendors, they often come with portions that are more or less non-free device drivers, that kind of thing.
Do you also provide support for those?
Polese: We provide support basically at the operating system level or above, and specifically what we’re doing is certifying the
common components that you find in the core stack, in the basic infrastructure stack -- like the application server, Web server,
and database -- and then additional supporting components. So we’re not getting down to the device driver level.
InfoWorld: So then a different table type for MySQL, for example, that might be a commercial product?
Polese: If it’s part of the mainstream MySQL release, we are supporting it.
InfoWorld: Let’s say there was some sort of add-on that was popular but was more or less commercial software, you wouldn’t be interested
in providing [support for that]?
Polese: We do certify with proprietary and commercial software, so Windows is a good example of that. If there was a popular commercial
software product that was used in combination with open source, we would likely add it to the set of components that we validate.
InfoWorld: And as far as the technical support side of it, how does that work? You say your main service product is SaaS, how does the
technical support work?
Polese: We have coverage for 24 hours a day and 365 [days a year], traditional enterprise-class support. We have teams here in the
United States as well as Europe and in India who are experts in various components in the stacks and in technologies like
Java or PHP. So we have a set of very well-qualified experts here on open source who are ready and standing by for customer’s
calls as they come in.
InfoWorld: So that is traditional phone-based type of support?
Polese: Yes.
InfoWorld: And so you have partnerships with, for example JBoss, and if you need to get escalated to developer-level support, you’ll
pass this along from the one phone number?
Polese: That’s right. So the customer [has] to make one call to us, although we can, as they need it, provide third-level support
from JBoss or MySQL or other commercial providers. And we have strong relationships also with open source [providers] and
the open source community in general, so we’re able to tap into that expertise as needed. And we’re also building relationships
with other providers that are not household names necessarily, but commercial providers of open source, support providers
of those components.
InfoWorld: You mentioned you have some people working overseas. Do you want to weigh in on the outsourcing issue? Sun Chairman Scott
McNealy last week said that there’s a false notion that if a job is outsourced overseas, that means a job is lost here. Do
you have any perspectives on that?
Polese: Yes, well I agree with that statement. I don’t think we can make an assumption that it’s a job lost here. In fact in our
case, we were a global startup from day one. We started with a team in India, and specifically because we believed that talent
is everywhere and [we access resources] from the global market when we’re aggregating and supporting open source [software].
We’re selling to the global market. Our first customers, in fact, were U.S.-based companies [but] we’re finding great demand
outside the U.S. as well as inside.
So it makes sense that we would have development and support teams that are located outside the U.S. as well. This is a team
that’s very much part of our engineering team. We didn’t decide to shift jobs over to India, these are positions that we [intended]
from day one to be based there, but we continue to hire here. So I think Scott’s point is a good one, you can’t always draw
a sort of black and white conclusion about having an offshore team. It does not mean a job loss over here necessarily. In
fact, it can mean growth straight across for the companies, and as we get bigger, we’ll add more headcount here too as well
as over there.
E-mail
Printer Friendly
Reprints
(InfoWorld) - In the litigious world we live in, deploying a unified communications platform in your enterprise could...
