Building a Network¶
Central to the way OpenGeo operates is to continually build a network of allies and partners who are collaborating in countless different ways. To build the open geospatial web we need to align incentives of many different players around common standards and software. To achieve this we need our core software widely used, as it helps establish a truly open standard. The traditional route to achieve this ubiquity is to continue to grow the core company, aggressively marketing and building sales channels worldwide, and owning all the profits. Our route is to build a more open ecosystem and share the profits with many different entities, including our clients and users. We seek to create more opportunity than a proprietary ecosystem. This isn’t something we are starting to create now, instead it already exists in the countless companies already making use of the software we work on to provide their clients with great solutions.
The OpenGeo Suite Enterprise Edition is meant to increase the ability of these companies to offer their clients a complete solution, with a solid company standing behind them in case anything goes wrong. They still can build their flexible solutions that truly meet the needs of their clients, but can offer an extra level of support guaranteeing the open source software will always work because they are teamed up with the core committers at OpenGeo. They can also reach back to OpenGeo for core development if they need more out of the software than is available at the moment.
We view are clients as key parts of this network, as at a granular level our clients are really individuals in an organization who are trying to build a solution that will help them achieve their goals and solve their problems. It may be a high level project manager who engages us or a partner in a complete solution, or a software developer who needs a bit of extra help. We team up to build a great solution, while also getting experience of using our core software in the real world, thus helping us improve it more. Even users of the open source software we build are part of the network, even if they can’t yet afford to put time or money in to helping the core. Their building of solutions with the software puts more open standards based interfaces out there, and their work can inspire others to contribute in some way in the future.
In this network OpenGeo focuses on the core development of the software as well as the core marketing and brand building to give it all an edge of true reliability than people expect from a complete solution. OpenGeo currently does a number of other functions, like training, application development, direct sales and consulting. But in the long term we’d like to have our partners and network handle the majority of that. In the short term though we must prove that there is a real path forward, developing the product and market.
Partners¶
OpenGeo’s goal is to have a truly worldwide presence around supported open source geospatial software. The only way to achieve this is with a strong partner network of high quality solution providers. Thankfully with the nature of open source software there are a number of companies already providing services and application development. OpenGeo complements their offerings with the ability to offer unlimited support and a guarantee of reliability for the whole solution. Since OpenGeo seeks to remain small, forgoing the large profits that can come from completely owning sales channels, there is lots of opportunity for partners to grow, potentially eclipsing the size of OpenGeo by offering their own supported products on top of the core. OpenGeo just seeks to have some revenue always going to a flexible core, ideally from many different domains.
Of course not all partners will want to offer their own products, but there are a number of ways they can provide value for their clients. The following are the ways partners can complement OpenGeo.
- Translation - OpenGeo Partners often operate in other cultures. They provide translations, first in a direct, technical sense of transforming the interfaces to words understood by their clients. But also in a more general way, translating their cultural norms in to a business relationship with OpenGeo at the core. They are local, on the ground providers who understand how their area of the world works much better than OpenGeo ever could. So they can translate the OpenGeo product offering and solutions in to something that works far better for their clients.
- Contract Vehicles - With government procurements it can be quite hard to engage a foreign company. OpenGeo Partners can resell the OpenGeo Suite and offer their services around it. This opens up new markets to OpenGeo, while letting partners sell complete solutions with fully supported software. OpenGeo seeks to have partners in every country, so that their governments can buy locally and support their local providers, while also helping fund the core software. As partners grow their relationships with clients they can take over more and more of the work, using the OpenGeo Suite sale as an entry point.
- Configuration and optimizations - With both open source and proprietary software users must customize server-based GIS software to meet their needs. Even if they don’t need a custom web application developed there is always a bit of configuration needed even to stand up pure web services. Many organizations that have shelled out tens of thousands of dollars for proprietary software often just let the new software sit on the shelf because there is no one able to set it up. Often there is a tech savvy person who can figure out how to get it all set up, as the OpenGeo Suite is designed to be as easy as possible to configure. But many organizations will always want an expert to help them configure it, preferring someone who actually understands their domain and problems and can recommend the ideal set up for _them_.
- Implementation work - The OpenGeo philosophy is to save money on training and expensive desktop GIS tools in favor of license free, web-based applications that are designed for the domain. These will always take customization by experts in both the software and the domain at hand. Some organizations will develop that capacity for themselves and just engage OpenGeo for the core support. But many will choose an implementor who can build the full solution to them.
- First tier support - OpenGeo Solution Partner are experts who can provide a first line of defense to help OpenGeo focus on core development. This extends a natural relationship, where if they were to build on unsupported OpenGeo software projects they would naturally have to provide similar support (but would have no one to help them out if the problem was beyond their expertise). OpenGeo’s Solution Partner recognizes that level of expertise, to properly diagnose and reproduce potential bugs so that the core developers can be more efficient when responding to requests.
- Customization and core development - As partners gain even more expertise in OpenGeo software they may grow and start to contribute to the core, customizing not just applications on top of the software but also the core itself to their needs. OpenGeo encourages partners to grow their developers to be core contributors, even becoming members of the Project Steering Committee of the underlying projects and having as much say in the future direction as OpenGeo. This is an option that is simply not possible with a proprietary partner, as that core code is private. This could be seen to threaten OpenGeo’s business, but OpenGeo’s value is providing the unlimited support on the core and productizing it in to a more full solution. So partners adding to the core just increases the value of the product by adding even more capabilities.
- Productization - The most capable partners will likely start to build the same types of custom solutions for several of their clients. OpenGeo wants to help encourage these to transform to a more general product that can meet the needs of many more. They will leverage core OpenGeo software, but extend it with additional value to a particular domain, building something new on top of it. Making the transition to a more general product can be difficult, but can ultimately be beneficial to all, since it will be more niche than OpenGeo’s product, but general enough that each client doesn’t have to fund the whole development. Partners will be able to leverage all the business advances that OpenGeo has made, building their product on top of the OpenGeo brand and offering unlimited support on the whole product including all the underlying software.
Domain-specific Products¶
One of the challenging things about GIS is that most people don’t truly understand its power until it’s put in their domain, in terms they can understand. OpenGeo’s goal is to bring the power of GIS to a much wider audience, by building tools that are easily customized in to a language they can understand. For this to be successful, however, we need to team up with many more people who are experts in their domain who can build solutions and products with the OpenGeo core. Much of this will come from partners. And indeed OpenGeo will also likely incubate certain products that our direct clients need, hopefully eventually spinning them out as their own open source companies.
The logical extension of many partners building products aimed at particular domains is that the whole partner network will benefit. Products developed on top of OpenGeo Suite Enterprise will benefit from all the other OpenGeo partners being able to sell it to their clients. So products will be able to spread through the network, and partners can potentially team up with one another on new open source projects on top of the OpenGeo core, and collaborate with OpenGeo on the productization of these. Having a number of diverse products built on top of the core will help make that center stronger for everyone, and all will benefit from advances to that core. Right now this is probably a year or two in the future, but we are working now to make the solid foundation for that to happen, and believe that big future successes will come from the network, not from OpenGeo itself. OpenGeo just wants to be along for the ride, and do what we can to encourage it.
The great thing about geospatial is that it underpins almost everything we do, so there is a myriad of software that could benefit from incorporating maps. And there are many existing products that make use of maps in some way, but they tend to be desktop-based and more expensive than they need to be because they must bundle proprietary software.
Potential industries and products include:
Fixed location asset management (signs, parking meters, stop lights, fire hydrants, roads, train tracks, solar panels, etc.), land information management, environmental applications, real time vehicle tracking (buses, delivery fleets, drones), insurance risk mapping, emergency response applications, risk modeling, spatial data infrastructures, agriculture management, urban planning, forestry, aviation, electric grid management, hydrography mapping, weather, redistricting, addressing. (Would be much better to do a whole section really elucidating a number of products that could make a difference in a domain - perhaps start an annex of product ideas)
OpenGeo Powered Products¶
As partners in the future start to make products on top of OpenGeo software we plan to extend the Enterprise Edition business models. This will enable partners to take advantage of the business relationships that OpenGeo is establishing, with a strong network and contract vehicles in a variety of industries. This will be an even higher level of partnership, something more similar to an OEM type of relationship. OpenGeo provides the core software and support around it, and the partner puts their own mark on top of it, but can offer their clients a top to bottom supported piece of software.
In this model since the partner is doing a majority of the work they will get a majority of the revenue. They will do the testing and narrow which parts of the OpenGeo stack they use. OpenGeo will then just support the core that they need. In exchange for the revenue passed back to OpenGeo they will get strategic input in to the core software roadmaps, as well as being able to tap in to the OpenGeo brand and expert developers. We also may experiment with things like contributing the majority of support revenue directly back to the underlying projects, for them to make their own cores better as they like. The goal is to give real value to partners who put revenue back in to the core, by ensuring that the base they build upon continues to evolve faster than any of the competition. That way they can focus on their unique additions, but also count on the fact that there are going to be a whole host of features developed by others that they can tap in to.
OpenGeo’s network will then increase in value to all, since it can be leveraged by partners with products to connect to other partners who may have clients with the same need. Instead of overlapping territories compete we will seek to set up the incentives to lead to cooperation as much as possible. Of course some competition is good, but it should be on the user interface and product value proposition level, not on the core technology. Ideally there are a number of different products addressing different market segments in different ways, but each leverages and improves the same core so that all products built on top of OpenGeo naturally evolve faster than any competition.
To add:
tech strategy - align with other open efforts, and other efforts in general, find key we can add. GS tech story, with freemarker, pdf thing, etc. Bends back on community. Some of this is tech, but here do the biz angle.
Other needed collaborations for open geo web, things OpenGeo likely won’t do, but want to encourage
- open source cloud (open stack)
- generic api key control
- openid/oauth
- gov transparency apps (open source socrata)
- mozilla, html5, web
- Foundation to support Open Data
