Welcome to the third part of  our little analysis of OSS business models (first part here, second part here). It is heavily based on the Osterwalder model, and follows through the examination of our hypothetical business model reaching the “key resources” part. After all the theoretical parts, we will try to add a simple set of hands-on exercises and tutorials based on a more or less real case.

The argument of this part is “resources”. Key resources are the set of assets (material and immaterial) that are the basis of the company operations. There may be physical resources (a production plant for example), intellectual resources (previously developed source code), human resources (your developers), financial resources (capital in the bank, loans) and other immaterial assets (your company name as a recognizable mark, “good standing” in terms of how your customer see your products…)

In our OSS company example, at least part of the immaterial assets are shared and publicly available, that is they are non rival. In our model we have a company that provides under an open source license the community edition of the software, while provides an “enterprise edition” with additional stability tests, support and so on. It is not correct to say that just because the source code is publicly available it is not monetizable; on the contrary, especially when the code is wholly owned in terms of copyright assignments it is potentially a valuable asset (for some examples, look at JBoss or MySQL). Even when the code is cooperatively owned (as in a pure GPLv2 with multiple contributors, like Linux) the “default place” is valuable in itself, and it is the reason why so many companies try to make sure that their code is included in the main kernel line, thus reducing future integration efforts and sharing the maintenance activities. Other examples that are relevant for the OSS case are trademarks (that are sometimes vigorously defended), “brand name”, the external ecosystem of knowledge; for example, all the people that is capable of using and managing a complex OSS offering, creating a networked value that grows with the number of participants in the net. People becoming RedHat certified, for example, increases the value of the RedHat ecosystem other than their own.

One of the most important resource is human: the people working on your code, installing it, supporting it. Most of those people in the OSS environment are not part of your company, but are an extremely important asset on their own thanks to their capability of contributing back time and effort. In exchange, these resources need to be managed, and that’s why you need sometimes figures like “community managers” (an excellent example is my friend Stefano Maffulli, community manager extraordinaire at Funambol) because exactly as you have a financial officer to check your finance (another essential resource) you should have a community manager for… the community.

To properly analyse your key resources, we can extend the network model created for the channel analysis (the actor/action model) and extend it a little bit, including the missing pieces. For example, we mentioned that a potential customer may be interested in our product. Who makes it? Of course, as any good OSS company, you have some pieces coming from the outside (other OSS projects), part coded by your developers and part coming as contribution from external groups. All of them are resources: the other OSS projects are key resources themselves, simply obtained without immediate cost but managed by some developers that are themselves a key resources; your internally developed source code is another key resource, and if you have large scale contributions from the outside those should be considered resources too, maybe not “key” resources but important nevertheless.

The main concept is: a resource is “key” if without it your company would not be able to operate; and whenever you have a key resource you should have a person that manages it with a clearly defined process.

Next: cost structure!

(now available: part three)

Welcome to the second part of  our little analysis of OSS business models (first part here). It is based on the practical workshops that we do for companies, and so it does have a little “practical” feel to it; as for its theoretical background, it is heavily based on the Osterwalder model, that I found to be clear and comprehensible. It could be adapted easily to other conceptualizations and ontologies on how to describe a business model, if someone wants to use it in a teaching context.

In the first part of our analysis we discussed the basic background concepts and discussed the first two aspects: customer segments and value proposition. As I mentioned before, the analysis is iterative, and should be done collaboratively (for example, by all the people working in a specific group, or by all the managers). As an example of why it should be iterative, we discussed the value proposition: by identifying several different value propositions, we inherently created different customer segments, that receive different value from our hypothetical “widgets, inc.” and this fact can be leveraged by differentiated pricing or different adoption percentages (if the user perceives an higher value, the potential monetary payment may be higher or it may be encouraged in adoption). Let’s continue with channels!

Channels: under this name we can place all the different ways our company interacts with the outside world. A common mistake is to consider only “paid” transactions, while (especially for open source software) a substantial part of value comes from non-monetary interactions. Examples of channel purposes may be sales, distribution (both physical and intangible), company communication, brand channelling and so on. Most channels do have a simple definition (“sales”) while some are indirect and outside the control of the company, for example word of mouth. As any iPhone user can testimony, word of mouth is one of the most powerful information dissemination vehicle, because it is based upon trust in people you already know, and knows what you may be interested in; the flash mob success of some online games on Facebook is a slightly modified version of this principle.

In channel analysis, the various actors in a company try to imagine (or list) all the possible ways someone from the outside may interact with the company or its products. How can a potential customer discover about widgets, inc. products? What actions need to be performed to be able to evaluate or buy? To help in this mapping exercise you can perform what is called the actor/actions mapping. In this activity you start by listing all the actors that may be potentially interacting with you, your users (potential or not), people that may talk about your product… Everything. You start with a simple table, listing the actors and the possible actions that they may want to perform. As an example:

1. unaware user: casually finds out about widgets, inc. through advertising, word of mouth, email campaign…
2. potential user: wants more information. Can go to the web site, download from a mirror site, ask friends, look for reviews of the product….
3. user: wants support. Contact through email, phone, web-based system, (if there is a physical part) may ask for replacement of something…
4. user: wants a different contract. As before, can use email, phone, a CRM system…
5. journalist: may ask for information to write a review…

The idea is to try to map all the roles, all the actions, and list all of them along with a sort of small description. Then, imagine yourself while performing the action listed within: who do you interact with? What are the precondition for performing such action? As for the customer segmentation, you repeat this exercise until nothing changes, and at this point you have a nice, complete map of all the in/out relationships of widgets, inc. with the outside world. At that point, you add a value to each channel, in terms of what does it costs to maintain it and what potential advantage brings to you. It is important to bring to the table all potential value (even negative value, or intangible) because for open source software a large part of the channel network will not be directly managed by widgets, inc. but will be handled by third parties that cannot be directly influenced. So, a very simple example: Acme corp. takes the community edition of our software, adds some bells and whistles and creates a nice service business based on that. Is it a value or not? It does have a positive value: enlarges the use base, may provide additional contributions; on the other hand, it competes directly in at least part of the user base. The decision on how to act (the strategy part) depends on what we want to optimize, and is something that is inherently dynamic; so as an example what is good in the beginning (when dissemination of information and adoption is more important than monetization) may not be optimal in a later stage.

This is one of the explanation for the change in licensing by OSS companies, after an initial stage designed to maximize recognition and community contributions; among the examples Wavemaker. As I wrote many times in the past, there is no “bad” or “good” license, the point is that the license should be adopted with a rationale; changing license (when possible) may increase certain factors and modify in general this global channel map for example by changing the percentage of developers that are adopting our software, thanks to a more permissive license. The various parameters of our model (percentage of enterprise/community, independent adopters that integrate our software within their products, return contributions…) are all dependent on many different external conditions that are a-priori imposed by how we manage the company. So, after the creation of our channel map, an important exercise is to try to estimate these parameters, or measure them if possible; this way, we can turn our model into a simulation, giving us insight and allowing us to experiment freely to find the best match for our needs. We will give an example of such parameters after all the pieces of our business model canvas are completed.

Next time: key resources!

(now available: part two and three)

One of the activity that I love is teaching: especially, within companies, helping them to assess their business model, and improve it. The first part is analysis; from the dictionary definition, “to separate (a material or abstract entity) into constituent parts or elements; determine the elements or essential features of”. This separation is fundamental – lots of wrong choices are made because some of the underlying choices are done without a clear understanding of what the company do, how it does it, what pays and for what. I will give a small example of such an analysis session, using as a model the Osterwalder business model canvas, that can be found here:

Let’s start with an imaginary company, “widgets inc.”, that uses the “community/enterprise” model, that is a fully open source edition (usually called “community”) and an enterprise edition, that is released under a different license, and includes things like support and additional features. There are lots of vendors using this model, and as such it should be easy for my readers to imagine their own, favourite  company listed.

The exercise is simple: we start by filling all the boxes, answering all the questions; the order that I suggest is: customer segments, value proposition,  channels, key resources, cost structure, revenue streams and the rest in any order. Let’s start!

Customer segments: who we are selling to, or interact with? Let’s start with the initial concept that not all customers do have a commercial relationship with the company. Some may be using the community edition, but may be users as well; the fact that they are not paying (yet) does not imply that they are of no value for “widgets inc.” The company may have a single segment or many segments; some offerings may be unstructured (which is always a bad thing, as it means that the effort for producing an offer cannot be automated) or simply everything may be dumped in a single bucket. The idea is to start from the differences; that is, different channels, different relationships, different profitability, different willingness to pay – every time you have a difference, it should be reflected in a segmentation of your customers. In a lot of situation this is perceived as a useless effort – especially if the company offers a single product. But separating customers across all the different variables allows for something similar to sensitivity analysis; for example, is the directly contacted customer more or less profitable than the one acquired through an indirect channel? How much do we lose by going through an intermediary?

So, let’s imagine that our “widgets inc.” is selling directly and through a reseller network. Resellers are providing additional reach, thanks to their own marketing efforts, so we have at least 3 different segments: users of the community edition, users of the enterprise edition that have a direct relationship with widgets inc. and users of the enterprise edition that are managed by a partner. There is a potential fourth segment, that is users of a potential “community enhanced” edition, for example a commercial offering by an independent vendor that enhanced the community edition and that is selling that in a form similar to our enterprise offering”. What can we say of these segments? The enterprise edition users are paying us (of course) and the profitability of each customer depends on the cost of servicing it (that changes if we follow it directly or through a partner); a reseller will require a percentage of revenues, but on the other hand it handles some of the support costs, and covered some of the expenses for getting the customer in the first place. The community users are not paying us, but can be leveraged in several ways: as a reference (for example GE is an Alfresco user, even if it was not paying for the enterprise edition, and this can be a reference with a commercial value) and by conversion. In fact, community users may become enterprise users, with a conversion ratio that is quite low (from 0.5% to 3%, depending on the kind of software) but that can become substantial if the user base is large enough. MySQL is a good example of such “conversion by numbers”. Sometimes segments are interlocked, in what are called “multisided markets”. An example is a merchant like eBay, that needs a large number of buyers and sellers to guarantee the fluidity of the market itself; it may charge sellers, buyers or both, charge only on trade performed, on publication or not at all (for example, using advertising to recover costs).

A common segmentation is also that based on size or revenue assumptions, so you get something like an SME offering and a large company (or administration) offering. Thanks to data from eBusinessWatch (an observatory of the European Commission) we know that the average precentage of revenues spent for ICT in companies is roughly the same for small and large companies, but this does also imply that smaller companies do have a smaller available budget, while larger companies may have a much longer (and costlier) procurement process.

Value proposition: the reason why someone would want to come to widgets inc. in the first place, because we solve a problem or satisfy a need. In our case, we have two separate propositions: one for the community edition and one for the enterprise edition. The community edition may solve a practical problem for companies (for example, document management, groupware, whatever), and thus gives a concrete value in exchange for the time necessary for the customer to install and adapt the product by themselves, including the potential risk if something does not work. The enterprise edition changes this proposition, by costing something (in monetary term) in exchange for an easier installation or better out-of-the-box experience, support, lower risk (knowing that it is possible to ask for support) and so on. The value proposition should be explicit (to give your customers, paying and non-paying, an idea of why it is useful to invest time or money in widgets inc. products), realistic (your company will not survive in the long term if the value advantage is not there at all) and approximately quantifiable. The value proposition may be different for different customer segments, for example a groupware system for a small company may not require to handle thousands of users; in general, the additional value of a feature or a structural property of your product is dependent on whether your customer is in position to use it, and this usually shows out in the fact that there may be different advertising for different segments, pushing only on those features that are relevant.

Next part: channels and resources. See you next time!