In a open source system integrator business could you separate out the role of Sales and Marketing? I see an increased role of marketing in an open source business but at the end of the day you are approaching large businesses for projects which requires consitent sales effort.
Should there be separate Sales and MArketing Teams? What would be their ke result areas?
Comments
Sales and Marketing Roles are no different
Thu, 02/05/2009 - 18:58 — stepheA solutions/services company doesn't run differently per se because they use open source software in their offerings. The open source software provides additional tools to be used in the vendor-client relationship. If the OSS project is run by the vendor itself, then marketing has new tools in terms of getting the word out more widely about the value of the solution (providing you don't confuse community and customers). Even sales gets the boost of a [hopefully] more trustworthy public image based on community engagement practices.
Because the open source software provides additional tools, a vendor may choose to make more use of these new tools, and hire accordingly, but it doesn't change the roles of sales or marketing.
OSS Sales and Marketing
Fri, 02/06/2009 - 14:23 — roryNot sure I completely understood the question, but anyway:
Sales and marketing are different roles and are as different in an Open Source company as they are in any other company. That is not to say the same team/person cannot handle both but they need the right skill sets.
I also agree that for many systems integrators sales and marketing are pretty much the same regardless of whether they are working with OSS, commercially licensed software or (more realistically) a mixture of both. The real difference in sales an marketing is between OSS and commercially licensed software vendors. Larry Augustine has a great ppt deck which goes over some of the figures here and suggests that there is a far smaller role (in terms of cost) for sales and marketing in an OSS vendor.
As far as the integrators go, I think the only acception to the above, is where the integrator is working tightly as a partner and community member with a specific OSS project or vendor.Here tighter community participation and investment in the community may take over from stand alone marketing efforts.
System integrators becoming vendors
Fri, 02/06/2009 - 19:54 — ordnasI'd like to add one point to the discussion: System integrators who built customer-specific solutions based on FOSS will sooner or later think about tweaking these solutions to become more generic and to bundle them to offer an industry-specific out-of-the-box solution.
This is a tempting strategic move and FOSS makes it more likely to succeed and switch from being a system integrator to actually become sort of a software vendor. Reason being that FOSS compenents conveniently allow system integrators to add value on a higher level of the stack.
Nevertheless, such a move should be considered carefully, because the change of business structures and processes as well as the corporate culture is tremendous when transitioning from a system integrator to a vendor business.
Having said that, perhaps with FOSS, the distinction between system integrator and vendor is sometimes blurry to say the least.