Selling software that sells itself: An interview with Matt Asay

Open source is changing not just how companies make software, but how they sell it. Alfresco's Matt Asay explains the new sales cycle and the skills that today's software sales people need to close deals.

By Don Marti, LinuxWorld.com, 08/16/07

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Hi, I’m Don Marti, and I’m here with Matt Asay, general manager of the Americas for Alfresco. Welcome, Matt.

Thank you.

Matt, your company just came out with a survey called the "Alfresco Open Source Barometer."

We actually went out to the customers of Alfresco. We have about five thousand plus registered developers. And also it’s those who have come to the site to register for a white paper or in some way they’re evaluating Alfresco and they want more information. So we had a mix of people in deployment, both paid and unpaid deployment, and people who were just kind of kicking the tires in evaluation. That made for, I thought, pretty interesting data. We didn’t set out to create a report from it. We set out to learn more about what our customers want, that we would know which platforms we needed to be certifying.

In some ways we would do that already, just through customer interrupt mode, where big customer X would say, "I really need WebSphere and DB2 mixed with Alfresco," and we’d say, "Yes, big customer, we will do so." We wanted to get a more macro level view of what our customers were using. And out of that came, I thought, pretty interesting things. Frankly, some of the data that came out of it was surprising to shocking to me. I didn’t expect open source to fare as well it did in our ecosystem. Our user base, at least paid user base, skews toward the Global 2000. So I figured that they would be using "enterprise class databases" and app servers or whatnot, or what they perceived to be enterprise class, and so the big proprietary offerings. But it turned out that that wasn’t the case.

In your results it looks like most of the users prefer JBoss or Tomcat. Since you’re a java based product, the app server, or serlet container is your key dependency.

Right. So on the database side the overwhelming majority preferred, I think it was 52 percent. I don’t have the numbers in front of me, but the majority preferred MySQL and PostgreSQL. And again, I talked with customers, and so I’m thinking, I shouldn’t go through names, but I know that this customer uses Oracle and I know that customer uses Oracle, therefore we must have thirty percent or so of our implementations on Oracle. And Oracle did have a significant percentage. I would have thought (Microsoft) SQL Server would have been a bigger percentage, but it wasn’t.

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