Do you ever get the feeling that you are living through a significant time in the IT industry?

I mean, in 20 years time are there going to be IT students sitting in a lecture (virtual environment I would imagine), making notes on how 2010 was the year that the proprietary software model tipped into terminal decline?

I have already seen the change happen in the world of content management. As we came out of the summer of 2009, hard on the tail of a global economic meltdown, something changed in the take up of open source ECM in the blue chip arena of business. Our projects suddenly shifted from strategic, point solutions leveraging the open source model of Alfresco to become main stream, enterprise adoptions of Alfresco as a chosen, strategic enterprise content management platform across global corporations and organisations. Not just on one or two occasions, not just in one or two sectors, but across the board.

This has continued through the first half of 2010, and has all the signs of continuing into the future.

Alfresco has come of age and is now seen as a viable, mainstream functional alternative to the large legacy ECM vendors and more to the point, as it is offered as an open source business model it delivers the cost savings required in today’s financial economy ,but with the commercial support required for such an important infrastructure usage.

When I reviewed a prioritised list of the top three business drivers that have influenced the selection and procurement of these Alfresco projects, it makes interesting reading:

• Features, functionality, commercial support, and defined product roadmap of the system either matches or over delivers against their specified requirement.
• Avoidance of vendor lock-in (there are considerable concerns over the increases in M&A activity within the ECM and Search space), and the openness of the Alfresco architecture to facilitate integration with their existing and future infrastructure.
• No requirement to raise capital expenditure for the procurement of software, and a cost effective operational expenditure for securing a normal, commercial support and maintenance service (typically this has represented a significant saving out of their existing operational budget for their current proprietary software support and maintenance, that they are deprecating as a result of shifting to Alfresco).

I am now seeing exactly the same thing happen in the world of enterprise search. The decline for me started when IBM acquired iPhrase, Verity acquired Ultraseek, and then Autonomy acquired Verity, thereby reducing the only two viable search giants of the .com era into one (Convera managed to die a slow and horrible death all by itself, with a pitiful asset stripping exercise as its swan song). FAST Search and Transfer rose rapidly in the subsequent vacuum, but alas resulted in the same inevitable conclusion i.e. being acquired by Microsoft.

In fact, you could probably summarise the only significant proprietary enterprise search considerations these days as Microsoft, Autonomy or Google. (I haven’t seen hide or hair of Endeca for ages).

Even Gartner are changing the way they report on the search space, dropping their "Magic Quadrant for Information Access Technology" and replacing it with a "MarketScope for Enterprise Search."

Therefore it is of little surprise that Lucene is now being downloaded over 6000 times a day and is being given serious consideration as an open source alternative.

And at last, the final barrier has gone.... you can now access a full commercial offering around Lucene to mitigate any of the risks associated with the open source model, whilst getting all of the benefits of no vendor lock-in and no capital expenditure to procure the system software. Lucid Imagination solved that when they formed.

So, why is this significant now in 2010?

Well, in the same way that I am seeing Alfresco being adopted as an enterprise content management architecture deployment, I believe we are also going to see search deployed as an enterprise architecture. An architecture that can deliver and maintain (as volume and complexity grows) the operating performance and financial benefits that good search can offer.

Obviously, if you are going to build an enterprise platform of content management and search that will underpin the mainstay of your business, you will want to ensure that the technology is fully supported, that you have an open and transparent architecture so you can control your own destiny, and that you have the back up and access to the product engineers on an ongoing basis should you need them (advice/training/tuning, etc).

That is why I believe we are seeing the cross over in the M&A world between search and content management vendors. Autonomy acquired Interwoven, Microsoft acquired FAST Search & Transfer; the options are locking down rapidly. If the rumour mill is to be believed, this is about to be further exasperated as it seems that Autonomy may well end up acquiring OpenText.

Talk about vendor lock in on a grand scale!

For me, the idea that you can deploy an open source technology stack of Alfresco ECM and Lucene/Solr search, with a full commercial, SLA based support offering, along with the flexibility to craft your own solutions, develop your own long term vision and solution, but with access to the original product engineers of the underlying technologies, is going to be the catalyst to further the adoption and maturity of the open source model. And in this financial climate, with the new UK Government adopting a serious approach to actively pursue open source and breaking the death grip of the big SI’s, I think it is going to become an unstoppable force.

I believe it is finally going to change the face of the software model for ever, and the Golden Age of Open Source has begun.

In my humble opinion!