OSS Adoption Becoming Ubiquitous

Gartner recently came out with a new report on open source software adoption . The wholesale adoption of open source software (OSS) across the enterprise seems to continue unabated. The firm found that 85% of companies are using OSS somewhere in the enterprise and that the remaining 15% plan too within the next 12 months.

Considering the looming recession, it is no surprise that respondents “consistently said that lower total cost of ownership (TCO) and reduction in development of cost-prohibitive factors were major factors for selecting OSS.” 

The simple fact is that open source software, with functionality that meets or exceeds that of older proprietary brethren,  allows you to focus your dollars where they are most needed: customization, marketing/fundraising, and service delivery. It no longer makes sense to invest significant money upfront for software licenses. Invest in what drives results.

Economic Crisis Makes Open Source Clear Choice

I have noticed recently that the pundits are aptly noting the growing importance of open source software. With the economic crisis, everyone is looking to cut costs and they will naturally look toward open source.

A great article in Express Computer relates that “Gartner predicts that by 2010 it will account for 20% of the global software market.” Open source is growing and, while the article outlines a number of reasons, I think Santosh Dsouza, Chief Technologist, Sun Microsystems, sums it up best, “There are a number of features in a product that only a few customers demand. It is not feasible for software vendors to spend time working on such features. In case of open source, the community contribution helps bridge this gap. This not only gives a customer more insight into the product but also helps in increasing the product quality as quality issues can be more proactively addressed and comprehensive testing can be done.” As software vendors have to tighten their belts (especially those that are publicly traded or trying to go public), you can bet they will have to cut back on staff and will not be able to maintain product velocity.

This is exactly why our ethos at MPower is community first. Let’s leverage technology and expertise across nonprofits so you don’t have to rely on us for everything. That way we can focus on the core product (product governance) rather than a bunch of customizations that distract us, which is what takes up significant amounts of most software vendors’ time.

In CIO, JT Smith recently did an excellent analysis of why open source will expand even more rapidly due to the economic crisis. Basically, there is an open source solution that is as good or better than proprietary solutions for almost everything you do.  As Smith ends the piece, “Open source applications don’t have one thing that their closed-source brethren have: licensing fees. Certainly you’ll still have support, deployment, and possibly hosting costs; but you have those costs with closed source software as well. The difference is that you’ll save the money you would have put toward licensing fees and now you have that to put toward implementation and support costs.”

I truly think moving toward open source makes great sense for so many organizations right now because of cost and flexibility. Some have asked me if it makes sense for smaller organizations without much or any IT staff. I say absolutely. Open source can be hosted and on-demand so you have no infrastructure issues (albeit some additional cost, but much less than hiring IT professionals). And even if an organization never reads or writes a line of code, they benefit. They benefit from the community fixing bugs and adding features, and they benefit from a better quality product since we remain focused on the core product. They can even become integral participants in the community through user tips, answering questions and getting top quality fundraising advice. 

But more on the community aspects soon. We are about to make some exciting announcements regarding the future of the MPower Community.

A Bad Economy Forces Good Decisions

Let’s face it: times are tough. This economic slowdown has seen giving slump more dramatically than in the past. The explanation is obvious…just drive by your local gas station, go pick-up groceries or look at the unsold homes in your neighborhood. Donors have less disposable income and are anxious about the future.

So, is there any good news? Actually, I think there is. The economy will recover—economies, like history, are cyclical by nature—and oil prices are already beginning to stabilize and drop from record highs. In addition, in recent days, we’ve seen a remarkable rise in the dollar’s value, making imports and goods, including food, more affordable. These are all positive signs.

Positive, macro-economic signs, however, do not change the amount of money in a donor’s wallet, at least not for a while. The reality is that we will see lower levels of giving at least into 2009 (remember, even when things get better, donors are cautious for a while) and maybe longer. There are no guarantees, and nonprofits doing their budgeting should not bank on year over year revenue increases.

Until things really turnaround, however, there are some creative and tangible things you can do to operate your organization more efficiently and effectively. Start by finding the most obvious place to cut costs without losing effectiveness or capabilities and if you follow the example of today’s most savvy companies and governments, that means focusing on IT costs.

Most IT spending today is incredibly inefficient. It relies on an outdated model of paying huge up front costs and ongoing license fees to lease software over which you have little to no control.

For example, how much do you pay Microsoft for desktop applications and back office applications (like Exchange)? The City of Washington, DC saved millions of dollars each year in licensing fees by switching to free (Google Aps) and Open Source (Open Office) solutions for their desktop applications. All of these are fully compatible with Word, Excel, PowerPoint and other Microsoft standards. How much could you save by doing the same? How many more lives could your nonprofit improve with the funds you’d save and have available for programs and services?

This is a large part of the reason that MPower made its mature and full feature constituent relationship management (CRM) solution available as an open source offering earlier this year. You have all the functionality (and more) of a product like Blackbaud’s Raiser’s Edge®, but your cost of owning and operating the software will be 40-70 percent less. Plus, you don’t have to pay huge up front fees and you are not beholden to us. It’s open source. It is as flexible and customizable as you want it to be.

Hopefully, the silver lining to these difficult economic times is that nonprofits will find ways to creatively cut costs so they can focus more dollars on the people they serve. Software, including but not limited to CRM solutions, is a great place to start.

Meeting Each Others’ Needs: The Power of the Open Community

Today ‘s announcement of MPower’s first user-developed product innovations marks another milestone not only for our company, but more importantly for the nonprofit community. We’re now delivering on the promise of open source CRM for charitable groups in a very tangible way.

The innovations we’re announcing and planning to incorporate into our product include: a comprehensive event management system that integrates with MPower; an application that provides mobile access to donor profiles in MPower; and integration with Enterprise Suite, one of the best solutions for shopping cart and eCommerce functionality (you can read about all of this in greater detail in our Aug. 7 news release).

There’s now a new paradigm for nonprofits based on collaboration, sharing and the best lessons each organization has learned. But it goes one step further because, for the first time ever, organizations are giving their innovations openly to the nonprofit community. Not simply the “how to,” but the actual software applications and integrations that have helped them cut costs, improve efficiency and raise more money. This is the beginning of the most powerful long-term pay-off of the open source CRM model for the nonprofit community.

Because MPower is open source, organizations are free to develop the features and functionality they need without waiting on their vendors’ slow-moving product roadmaps or paying those vendors large customization fees. These innovative groups also submit their product innovations to the entire community of MPower users. We at MPower follow strong product governance guidelines and submit all contributed innovations to a rigorous quality assurance process. We then document the new features and functionality and provide full ongoing support for them as part of the MPower product and code base.

Now you get total freedom to develop your own innovations and/or use and benefit from community innovations that meet your needs, all with full MPower support and at zero additional cost. MPower users get the power of top developers who daily are adding new features and functionality to address real-world problems unique to nonprofits. The result: product quality and velocity unmatched in the history of charitable organizations.

Now that is what I call a “win-win” situation that will allow all of us to be more efficient and effective in making the world a better place for everyone.

Nonprofit Software Superstar Embraces Open Source

The irrefutable momentum of open source platforms as the right solution for nonprofits – as well as Fortune 500 companies – continues its exuberant pace. Although the old software model still dominates at most nonprofit organizations — due to the clawing grip of legacy systems, entrenched costs and fear-driven hostage tactics of proprietary vendors, the savviest insiders in the nonprofit marketplace understand this model is dying.

One of the most significant validations of that for me is the decision of Bryan Klann to join the MPower team as Chief Sales and Marketing Officer. There is no one I have met in the past six years who better understands the confluence of nonprofits’ unique needs, limited resources and need for best-of-breed software so they can reach more people, raise more money to fund important programs and services, and ultimately fulfill their missions. Bryan is both a visionary and a practical implementer who drives real results for organizations.

While Bryan could choose to work with just about any company in this space, he has chosen MPower. The heart of that decision, Bryan told me, comes from his fundamental belief that open source constituent relationship management (CRM) is the right model for nonprofits both today and tomorrow. This is due to the cost-savings, robust feature set, and freedom that comes from the ability to expand the software’s functionality and adapt to changing situations and needs exponentially faster than any proprietary system.

Empowering nonprofits is something Bryan has been passionate about for well over a decade. In fact, Bryan helped pioneer a partner eco-system for nonprofits with Sage Software that uses service partners to design, deploy, support and extend the software. Unlike the other major players in the nonprofit software space, Sage did not try to lock-in clients with full dependence on the company for all support and services. Rather, Sage empowered nonprofits to choose from a range of partners to serve them. It is one of the reasons Sage has become the leading provider of fund accounting software to charitable groups (and why Sage is one of our valued partners).

So, when someone like Bryan steps away from the old model because he believes that the open source model is not only the best, but really the only, model to serve nonprofit organization’s long-term strategic CRM needs, I can’t help but be a little exuberant myself as well as humbled.

MPower on SourceForge

Your donors, your data…and, finally, your CRM platform

One week ago, MPower’s full feature CRM and fundraising solution was accepted and launched on SourceForge, the world’s largest online development and download repository of open source software code and applications. Now anyone in the world can download and modify MPower. If you are not technical, that may not seem like a big deal. However, it is a very important step in helping to drive adoption of the unique and powerful platform we provide to the nonprofit community. Let me explain, in laymen’s terms, what this means.

Historically, and with all other mature CRM and fundraising software currently available to nonprofits, you have no control to change, expand, modify or customize the software. Your only options for making changes to any software from the many vendors in our space have been:

• Lobby, beg, cry, threaten. You submit a “feature request” or something similar to the company and hope that a.) Enough other organizations are clamoring for the same feature (You would need at least 10 and sometimes hundreds of groups to also ask for this same feature to have a prayer) or b.) Your organization is high-profile enough that the vendor had to keep you happy (Unless you are the American Cancer Society, American Red Cross, or the like, good luck).

• Pay for a customization. Nothing gets a vendor moving quickly like thousands and thousands of dollars on the table. However, even then, software companies dislike doing customizations because of the inefficiencies and challenges in maintaining those customizations across upgrades and new release cycles. Because software companies do not like them, the costs of customizations are intentionally set prohibitively high. So, if you were ready to spend $10,000 to get what you want, then you might have a chance.

• Build externally and integrate – Assuming your software has a decent open application programming interface (API) with good documentation that allows access to the right data and applications in the software product (and this is still frighteningly rare), you could build what you need externally and attempt to integrate with your other mission-critical applications. This can work well, sometimes. But, anyone who has been through any type of integration process knows how time consuming and painful it can be. You also know that if you change anything, on either side of the integration, it has a bad habit of breaking.

True open source software provides another way. Since March, we have made MPower available as a free download (no license fees). But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Now if you want to add a feature or customization or just create a specialized application for your CRM system, you can do it directly. No begging, threatening, paying or unwieldy integration. The source code is yours. Just as you own your donors and decide when and how to build relationships with them, you can now truly own and manage your software to meet your organization’s unique needs. Rather than being reliant on the mercy of a vendor to choose what tools and functionality you get … you choose.

I have gotten a lot of questions recently about why we decided to go open source with our full feature software. There are two reasons:

1. We continually hear from nonprofit marketing, fundraising, development and IT professionals that they want control over how they operate and that includes control over their technology;
   
2. MPower as a company believes providing that control – which really is freedom to fundraise – is the right thing to do for the nonprofit community which should have the same powerful technology as the for-profit sector where open source solutions are widely used.

Now with powerful open source CRM readily available to nonprofits it no longer matters if we listen to our customers or not\ because they are not beholden to us. Don’t like a certain screen or the workflow of a certain module? You can change it, improve upon it and share it. Frustrated because some simple functionality you think should be included is not in the software? Write it, launch it, share it. No software company should be deciding what is best for you. Instead, why not provide the most robust, powerful platform possible , and give you full power and access to modify and integrate with the tools you need? To me, that is an exciting, market changing proposition. Instead of spending your time wrestling with your software and your vendor, we give you the freedom to fundraise the way you need to do it to help more people and effect change in the community you serve.