Ian Howells

A year ago I wrote "Howells Ten Rules for Open Source Marketing." At Alfresco we believed that open source was different and needed a different marketing model. Geoffrey Moore was at the root of our thinking when he wrote about "Darwin and the Demon" and markets being ripe for disruption in the form of marketing and business model disruption. We saw that there was no "cookie cutter," standard approach and tried to blend our experience in growing large successful enterprise software companies with some best principles from marketing visionaries such as Geoffrey Moore, who had a massive influence on all of us from Documentum. Since I wrote that article Alfresco has been downloaded 600,000 times, is actively used at over 12,000 sites and supports over 300 paying customers predominantly from the Global 2000 and Government. Alfresco in just over a year has become the cl... (more)

Make Markets Not War

This is the second part of my two-part series on open source market strategies and implementations. I previously outlined the 10 strategy rules for open source marketing and emphasized building new markets, differentiating, contributing, pricing and innovating, and the customer relationship. As I mentioned in part one, a year ago I wrote "Howells' 10 Rules for Open Source Marketing." Here we're looking at where Alfresco is a year later in its marketing approach. Many of our open source peers are adopting the same principles, and I believe this evolution of open source and the re... (more)

10 Rules of Open Source Marketing

I was lucky enough to be Documentum's first employee in Europe in 1993. While there, I worked closely with Geoffrey Moore and got "religion" about understanding not just the so-called "chasm" but the whole marketing model and its implications for strategy, marketing, product, and operational behaviour. I started working with John Newton in the late '80s and we recently discussed marketing models and their relevance to Open Source as well as Geoffrey Moore's new thinking in Darwin and the Demon. This conversation was the root of my thoughts on rules for Open Source marketing - n... (more)