IDC’s Kusnetzky exchanges analyst hat for marketing job

Dan Kusnetzky spent 11 years as a research analyst for IDC, and is a popular speaker at Linux trade shows and other events. Earlier this week Kusnetzky announced he had left IDC to sign on as the vice president of marketing for Open-Xchange, a company that develops and markets an open source collaboration package that competes with Microsoft Exchange. Open-Xchange has charged Kusnetzky with expanding the company’s reach in the market in a job that could be a return to his roots. Kusnetzky spent several years as a product manager and marketer for Digital Equipment Corp. before he went to work for IDC.

Kusnetzky says he had no intention of leaving IDC, but says Open-Xchange came courting. “I’ve been doing [analysis] for quite some time and I’ve learned quite a bit — like better ways to do research,” Kusnetzky says. “So I was approached by Open-Xchange executives, who I had actually known for a while because they were SUSE Linux people before Novell bought it. They’d found another piece of open source software they could get behind and they had a need for corporate marketing. We had a discussion over what I thought they should do, and it appeared to be old friends meeting once again.” They must have liked what he had to say, because they made him an offer he couldn’t turn down, and he’s been looking forward to “having quite a bit of fun” beginning in February when he officially starts his new job at Open-Xchange.

Frank Hoberg, Open-Xchange CEO, says Kusnetzky will be responsible for overall strategic marketing and product positioning. “To do that in a pretty new market like open source messaging and collaboration,” Hoberg says, “you need to have somebody who is really, really well-known in the open source market, that knows what’s going on, and knows how other companies and analysts see the market, and then position the product exactly.”

Kusnetzky likes what Open-Xchange is doing because “the idea of producing short-term value is something they can offer.” Kusnetzky believes organizations are looking to cut costs “at any cost,” and so any investments they make must produce measurable short-term results. He believes the company can compete with Microsoft Exchange and Lotus Domino for several reasons. “If we look at current software products, they have a requirement for asset management and license management, which means additional staff. Offering an open source software solution that has a lower cost and doesn’t have the requirement for all of the asset management and license management addresses that issue,” Kusnetzky says.

“Next, the new workplace increasingly has staff working from hotels, airplanes, wherever, and yet they still need to work with one another to exchange and share information and work jointly on documents. That’s exactly what Open-Xchange is,” he says. “But if you’re using software from Microsoft, not only do you need to have a license for the server, you need a client access license for each device you’re connecting to the server with.” Since each person could have two, three, or more devices, such as laptops, handheld computers, and phones, the cost could quickly become prohibitively high for small and medium-sized businesses or new divisions within established companies. “It’s not necessary to have a license with Open-Xchange,” Kusnetzky says.

Kusnetzky says that his strategy will not necessarily include trying to convince companies with large investments in existing messaging infrastructures to migrate to Open-Xchange. “I’m not sure that it is the best strategy for companies. I’m not suggesting people abandon years of investment.” Instead, Kusnetzy says, he will focus on approaching those companies when they are looking at expansion, either through internal growth or the establishment of new business units. “I would be targeting the new applications, where people were looking at ‘how do we create a collaborative environment?’ Quite often, organizations are constructed as a number of business units with different goals and different measurements and they have different tools. It’s an obvious opportunity to seek out those new opportunities where the strength of this particular set of software applications would match the needs of the organization better than the current selection does.”

Walking the walk

Kusnetzky says he first noticed open source software in 1994, shortly after he began working at IDC as its Unix and advanced operating systems research manager. “People started asking questions we couldn’t answer,” he says, “so the next step for us as a research firm was to construct a program to answer those questions.” It wasn’t long until Kusnetzky and his team of researchers became one of the “go to” resources for information and statistics on open source software.

Kusnetzky is one business executive who’s “put his money where his mouth is” when it comes to using open source. He uses it as part of a mix of technology at his home office in Osprey, Florida. “I’m running Xandros on the desktop,” he says, “and a tablet PC running Windows XP Tablet edition 2005.” He also has an “old Mac” and a Linux-based server appliance a company once sent him to review. He ended up keeping it because by the time he was done with testing, the company had gone out of business and he couldn’t figure out where to return it.