You know that the Open Source approach is gaining acceptance when even
companies not primarily in the software industry are
beginning to get into the act.
Founded in 1845 to make billiard tables, WDI’s parent
Brunswick Corp. is a $3.7 billion, 21,000 employee company, currently making
a wide variety of
products. Besides making and selling boats, marine-related items,
fitness products, bowling equipment, and operating more than 100
bowling centers, Brunswick today makes pool, table hockey, and foosball
tables. And through the Brunswick New Technologies group, Brunswick is
also getting into techier stuff like marine navigational systems, marine
dealer management systems, and GPS devices.
At first blush, this is an unlikely organization to create Open Source software,
much less an Open Source-based business. But that’s exactly what is happening:
Brunswick’s WDI is offering BIE as Open Source-based software, and selling support,
training, documentation and other professional services, even
using SourceForge as
a development management environment for BIE.
Andy Singleton, who manages Assembla, a site about managing distributed projects, and serves as CTO for three startup clients, observes, “There are economic incentives
for companies to release their apps under Open Source or at least Community
licenses…The company that releases the code that way will save on maintenance
and enhancements costs, since they will share those costs [with other companies].”
BIE is a Java-based application integration server that competes against (and can communicate with)
Microsoft’s BizTalk Server.
It’s available from Brunswick New Technologies’ WDI Group in a no-cost
GPL version and a variety of other licensed versions.
(By contrast, BizTalk can
plus operating system and hardware costs.)
Begun as an internal tool
BIE began as a solution to Brunswick’s own needs. It was initially developed for e-business use internally at Brunswick
for use by its business partners.
“We have like 10,000 dealers globally, ranging from small mom-and-pops to publicly
traded companies,” says Lambert. “Being able to electronically transact with
them was very important.”
However, a lot of the software packages available at the time weren’t a good fit,
especially for the smaller dealers, Lambert recalls. After evaluating commercial packages, WDI decided that in-house development using an Open Source approach made the most sense. “We realized we had to
do something that others could develop from … and that Open Source would be the
easiest way to do this.” Brunswick was already making use of Open Source, she
notes. “We have individuals on our staff with years of Open Source experience.”
The result was BIE, written in Java (requiring Java 1.4), capable of running
on platforms including Linux and Windows. BIE is an application-to-application
integration server — a.k.a. middleware — providing transformation,
translation, and transport services for applications.
“BIE talks among existing systems and makes them work better … if you’ve got
data and want to move it around,” explains JT Smith, director of technology at WDI.
“We knew we’d have to give it away pretty cheap to get it to all the dealers
and divisions,” Smith says. “Since there wasn’t a lot of money to be made in
that regard — it was close to giving it away — we decided why not give it away,
and give it to the Open Source community, and reap the benefits.”
Making BIE Open Source has had several benefits, according to Lambert.
“We were able to deliver the product faster. And making it available to
anyone interested was a key goal. Our sales cycle becomes free — you
just go download it.”
Lambert says BIE is a better product because it’s Open Source. “We can
leverage knowledge and experience of people in other industries we might otherwise
not, which is to our benefit. And this allows us to focus on the areas where we are
strong, like development, project management, support, and training, which is where
we provide the most value. Our revenue model is similar to MySQL AB’s — we sell
professional support, do training classes on how to use BIE, and sell advanced
documentation. And we recently launched our proprietary licensing program; we’ve
had requests from companies who want to embed our stuff.”
The choice of Java reflected the range of systems in use
within Brunswick, in part “because they buy a lot of companies,”
notes Smith, who said there’s “lots of BSD, Linuxes, Windows, Unixes,
Macs, mainframes, all kinds of stuff. So being able to run anywhere
was pretty important, and Java is pretty much the de facto enterprise
language, and it’s cross-platform. And we knew we wanted to work with popular
messaging protocols like Web services and JMS (Java Messenger Service),
and only Java would support JMS.”
According to Smith, Brunswick is using BIE for a wide range of integration tasks.
“We’re integrating traditional business transactions like purchase orders
and warranty claims, some data mining like from Sales to a central database,
some content integration with extranets so we can publish data to a Web page,
and data replication from user repositories to other places, so they’re
always in synch.”
“BIE can be used just for internal apps integration, but where we see the most
need is for companies with supply channel integration issue.”
For example, at one of Brunswick’s boat companies, where it had been taking
up to 90 days to see boat sales from dealer channels, BIE was recently used
to collect sales data directly from the accounting application and send
it back daily to the boat manufacturer, according to Smith.
“They now have much more accurate stats on what’s been sold — they’ve
gone from 90 days to daily.”
Using BIE also translates to hard dollar savings, Smith notes.
“Manual processing of an order costs about $50 to $60 for rekeying. If you
can electronically integrate it, that drops costs to about five dollars
per purchase order. And while some deals may have only two or three POs a
day, other dealers may have 50 or 60. And that doesn’t
even include the supply side savings, for any manufacturer integration.”
So far, BIE is looking like a big success. “We have over 2,400 registered downloads of BIE,” Lambert says, noting it is being used not only by three Brunswick
divisions, but also by other organizations, including Doctor Solutions Inc.,
the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, and a multi-billion-dollar
building materials company. “If you
count our professional services, support and training, we currently have
around 40 customers.”
Because BIE is available for free download, Lambert notes, “It’s difficult
to know exactly how many companies are using BIE at this point.
We have tracked a wide variety of industries downloading BIE, from major financial
institutions to major brands in the automotive space. We’ve also tracked a
fair amount of consultants and systems integrators that are evaluating BIE for their
customer’s projects.”
According to Lambert, “We are currently engaged with five software
companies, specifically in health care and telecommunications, that are
considering BIE as a complement to their software. Considering that we’ve
only been ‘out’ for three months, we are very happy with our success.”
“From the end users, we’ve heard nothing but rave reviews,” Smith says.
“They don’t know BIE is behind it, but they know they can get information
they couldn’t before.”
“BIE is quite amazing in terms of its simplicity, and the fact that it’s
built on other Open Source technologies,” notes Hugh Brien, vice president of Dunbar Consulting Inc., the systems integrator that worked with
the SEC for BIE. “That’s the thing that attracted us to it even more, that it’s built on top
of other Jakarta/Apache products, like Tomcat and Struts…. There’s a whole
series of Jakarta libraries there, regular expressions, the whole smash….
If you look in the library and open up the directory, there’s a whole bunch of
Open Source components there. So it wasn’t just like someone built
a proprietary product, couldn’t sell it and decided to Open Source it….
You could tell they were committed by the approach they used in
building and architecting the product.”
According to Smith, WDI developers will be continuing to enhance
BIE functions. For example, “The 6.0 release coming out later this year
will include full support for JMS and JBOSS.” They’re also looking
at functions to support use of BIE in more industries and activities,
including data warehousing and distributed computing.
“We have quite a few companies using or considering BIE for projects, but
they want the project information kept confidential,” notes Lambert.
“One company even stated that they feel BIE is a competitive advantage
for them and they don’t want their competitors to know they are using it.”
Daniel P. Dern is a free-lance technology writer.
Most recently he was Executive Editor of Byte.com.
Category:
- Open Source
