November 4th, 2008
Palamida offers just the facts on new opportunity
The story you are about to read is true. A name was changed as an anniversary present.
The name is Friday. Theresa Bui-Friday. She’s a marketing executive. Carries a laptop.
Monday, November 3, 5:30 PM. Ms. Bui-Friday is on the phone talking about her employer, Palamida, for whom she is vice president of product marketing.
Just the facts. They started out selling services to identify licenses on open source in enterprises, then started tracking security vulnerabilities in same.
Now Palamida e-mails security people with news of the latest problems in their open source software. They did 114% of their 2007 revenues just through June. Ms. Bui-Friday should have no trouble making mortgage payments.
Here is what turns this from an ordinary Dragnet send-up into a real story. Nearly half of today’s security problems lie in open source code, and over two-thirds of enterprises have open vulnerabilities because these are not being patched.
What Palamida is moving toward is a system that can push out patches to enterprise security managers, making certain that their open source software is constantly updated and at least as invulnerable as commercial software.
“Some 9 in 10 open source projects lack professional support,” Ms. Bui-Friday said. “You’re not getting the patches.
“We looked at 3,462 packages and only 1 in 10 had a commercial service related to it. So open source software tends to be outdated. There is no one assigned to pulling down patches.” This makes it all vulnerable.
Palamida is currently focusing on the enterprise market, building relationships with security managers who can then push patches into their organizations, but what about the rest of us?
What about offering this to Linux Laptop owners, I suggested, to the growing mass market. Most open source users don’t buy code. This means they run old code. This makes them vulnerable.
A service that updates open source on your laptop would be valuable. It would be worth paying for. You can then fold licenses for that software into the bundle, finally providing revenue to consumer open source projects.
What Palamida has stumbled on in this case is a potential gold mine, and the last link in making open source, in the field, as stable and secure as proprietary software.
Case closed. Palamida will be sentenced to continuing revenue streams, and open source will be sentenced to relevance in the mass market.
Dana Blankenhorn has been a business journalist for 30 years, a tech freelancer since 1983. You can follow Dana on Twitter. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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| 11/05/08
