Brilliant Thinking

One of IBM’s senior venture capital investment authorities is encouraging software start-ups to follow the money, and back the LAMP open source stack. According to Drew Clark, director of strategic insights for IBM’s venture capital group, building software using Linux, Apache, MySQL and Perl/PHP/Python (LAMP) is one of the key requisites for VC investment today. He also believes start-ups should examine delivery of their software online, as a subscription service like Salesforce.com, instead of via CD or in a box.

We’re glad to see that open source and software-as-a-service is getting a lot more interest - we have long beieved that the economies of scale, reliability and performance that the combination provides are well worth adopting in the SME market. The only drawback is the culture among the SME community of needing to own the product - a fixed, one-off fee - versus an ongoing license structure, but with a little innovation on the licensing structures we believe that software-as-a-service can open the doors for many SMEs to perform brilliantly.

Link: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/05/30/vcs_warm_to_lamp/