Jahia's Garcin: Open Source Software is the better option for Cloud Computing

“The cloud might be a deal breaker for many software companies, either from a licensing standpoint or because their software is not extensible.”

We sat down with Emmanuel Garcin, Vice President & General Manager of Jahia Inc., in Washington, DC to discuss the open source CMS Cloud offering.

Hi Emmanuel, thanks for taking the time to talk to us. In a recent release Jahiastated it has experienced a growing acceptance for hosted web content management, even among conservative industries like banking and finance, for both corporate websites and Intranet projects. Why is not everyone using the cloud?

Emmanuel Garcin: Some companies still have financial incentives to own their datacenter It really depends on the financial structure of the firm. Some prefer hardware that you can depreciate, in order to maximize tax deductions [CAPEX versus OPEX]. Most of our Cloud clients prefer to expense [OPEX] their web initiative spendings.

When discussing the cloud option with new or existing clients, what kind of concerns do you hear the most?

Emmanuel Garcin: Different types of customers have different reasons for looking at our cloud offerings. SMBs with low IT resources don’t want to spend on infrastructure. Large enterprises with datacenters still want the flexibility of the cloud, for example, to reach a new region. Thanks to Amazon, we have computing power all over the world. Companies also may want to get faster to market and bypass the  internal IT/datacenter processes which can be heavy and time consuming.

However, both types of customers hesitate to trust others to administer and secure their systems because they want to be able to monitor and back up the cloud themselves. Their concern is always the same:  What do we do when it’s down? Salesforce.com had the same hesitation in the early adoption phase. In our experience, Jahias’s automatic monitoring, security and backup option is often the selling argument.

What is the most convincing argument for using a cloud-based content management system?

Emmanuel Garcin: Number one is scalability. Not all software can leverage the cloud – you need scalable software that can leverage hardware elasticity. Jahia is fully scalable on demand, allowing the user to add throughput to the Jahia architecture at any time.

In addition to its scalability, Jahia is 100% accessible anywhere, anytime through the internet. However, some solutions in the market are only partially accessible through the browser and thus cannot provide all the benefit one could get from the cloud.

How do your clients calculate the ROI of using Jahia in the cloud?

Emmanuel Garcin:  There are two parts to the calculation: the Jahia standalone ROI, as described on our website, http://www.jahia.com/jahia/Jahia/Home/solutions/Benefits/TCO, plus the additional leverage of Amazon’s ROI, explained at http://aws.amazon.com/economics/.

What do these emerging cloud-based offerings look like?

First it is important to define cloud-based offerings in two categories: hardware (Amazon EC2, EMC, for instance), and Enterprise software offerings on the cloud (SAP in the cloud, or Jahia in the cloud).

From an IT infrastructure standpoint, hardware cloud offerings get richer and richer every day, converging towards extremely granular on-demand computing resources and virtually unlimited scaling capabilities. This is mainly due to the recent innovation in virtualization (that cloud vendors leverage) and greater standardization of interoperability protocols within middleware components.

From an Enterprise software perspective, it is obviously a different ball game. Additional flexibility for hardware means capacity-based software licensing scheme have to adapt. This is why Enterprise software companies, while making their product "cloud-ready", shy away from fully embracing cloud computing within their business model. SAP's Leo Apotheker states: "There are certain things that you cannot run in the cloud because the cloud would collapse. It's simple," he said. "Don't believe that any utility company is going to run its billing for 50 million consumers in the cloud. I believe, and John [Wookey] is there to help us, what we can do is to combine the two worlds."

In a nutshell, software companies can't avoid adapting to the cloud, but it still represents a niche and poorly analyzed market for them.

What is the greatest challenge for the cloud adoption?

The biggest challenge is not the client’s decision to cloud or not to cloud -- it’s for the software provider to adapt its business model to the cloud. 

Matching the pricing of Amazon can be a challenge for software providers. For example, when a large city organizes a U2 concert, their website needs only a couple of months of high processing power, to handle ticketing for instance, while the rest of the year remains low.

The cloud might be a deal breaker for many software companies, either because their software is not extensible or from a licensing standpoint. Open Source companies are by default better prepared for the cloud because they don’t rely on licensing income.

We address the challenge with expandable software and a flexible infrastructure which provide a perfectly nimble solution for our Enterprise customers of any size. And here is no extra investment from our side as our software is free our model is transparent, and our support and services are always available at affordable rates.

To follow Emmanuel, please go to http://twitter.com/emmanuelgarcin.

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