It was as a satisfied consumer of the Drupal content management system that Bachana first realized the business success potential of moving away from proprietary licensing structures. “When we made a decision to do more interactivity on our Web site, we determined that it made the most sense for us to implement a content management system on an open source platform.” Bachana began hiring what he calls “open source gurus,” and he found their enthusiasm for community-based development contagious. “They evangelized within the company about the merits of open source. Having some new people in this environment, which had always been traditionally Microsoft-based development, well, they were sort of getting people excited about what could happen.”

It didn’t take Bachana long to connect the benefits of open source content management, such as drastically reduced capital requirements and greater flexibility, to meeting the needs of his clients. “I get really excited about solving business challenges,” he says, calling consulting a “buffet lifestyle. You get to solve challenges in lots of different businesses. We found a number of our customers didn’t have the budget to purchase licensed products. In university settings, or museum associations, or even more recently media companies, there’s been some issues around decelerating of their revenues. They just couldn’t afford [proprietary]. For us it was a logical next step to offer those customers open source.”

Bachana says DPCI also began getting requests from clients specifically for open source solutions. “They asked us to go out and recommend platforms in the open source world that we could help them implement and customize. When we first started nine years ago, we were either building custom solutions from scratch, or we were implementing proprietary solutions from big-name companies.”

Moving to open source inside and outside the company has benefited DPCI in more ways than one. “Rapid deployment,” Bachana says, is the biggest benefit. “Not only within the framework of Drupal, but other open source modules and components that we can integrate. And we work in a LAMP environment, so it is quick for us to implement new functionality that we want internally.”

Using open source software also benefits DPCI from a business strategy perspective. “One of the drawbacks of consultancies is that there are typically a lot of solo practitioners that can’t do the bigger projects. We use a team approach, and by matching this with open source, we think it gives us a strategic advantage, because the team can implement changes very quickly [for] our customers. That’s been a terrific benefit for us.”

Bachana says the challenge in open source is putting all the pieces together. “The market is not fully mature,” he says. “There are pieces to the puzzle that we’d like to see, like customer relationship management, accounting — all the different pieces you’d see in managing a business. There’s still a lot of satellite initiatives that haven’t converged yet. The disconnect is that there’s no one entity or group or central place where people are thinking about how all the pieces snap together. I’d like to see that happen, but we’re not big enough to effectuate that. We can snap the pieces for our own benefit and for our customer, but that still isn’t doing justice to the whole world. If there was some kind of roadmap, you’d see a lot more companies buying into the open source vision, in the same manner that they’re buying into Oracle or Microsoft.”

Bachana recommends starting your company’s open source journey at the Web level. “There’s plenty of resources out there where you can get information on the different platforms available. Implement Web servers first. Hire a couple of really great developers that know the LAMP environment and task them with getting a roadmap for the back office using open source. If you start that way, you could map all your needs to readily available open source solutions out there. But it starts with getting at least one person who is a technologist that could support them in the back office.”

Switzer used to work for Unanimis Consulting, a large ad space agency based in the United Kingdom. Today, he does work for them through Openads. Unanimis, Switzer says, is very much like Federated Media. It represents publishers such as eBay, Ticketmasters, and the BBC, selling Internet ad inventory on their behalf. “[At Unanimis] we realized a lot of our profits were going toward the ad-serving technology, so we decided to use an open source ad server to save money,” Switzer says. “Over the next two to three years, I made significant changes and improvements to phpAdsNew, and became the leader of that project,” while still working full time for Unanimis.

Switzer says that because he was working for Unanimis, most of the changes to phpAdsNew at that time were “solely for the benefit of Unanimis, without taking much consideration for what the community wanted.” He had a sneaking suspicion the community was much larger than just Unanimis users, so Switzer set out to prove it. “I wrote a script for Google to find out how many people had our tags on their files. It was over 100,000 domains serving hundreds of billions of ads a month. It was obvious that phpAdsNew (now known as Openads) was the biggest ad server network on the Internet.” With a community that big, Switzer reasoned, it needed to have a company backing the product up, rather than “this guy here and that guy there.” His entrepreneurial spirit jumped at the chance to create that company. Switzer soon left Unanimis in order to focus completely on expanding and monetizing the Openads project.

“The goal for Openads is to provide a platform for advertisers to be able to buy ads on publishers’ sites,” he says. “We’re taking the large community of publishers who have our software loaded, and creating ways for them to make it easy to get ads on their site. If you have a small site, you’d probably just get Google Adsense. Over time, after you start making more money, you’d probably add Tribal Fusion and any number of other ad products. Then you’d rotate them to see which gave you the most profits. As the site grows, you’d also get solicitations from advertisers who want to advertise directly on the site. That’s good, but it’s also getting more complex — which is really a barrier to entry into making real revenue. So we’re building a publisher platform that makes it easy for advertisers to click on a link, upload their ad creative, and pay automatically. We’re also making it easier for publishers to try out a number of different networks, to automatically rotate them and bubble up the network that pays the most.”

Openads derives its income from advertisers who pay for access to the ad space inventory, and from publishers who pay yearly fees for technical support, consulting, bespoke training, and custom coding, though that is on a limited basis, Switzer says, until the project can “build a community of developers that can help us out in that area.”

The biggest challenge in monetizing a large open source project has been meeting the needs of the community, Switzer says — “Trying to put together a structure so that they can have a voice, so I can really get new product ideas and direction for Openads to come directly from the community. I wouldn’t say they have been ignored, but there hasn’t been that structure. So, over the last six months we’ve spent a lot of time serving people — we’ve dedicated resources to reading forum messages and responding by building up the infrastructure, consulting with publishers, and getting venture capital investment to help with that.”

Landing $5 million in venture capital this past June has changed Openads “quite a bit,” Switzer says. “Before we had it, it was largely just me and a few developers, and so we would sit there and develop whatever we decided to and there wasn’t a lot of significant project planning going on.” Switzer says Openads purposefully chose Index Ventures to provide the majority of the funding, because “they specialize in open source and community-based products. We were very selective in who was going to give us money because the potential for taking a special project like this and overcommercializing it is there — but Index absolutely gets it. They know the value of using community to help drive forward the company.”

As part of the financing deal, Openads recruited Skype vice president James Bilefield to fill the CEO spot. “We were introduced to James by one of the investors,” Switzer says. “He’s somebody who really gets the Internet space. He absolutely got it. He really knows the value of community, and he has strong operations and management skills. It was a pretty obvious thing to bring him aboard. And by the time we were looking for a CEO I’d already known him for seven or eight months, and there was a level of trust.”

Switzer says listening to the community is the most important aspect of commercializing an open source project. “Take advice and direction from them in terms of new product features and even strategically positioning your company. We’ve not yet fully monetized Openads, and we’ve even ruled out some commercial options, because we spent a long time making sure all the features the community wanted were there. Monetizing an open source project is still an art, and there are people that understand the value of community and they understand the fact that when you’re the leader of a great project, that’s something incredibly special. Surround yourself with people who understand that from an investment perspective, and from a coworker perspective.”

POS System – MerchantOS is based on open source software. It’s web based, easy to use and affordable. At MerchantOS they make retail software easy.