The open-source software (OSS) movement is formally about 15 years old and informally much older than that. Most people know that OSS provides them free software (at least without a license cost) with source code and much has been written about it from a user’s perspective. However, I’d like to encourage that healthcare IT vendors, especially those just getting into the market or those that are struggling to make sales in a tough customer climate (jaded by failures), seriously consider open-sourcing their solutions.
Why should a vendor forgo license revenue and give out their source code for free? While I know of dozens of good reasons, here are just a few great reasons:
Gain visibility for your product, eliminate long sales cycles, improve customer relationships, and build your market quicker because people will be able to download your products and begin to use them immediately. If they like it, word will spread. You can put together software and release more quickly and with greater frequency, since you’re not beholden to a sales cycle. By eliminating cost from the sales side, you can focus all your efforts on development and building a maintenance, customization, and services arm that tends to make more money for most vendors, anyway. You can also foster a community of developers around your product to help develop enhancements for free. This will reduce your overall development costs, help increase the value of the product, and make customers happier. And with a happy development community, your product will be able to get into more customers faster than ever before. All without a large sales force.
If you’re in a field with an entrenched competitor, open-sourcing your solution may be the best way to break the vendor lock-in that customers feel. Because your product will be freely available without license costs, a different group of people (the ones not beholden to the incumbent vendor) can make decisions about bringing your product in-house. Then, once in-house, you will have the ability to customize, enhance, and service your product by connecting it to the competitor already in the customer’s environment and help them “wean” themselves off the legacy vendor. Another benefit of this approach is that you will be seen as a “risk reducer” for the customer, not a “risk increaser.” By getting in there for free, you come in risk-free. By reducing lock-in to the existing vendors, you lower the customer’s risk of being handcuffed. Both are great ways to win and keep customers.
As an open-source vendor, you can be seen as the innovation and thought leader in your category. Because you don’t count on license revenue, your products have to win and be installed on their merits because they can be thrown out as easily as they were brought in (people don’t throw out million-dollar systems regardless of how bad they are, but since yours will be free, they can). Customers are more likely to share their honest thoughts and opinions, give ideas, foster innovation, and help you grow because they feel you are there for them, not for your license revenues. Overall, the “community” feel will simply improve your ability to get your product into the customer’s environment, which is, of course, the whole point.
So, should you open-source? If you’re looking to get into a competitive and entrenched field with big vendors and want to help reduce long sales cycles to get your customers to try your products, the answer is a simple “yes.”
Open source isn’t best for every vendor, but I do believe that health-IT customers are begging for the benefits that OSS can provide them.
Shahid Shah is a health-IT blogger and Java/.NET enterprise architect who has worked for CardinalHealth, American Red Cross, NIH, and COMSYS. His blog is The Healthcare IT Guy, and he also runs the HITSphere blog aggregator. E-mail: shahid.shah@netspective.com.