答复: [community] cooperation opportunity with South East Asia

["Hongbo Xu[HgSoft]" <hx@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Actually things are changing. Other than eGovt projects, we see more and
more large enterprises in China are adopting Open Source. For example,
Huawei (No 1 Telco Manufacturer in China and compete with Cisco worldwide),
ZTE (No.2 Telco Manufacturer in China), Ping An (largest insurance company
in China), and Chinese Telecom Operators are using OSS extensively in their
systems. Hence IBM, Sun Micros are actively seeking developer community
support for their "Open Source Software", and even BEA are taking OSS in
China. However, other than various Linux support centre fund by governments,
there is virtually NO systematical OSS support and service in the middleware
field in China, therefore I believe there is a opportunity here. 

FYI, JBoss is actively recruiting developers for its first Chinese support
centre.

In terms of funding source in China, from my past experience as a senior
manager in BEA China, and currently running GMRC (www.middleware.com.cn), a
government funded research institute in middleware, it is obvious to me that
the government are the largest funding source in terms of both as a largest
customer for eGovt, and provide R&D funds for scientific research and
innovations. From the government point of view, OSS is a strategic direction
to go for Chinese national core competency and foster innovations. Project
like Asia Invest will give us good opportunity to lobby the government and
seek main stream industry adoptions.

Regards

Hongbo

-----邮件原件-----
发件人: David Li [mailto:davidl@xxxxxxxxxxx] 
发送时间: 2006年2月15日 2:24
收件人: stephane.traumat@xxxxxxxx
抄送: julie.marguerite@xxxxxxxxxxxxx; 'Benjamin Mestrallet';
legal-entity@xxxxxxxxxxxxx; community@xxxxxxxxxxxxx;
fbancilhon@xxxxxxxxxxxx; gregory.lopez@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
主题: Re: [community] cooperation opportunity with South East Asia

Hi,

   There are several organizations supporting the ObjectWeb Chinese  
Project would also be interested in participating. However, I'd think  
there has to be some right mindset in cooperation. I'd like to offer  
my two cents here for the partners who are interested but not  
familiar with the regions.

1. Open Source in China

Well, money talks and there are still no money in open source in  
China. Microsoft, HP, Oracle, BEA, IBM and other are making large  
"donation" in the region in hope to catch the emerging market. These  
companies are funding the SME system integrators and software  
developers. Essentially, we would be competing with the mighty  
dollars from these companies as well as their products in such  
cooperation.

2. Open Source in the SI's mindset

Chinese SIs are used to work with very little support from the  
vendors. Take particular example in middleware, BEA offers only sales  
support (pre-sales and lead development) but almost no technical  
support to the small and medium size system integrators. In many  
regions outside of major cities like Shanghai or Beijing, BEA  
actually relies on their SI partners to provide technical support for  
BEA.

In another word, vendor support is not highly valued in China. SI  
pays for the business leads.

3. Open Source usage in SI

There are a lot of usage of Tomcat around but few are active in the  
community. The SI uses Tomcat as well as BEA dev servers in  
production environment.

Going to this region in the typically way of open source business  
(support and consulting) won't work because there are no value in  
them. The SI uses BEA's official system if the business leads come  
from BEA or just simply use Tomcat or BEA's dev server in the  
customers site. What do BEA think of this? Well, Dev license is  
better then piracy.

4. Customer's view of middleware system

There are two types of customers: one with deep pocket. They want  
biggest names: BEA, IBM, Tibico and etc. They are buying the brands.  
Well, same reasons Louis Vuitton boutique is Paris are packed with  
Asian faces. They want the most popular and expensive brands. Same as  
this type of customers.

On the flip side, there are penny pinch customers who practically  
asking for pirated version of the software and end up buying dev  
version.

There is a different value chain in the software business in China  
and for all of those who are interested in the region, you should  
develop a real business scenario before coming there. Try to figure  
out why you want to enter the market and what's your value proposition.

One major opportunity in China is with the issuing of the "Guideline  
for eGov Software Procurement" which states all eGov software  
purchase should use domestic produced software. Domestic software are  
defined as following:

1. Software developed by domestic companies
2. Software developed by foreigner or joint venture of which 50% is  
developed in China
3. Open Source software packaged by the Chinese domestic companies

Just my two cents.

David


On Feb 15, 2006, at 12:43 AM, Stéphane TRAUMAT wrote:

> Dear Julie,
>
> We could be interested in the Asian Invest Project.
>
> Scub is a French company specialized in J2EE and Open Source  
> softwares.
> Our main activity is to develop or help companies to develop J2EE
> applications with Open Source components.
>
> We are contributors of the JOnAS project (a bit of code, mailing list
> support, conferences, a book about it...) and we hope to go back to  
> code
> contribution soon (when I will have less work :)).
>
> Depends on the proposal details, but I think we could provide help in
> training, cooperation plans, advise and other things in the J2EE  
> domain.
>
> Regards,
>
> PS : Scub is a 4 years old company composed of 4 persons and  
> located in
> Angoulême, France.
>
> -- 
> Stéphane TRAUMAT
> Scub.net
> +33 (0)5 45 373 373
>