RE: ´ð¸´: [community] cooperation opportunity with South East Asia

[Guillermo Pastor García <gpastor@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Hello,

Andago Engineering is an spanish consultancy that is sponsoring an opensource 
middleware project for e-government purposes called OpenCities. We have no 
business model in Asia at the moment, but we are very interested to initiate 
it if we can get some support.

In our solution (OpenCities) we provide a framework to develop and to build 
the basis for e-government systems in small and medium organizations, like 
city and county councils. Our approach have the ability to grow and to evolve 
covering the full collection of administrative processes of such 
organizations, and it is able to integrate legacy back-office systems with 
the final citizen e-services. We made a presentation in the past ObjectWebCon 
in Paris.

Initially, we are very interested in this opportunity and we are convinced 
that OpenCities project could be the solution for the e-government 
development in the South East Asia, as well as in the spanish environment.

If you need further details, please don't hesitate to contact with me.

Regards

__________________________________
Guillermo Pastor García
IT Product Manager
ANDAGO INGENIERIA
Alcalde Angel Arroyo , 10-2º
Getafe, MADRID 28903

tfno: +34 91 601 13 73
fax:  +34 91 601 13 72
mail: gpastor@xxxxxxxxxx
web: http://www.andago.com

-----Mensaje original-----
De: Hongbo Xu[HgSoft] [mailto:hx@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] 
Enviado el: miércoles, 15 de febrero de 2006 1:27
Para: 'David Li'; stephane.traumat@xxxxxxxx
CC: julie.marguerite@xxxxxxxxxxxxx; 'Benjamin Mestrallet'; 
legal-entity@xxxxxxxxxxxxx; community@xxxxxxxxxxxxx; fbancilhon@xxxxxxxxxxxx; 
gregory.lopez@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Asunto: 答复: [community] cooperation opportunity with South East Asia

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
>