Likewise Blog

These days, it’s getting more and more rare to see in-depth reviews of products. The imploding publishing industry means speedier coverage and less time spent on everything, especially product reviews. So we were pleased to see eWeek is continuing its tradition of product reviews with heft by putting Likewise Enterprise through its paces.

Frank Ohlhorst wrote up Likewise Enterprise recently, and we’re happy to see that he mostly gave Likewise a thumbs up. He tested Likewise on Ubuntu, Mac OS X, and openSUSE against Windows Server 2008 R2, and said he was surprised how easy it is to install and work with. We’re glad to hear that, because a lot of work has gone into making Likewise as easy to install and manage as possible. Authentication and user management should just work, whether you’re on Windows, Linux, UNIX, or Mac OS X.

The complaint Frank surfaced in the review about log in time is something we’ve been working on for our next release, and have improved dramatically in Likewise Open 6. Those improvements will be rolling up to our enterprise customers this fall, and we think Frank (and our users) will be pleased with the results.

If you haven’t tried Likewise yet, give Frank’s review a read and download Likewise Open 6 for a trial run. We’re sure you’ll be impressed with the results.

I’m often asked why Likewise invests in Likewise Open. Clearly the target market for Likewise is the enterprise market, yet we work hard to provide a set of core functionality under GPL/LGPL that allows any individual or organization to join machines to an Active Directory network for free. Moreover, that code would allow anyone to modify, extend, and ship the same functionality in a community project or commercial offering. How does that benefit Likewise?

The benefits of having an open source offering are not always immediately obvious. However, we’re in it for the long haul and see that the long-term benefits of being open source are good for Likewise, our customers, and the open source community at large.

Helping the Open Source Community

Some of the benefit that we provide to the community could also be derived from offering a proprietary but free-as-in-beer offering. But there are a few things that wouldn’t be possible if we only provided binaries.

First of all, providing source under an open license means that we can ship with Linux distributions like Ubuntu as part of the main distribution or in the regular open source repositories. This is a huge deciding factor for us, because we want to allow any and all Linux users to be able to interoperate with an Active Directory network regardless of whether their company is a Likewise customer. Many of our community members would be faced with using Windows laptops or workstations if they weren’t able to authenticate against AD, regardless of their personal preference. That’s not desirable at all.

We want to make sure that Linux, UNIX, and Mac OS X are first-class citizens in any network, and the reality is that many organizations depend on Microsoft Active Directory for authentication and user management.

We also want to enable the community to package and ship Likewise Open with any Linux distribution. We obviously can’t package Likewise Open for every distribution ourselves. But any distribution that wants to offer an RPM, Debian Package, etc, can do so without needing to ask permission from Likewise.

Another consideration is that an open source stack allows users and distributions to compile Likewise Open for other platforms if they choose. Most Linux users are running on x86 or x86_64 systems, but we’d be pleased to see Likewise Open running on PowerPC, ARM, you name it. These platforms may not be strategic to Likewise, but they’re important to many users. Being open means that the community can take Likewise Open to platforms we aren’t shipping on yet, and gives the community the ability to modify Likewise in ways we might not.

Benefits to the Customer

That’s all great, but how does that benefit Likewise’s customer base? For one thing, we learn a lot from our community about the core product in the form of bug reports, questions in the Likewise forums, and interacting with the larger community.

It also helps Likewise work with distribution vendors. Our partnerships with companies like Canonical and Novell are strengthened by the fact that they’re able to recommend Likewise Open to their communities, while offering Likewise Enterprise to their enterprise customers. Again, it’s very important that every user is able to join to their organization’s network, including users running community Linux distributions like Ubuntu, Fedora, openSUSE, Debian, and others.

And, of course, Likewise Open makes Active Directory authentication available to everyone. Whether it’s an Ubuntu-using developer in a mostly Microsoft shop, to a 50-seat art department using Apple machines inside a major corporation with a wholly heterogeneous network.

We also feel indebted to the open source community. The solutions that Likewise provides are largely in response to opportunities made possible by the Linux and open source community. We’re committed to sustaining that community and ensuring that every user that needs to operate in a heterogeneous network has the opportunity to do so. That’s why we’re open, and not just free.

We released Likewise Open 6 this past week and have gotten some great press coverage on the launch. Likewise Open 6 includes some  great enhancements including a smart service manager and faster logons in complex environments. With these updates, the folks in the trenches who have been tasked with figuring out how to control a heterogeneous environment now have an even more powerful and free tool to start this process.

We are picking up speed on development thanks in part to the large OEM partnerships we have — the likes of HP, Cisco, and VMware to name a few. These OEM’s are building their products around our authentication engine, and contributing back to the Likewise Open project. This should provide some serious comfort to those evaluating our product, and should they recommend Likewise as the solution to their companies project, they are keeping good company.

We also get great feedback from communities dedicated to some of our large technology partners.  Fedora, SUSE, Ubuntu, and other distros’ communities provide great feedback, which all goes toward making Likewise Open 6 what it is today.  We’re grateful for the contributions of the community, and want to emphasize the part that our partners and community plays in delivering an excellent tool for cross-platform authentication and single sign-on.

Keep the feedback coming, guys!

Today’s a big day for us here at Likewise — we got Likewise Open 6.0 out the door.

One of the struggles that all software development teams face is accurate and relevant testing of an upcoming release.  You could ask one hundred engineers if they believed that their software would experience some currently unimagined environment or use once in production and I believe that all one hundred would answer a resounding “Yes!” How can we “out-imagine” what productions networks throw at us?  Two words – Collective Experience.

Over the past two years, Likewise has been partnering with software and hardware companies to embed seamless Active Directory domain member integration into products.  Most  of our technology licensing and open source customers are familiar with the patch burden that comes from maintaining local changes to an upstream software project and have decided to re-submit changes back to Likewise for inclusion in future releases.  This expanding community of Likewise vendors benefits from the collective experiences of each shared through source code.

We strive to make Likewise a platform for application development.  Our engineering team has frequently discussed hosting a “Likewise Developer’s Summit” to bring engineers outside of Likewise together to discuss what they like, don’t like, and would like to improve in our platform.  I believe that by bringing good engineers together, we can create great software, and by bringing great engineers together we can revolutionize the Unix, Linux, and OS X software industry.

And that’s what I love about a technical community — it can leverage the collective experience of some of the smartest engineers on the planet to improve the contribution of everyone.

Likewise Open 6.0 is out the door, check it out here.  Join our community in the Likewise forums, mailing lists, or maybe even at a future LDS.

There are several reasons why Likewise Open dominates our category (and for the record, with something like 60 times the adoption of our nearest competitor).  Two primary reasons have been the technical strength of the product and its availability under a free open source license.  Years after we released Likewise Open, an astounding 50,000 organizations are using it and Likewise Enterprise to authenticate, secure, and manage Linux, Unix, and Mac – providing a single identity store with single sign-on across multiple platforms and leveraging organizations’ existing infrastructure and investment in Active Directory (and share files across those systems).

Open source isn’t just about free software. When done correctly it’s about building a company with a very different model–a model that allows us to invest more heavily in software engineers than our competitors.  For our premium product, we can charge less for a better product because of our development model.  While we’ve been driving continued year-over-year revenue growth, our computers have had the wobbles.  We’ve seen the following from our competitors:

• Repeated and ongoing layoffs of developers and sales personnel
• Investment then pullback from overseas markets
• Off-shoring of core development to China.
• Using marketing bluster to distract from technical shortcomings

We’ve continued to grow our primary US-based development team as well as our European development team.

Likewise Open is more than just free; it has an active community helping us build, test and improve the project — not just making it a great platform, but significantly reducing the costs of development, accelerating our time to market, while providing a quality product.  Companies like VMWare, Citrix, EMC, Novell, Canonical–not to mention hundreds of integrators that are part of the Likewise Open community.

Likewise Open has also proven to be an incredible on-ramp for those wanting to move to Likewise Enterprise.  And that doesn’t even take into account what we are doing with Likewise-CIFS – which enables file sharing across those networks.

More to come on Likewise Open.

Likewise Open & Likewise Enterprise can now use the Kerberos 5 credentials you receive when you login to your Windows desktop. These credentials streamline your work flow by allowing you to access network shares and printers across your environment without prompting you for your username and password. This is often referred to as “seamless single-sign on”.

Previously at Likewise we have linked to a third-party compiled PuTTY–a SSH client for Windows–as a way to use your Kerberos 5 credentials. Unfortunately, this version was old and had incomplete support for the Kerberos 5 standard.

We now have our own version of PuTTY that includes complete Kerberos 5 (GSSAPI) support allowing seamless single sign-on to Linux and Unix machines. You can now access your Linux and Unix resources via SSH just as easily as accessing a Windows file server or printer in your enterprise. We have tested this version of PuTTY against our supported platforms and can validate that it works seamlessly with both Likewise Open and Likewise Enterprise 5.3.

Download the Likewise version of PuTTY to start accessing your Linux and Unix servers via SSH using SSO today.

Great news from the Likewise development pipeline in conjunction with one of our great partners:  Likewise Open 5.4 bits are in the newest Ubuntu 10.4 Alpha release.  Likewise Open has been included in Ubuntu since the Hardy Heron (8.04 LTS) release in April of ‘08.

This marks the first time that Likewise 5.4 bits will be included with the Ubuntu release.  The 5.4 build is currently not considered a stable release, and so is not recommended for production use at this point.  For the latest stable Likewise Open bits, please go here.

Here’s what the Ubuntu community page has to say:

Major new version of likewise-open
The likewise-open package, which provides Active Directory authentication and server support for Linux, has been updated to version 5.4. The package supports upgrades from both the officially supported versions 4.0 (Ubuntu 8.04 LTS) and 4.1 (Ubuntu 9.10), as well as the likewise-open5 packages from universe. Since this upgrade involves a lot of configuration file changes and in-place database upgrades, testing and feedback is appreciated.

Some thoughts from Likewise senior developer Jerry Carter:

“We are all very excited about the inclusion of the Likewise Open 5.4 features in the Ubuntu 10.04 release.  The success of Likewise Open 4.x and 5.0 in past Ubuntu releases has been very encouraging.  With 5.4 we are including a new service manager interface for managing the set of likewise daemons, a new centralized configuration store which helps make future upgrades much simpler, and a rewritten client and server network I/O stack.  And as always, the Ubuntu server and desktop teams have been very helpful when navigating the packaging specific issues that cropped up.”

Finally, here are some thoughts from Gerry Carr, head of Platform Marketing at Canonical:

“Likewise Open allows organizations to manage mixed environments of Windows, Apple and Ubuntu users – enabling increased adoption of Ubuntu into the enterprise. Previous versions have proven to be very popular with the Ubuntu Server user base and we are delighted to be able to bring 5.4 to current 10.04 Alpha.”

You can get the latest Ubuntu Alpha 2 release bits here: http://www.ubuntu.com/testing/lucid/alpha2

Here’s some more color on our work with integrators.  While we work with IBM Global Services, Accenture, and Avanade on many of our largest projects involving Likewise Enterprise, we also have seen robust growth in our work with regional integrators, many of whom have deep expertise in open source as part of their practices.

Here’s a great Likewise write up from TooMuchGreen, a Leeds, UK based integrator focusing on Linux, Lamp, and open source solutions: http://toomuchgreen.eu/2010/01/wise-up-with-likewise/

“Likewise [Open] is a superb, quick and easy utility for both Linux and Mac which allows authentication (single sign on) to a Microsoft Active Directory network…”

One of our other integrators once wrote me an e-mail with the following equation:

Linux + LAMP + Likewise = goodness.

Amen.  The reason for this “goodness” is that we have offerings for system integrators that span from projects large and small.  Likewise Open is the best way  to authenticate Linux, Unix, and Mac systems into Active Directory for any size of project.  And it is free of licensing costs.  For complex projects that require group policy, audit, reporting, and event management we have a simple upgrade to Likewise Enterprise.

#1.  Blog more.  I met one of our early customers for lunch right before the holidays.  His comments matched what I’ve heard from others… you’d like to hear more from me.  I confess blogging doesn’t come easily for me; I was raised with a “do it don’t talk about it” ethos.  This is an area of personal growth and you’ll be hearing much more from me this year.

#2.  Double again.  Here’s some quick company history:  Likewise was founded in October of 2004.  I joined from Mercury (now HP) in January of 2005. We shipped our Likewise 1.0 product in January 2006 after about 16 months of development and also found our first customers that January.  2006, 2007, 2008, and now 2009 have all been high growth years for the company.  We just capped off a great 2009 with over 100% sales growth for our fourth consecutive year.  I’m forecasting at least 100% growth for Likewise in 2010 and expect that it will probably be higher based on our current velocity.  Adoption of Likewise Open and Likewise Enterprise is accelerating in large organizations and we’ve expanded our strong base of technology partnerships with companies such as VMware, Red Hat, EMC, Citrix, Novell, and Ubuntu.  We’re hitting on all cylinders and the IT spending environment is clearly relaxing.

#3.  Keep the balance sheet strong.  Our second quarter last year was important; since then sales have exceeded expenses.  This is a major milestone for growing companies.  A big part of that is the efficiency of our open source model and the significance Likewise Open plays in attracting large, paying enterprise customers.  It also allows us to invest, as a percentage of sales, more heavily in technical resources than our competitors.  We’ve had significant payoff with this approach from our customers and partners and I believe this is a big part of our high competitive win ratio.

#4.  Hiring, hiring, hiring.   We’re aggressively hiring as we continue to grow.  We have lots of open headcount in most areas of the company.  We’re especially looking for top technical development talent with deep knowledge of Windows and Unix architecture, directories, DCE-RPC, Active Directory, Kerberos, file systems, and other related technologies.

#5.  Likewise Open will continue to be a big part of the puzzle.  This isn’t so much of a resolution as a commitment to continue to develop and nurture Likewise Open.  I hear frequently from the Likewise Open community about the future and direction of Likewise Open.   Likewise Open is the foundation of our technology portfolio and as such we will continue to invest heavily in Likewise Open.  Our current monetization model is working very effectively and we will continue this approach in 2010 and beyond.

As always, I encourage and appreciate your thoughts and comments.

Happy New Year!

Barry

Just last week Ken Hess of Serverwatch and Jason Perlow of ZDNet extended an invitation to Likewise to chat on their Frugal Tech podcast.  Barry joined the show (about the 35:30 mark) discussing Likewise with two of the top enterprise IT bloggers.  Barry Crist, our CEO, gave an excellent overview of the company, and really touched on some of the things that make Likewise different, such as:

• Open source business model
• Likewise Open a standalone, valuable product for the enterprise that is completely free—not a gimmick to get people to go with the for pay Likewise Enterprise
• Strong company investment in technology and development
• Leader in authentication for virtualization

I suggest you check out the podcast http://www.blogtalkradio.com/frugaltechshow/2009/10/09/Frugal-Tech-Show-with-LikeWise-Softwares-CEO-Barry. Also, thanks to Ken and Jason for having us on the show.  You can subscribe to their excellent podcast either by RSS or in iTunes.