Likewise Blog

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.

Congratulations to team Ubuntu who today shipped Lucid Lynx Desktop and Server editions.  As many of you know Likewise Open 5.4 ships as part of Lucid Lynx.  We’ve worked on a number of customer projects with the Canonical team and we continue to see growth of the Linux platform in all areas of the enterprise.

I frequently get asked about the state of affairs in the Linux world both relative to the platform vendors and relative to the degree of penetration of Linux as a desktop and server platform.

I’ll focus briefly on the Linux desktop.  There are three types of Linux desktop projects that I’ve observed:

The Technical workstation. Often engineers, sometimes former Solaris, HP/UX, and AIX users, have also spent time with Windows before moving to Linux.  What Linux variants?  We’ve seen it all:  RHEL, SLED, Ubuntu are all represented; we also see Debian, CentOS, and Fedora.  This group of users are almost always unabashedly enthusiastic about using Linux and have talked to me at length about the virtues of Linux as a viable desktop platform.

The Single Task Worker. Usage includes vertical markets such as call centers, manufacturing, and retail.  Usually multiple workers share a single computer and the security settings as managed by the company are fairly restrictive.  I have spoken to users on several of these projects that were unaware of the details of the underlying operating system.  Their interest was usually in the application that they use to accomplish their job instead of the platform itself.

The Information Worker. Linux is clearly not a mainstream platform for the information worker today.  There is, however, a non-trivial number of early adopter organizations that are experimenting with new platforms and hosted applications in a way that is quite different than the dominant paradigm today — Microsoft Windows + Office.  Many of the interesting projects that I’ve seen involve desktop virtualization.  Some organizations are experimenting with allowing users to choose whatever platform they want including Windows, Mac, and Linux while they provide a tightly controlled virtual desktop environment.  There are some very interesting intersections between the desktop, virtualization, and cloud computing.

Likewise gets involved with these projects because organizations want to leverage the infrastructure they have put in place to manage their Windows desktops.  Almost always this includes Active Directory both for authentication and as well as using group policy to enforce various security policies and settings.  With Likewise they can bridge their Linux and Mac users directly into Active Directory.

If I look to our customer base, we usually wind up with the Linux administrator as a big Likewise fan.  By using Likewise, they are able to offload authentication and account management issues to the same helpdesk that already supports the Windows desktop infrastructure.  We also allow them to integrate familiar Unix tools like Sudo into Active Directory which can be a powerful and highly scalable solution.  One of our customers told me this was “the best of both worlds” from her perspective.  From the users point-of-view, we help organizations take a big step in the direction of single sign-on which means less complexity for the user.

Interesting article on virtualization and the cloud by Amy Newman at ServerWatch.

http://www.serverwatch.com/article.php/3871306/Big-Blue-Bets-Big-on-Red-Hats-Virtualization-Technology

Aside from covering the news (Red Hat/IBM and VMware/Likewise announcements) Amy makes some prognostications of how the virtualization market may play out over time:

• VMware wins virtual server market in mid- and large-sized enterprises.
• Microsoft takes the top position in SMB virtualization.
• Citrix owns the virtual desktop.
• Red Hat succeeds in the cloud.

Interesting.  Especially interesting for Likewise, as we work with all four of these companies.  We license portions of our technology to both VMware and Citrix; we partner with both Red Hat and Microsoft.  We know all of these companies very well.

Increasingly I’ve heard our customers discuss their Likewise deployments in context with their cloud initiatives.  Here’s my take on the cloud, enterprise computing, and Likewise:

• The cloud is nearing the peak of the hype cycle.

• For the enterprise, most of the action (meaning $s) is in the internal cloud.

• The internal cloud is the modern data center — highly virtualized with the promise of vast scalability with a utility computing model.

• Companies are looking for common IT services across hypervisors, operating systems (Windows and Linux), and management components.

• The internal cloud is a bridge to hybrid and pure cloud topologies for enterprise computing.

• Winning technology providers will be those that unify these various pieces and platforms.

• Many organizations view authentication and policy as the right place to begin this unification process.

The one thing I know for sure is that the winner of the virtualization/cloud scrum will embrace cross-platform computing.  CIOs want to work with companies that make the various platforms work well together, not ones that make the problem worse.

Many of our customers tell me that Likewise is a great position for the cloud computing revolution.  I agree.

Yesterday, we announced a significant technology licensing win at VMware.  After an exhaustive evaluation, VMware selected Likewise to provide our Likewise Identity Services (known as LWIS) to be integrated into VMware’s vSphere.  This will allow organizations using vSphere (with ESX or ESXi) to manage and control vSphere users with Microsoft Active Directory.  I thought I’d share some color and context on the announcement as this touches on a couple of meta-trends that are going on in enterprise computing.

To boil down what is happening in the industry around directories:

• 90% of mid- and large-sized organizations use Active Directory to manage authentication, access control, and policy for their Windows’ desktops

• There has been an explosion of identity information stores throughout organizations with the growth of applications (SaaS and traditional), server platforms, and networked technologies.   Usually these various pockets of identity data are not well integrated or synchronized across the enterprise.

• While Active Directory is often tied to the HR employee onboarding/offboarding process, it is frequently the case that many of the other application or server specific directories are not.

• Auditors regularly discover administrator accounts (a privileged user) for employees that no longer work at the company.  This is often a significant audit finding and can become quite a thorn in the side of the CIO, especially for those that fall under the umbrella of Payment Card Industry (PCI).

• CIO’s are trying to consolidate their numerous directories both to meet the demands of auditors around authentication, access control, and segregation-of-duties as well simply to reduce IT costs by eliminating duplication of efforts.

• Active Directory, because of it maturity and its widespread usage due to its connection with Exchange and Windows desktops, ends up being the master directory for the many organization’s consolidation efforts.

• Technologies such as Likewise Open and Likewise Enterprise allow non-Windows platforms and applications to fully participate in Active Directory environments.

By integrating Likewise Identity Services into vSphere, VMware is responding to their customers’ requests to integrate ESX/ESXi/vSphere privileged users into Active Directory.  For example, those customers can now set up an administrative group in Active Directory such as “esxi admins” whose users have appropriate privileges and policies as ESXi administrators.  There are also tremendous security and accountability benefits of having users authenticate with their own credentials instead of using root or shared credentials.  And, when an employee leaves the company, turn off their AD account, and they no longer have administrative rights to ESXi.

The virtualization war is heating up both on the Linux and Windows side of the shop.  Platform interoperability is going to be an important foundational element of for the eventual winner.  The CIOs want management solutions that work across the hypervisor, Windows virtual workloads, and Linux virtual workloads.

2 work days in 2010.  2 blog postings.  I’m all about PR in 2010.

Good Likewise article by the VAR Guy:

http://www.thevarguy.com/2010/01/05/likewise-software-ceo-predicts-100-growth-in-2010/

As the VAR Guy points out, I didn’t talk about channel in my “New Years” blog post so I thought I’d touch on it.  The channel has been a good part of our success over the years and you will see continued focus on this in 2010.  In fact, we’ve had particular success with Systems Integrators that have a natural affinity for Likewise projects.  We’ve found that SIs like open source projects such as Likewise Open.  It allows them to provide, without licensing fees, a world-class solution for their customers that require Active Directory authentication for Linux, Unix, and Mac systems (or non-Windows applications).  These projects frequently involve a healthy dose of services beyond the deployment of Likewise.  A typical project, depending on the legacy environment, may involve account remediation and/or migration services.  And although it isn’t required by us, customers frequently time a variety of Active Directory “clean-up” projects when integrating non-Windows systems.  Furthermore, we have a smooth and clean up-sell and value proposition when the customer’s requirements demand Likewise Enterprise (Group Policy, Audit, Reporting, and Events).

Last year we experienced strong growth of our OEM/Technology Partner channel.  From our relationships with companies such as EMC/Data Domain, Red Hat, Novell, Citrix, and Blue Coat we gained a platform to dramatically expand our channel interest  as their channel partners gained familiarity with Likewise and their customer demand for solutions addressing mixed-platform environments.

Several of our large VARs have told me that Sun’s pain has been their pain over the past few years.  While many have enthusiastically shifted to Linux, they still miss the heyday of selling expensive Sun hardware.  Likewise is a very natural extension for VARs that sell Red Hat or SUSE server licenses;  we have a simple would-you-like-fries-with-your-burger value proposition anytime they sell Linux in an mixed-platform organization.

Standby for more from us this year in the virtualization and storage markets.  Likewise-CIFS is off to a strong start… more on this later.

Tracy Lothringer, our own “VAR Guy” (actually Director of Channel and Partnerships) asked me to plug “partners@likewise.com” for channel partners that would like more information on working with Likewise.

#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.

I’ve had an interesting front seat to the PC operating systems industry over the last 20 years.  I started my tech career at Apple in 1985 and worked there nine years.  My wife twice worked at Microsoft having departed for her second time earlier this year.  Having lived in both the Bay Area and Seattle, I have had friends and neighbors that have worked for just about every significant PC hardware or software company in the industry.  At Likewise, I’ve gotten to know former, inner-circle Microsoft executives through our lead investor, Ignition Partners.  And I’ve personally been involved with Red Hat, Novell, and Ubuntu — we  have partner and/or licensing agreements with each.

So what do I think of Windows 7?

Our experience at Likewise with pre-release candidates of Windows 7 has been very positive.  Unequivocally, this is the best Windows operating system ever.  That Windows 7 bests Vista is no surprise but Windows 7 also clearly eclipses XP enterprise customers.  Those on our development team that have tested Windows 7 are almost effusive and this is not a group that dispenses idle praise to Microsoft.  The bottom line is that Windows 7 is a great OS for the enterprise in terms of user experience, performance, and stability.

So Windows 7 is the upgrade from XP that we’ve all been waiting for.  Except that you can’t upgrade from XP without doing a clean install.  This may hold back happy XP users that are unwilling to deal with hassles of a clean install if they have a nicely-functioning XP box.  Despite the upgrade issue, I’m confident that Windows 7 will be a huge commercial success for Microsoft and the PC vendors.

But Windows 7 may be bad for Microsoft in the long term.

I believe that Windows 7 will drive revenue and probably lift the stock… maybe Microsoft can even flirt with historic highs again in the next year or so.  So what is wrong with up-and-to-the-right revenue and stock price?

The enterprise action isn’t the OS.  Yes, Microsoft needs to defend this turf against Linux and the Mac and Chrome OS.  However, the enterprise game is no longer about the OS, it probably hasn’t been for some time. Virtualization has become the new platform and this game is dominated by VMware.   This is marginalizing the OS in the enterprise.  Success of Windows 7 may be like comfort food to Microsoft.  The OS is Microsoft’s “woobie” and a Windows 7 home run may only muddle the metamorphosis that Microsoft must make to be the dominate enterprise platform for the next ten years.

Likewise-CIFS is a Linux (or Unix) based Windows-compatible high-performance file server targeted primarily to storage solutions providers, but which has also drawn interest from large organizations.

I’m getting many questions about Samba. Here is the complete history.

Originally, Likewise incorporated Samba, particularly Samba’s WInbind code, as part of our solution. Over a three-year period we were a frequent and active contributor to Samba. We employed two members of the Samba team and had 3-4 other developers that were making contributions to the Samba project. We were a sponsor and participant at Samba XP.

However, we had challenges with Samba primarily around Winbind. Likewise Open and Likewise Enterprise are used by some of the largest organizations in the world to integrate Linux, Unix, and Mac systems into Microsoft’s Active Directory. One of our largest challenges with the Samba code was that it is very difficult for an administrator to troubleshoot issues and determine the cause of authentication issues. There are perhaps a half dozen (or less) people on the planet that can read and meaningfully interpret Samba/Winbind debug logs. Two of these worked for Likewise. Additionally two of our largest opportunities at the time were unwilling to accept a GPL v3 license. One of these was Citrix who now licenses Likewise Open to enable Xen’s AD authentication. Based on our experiences with large enterprises and on our customers’ requirements, we began to explore our options.

Initially, we explored a major overhaul to Samba and made a number of suggestions and recommendations to the Samba team. Most of these suggestions were not embraced. Additional challenges existed around licensing: Samba moved to GPL v3 and later when they signed Microsoft’s MCPP license.

After considerable internal debate among the management team at Likewise, we decided to move away from Samba. This was not an easy decision for us. We were concerned about our existing Samba team members, as well as the investment that would be required to write a new clean room implementation. We knew the value of developing a modern, modular architecture but knew that work was non-trivial and represented a significant bet for Likewise. Given the strength of our development team with a deep background in Windows-systems, DCE-RPC, SMB/CIFS, Kerberos, Linux, as well as Samba we were confident in our ability to execute. A little over two years ago we made the difficult decision to move away from Samba. Likewise Identity Services (LWIS), our own authentication code, shipped with both Likewise Open and Likewise Enterprise just over a year ago.

Likewise Open is a complete, clean room, ground-up, Windows-compatible implementation based on a modern architecture. We provide a modular, programmatic, solution that pays particular attention to clarity, extensibility and usability. This allows ISVs to easily incorporate our solution. The market reception to Likewise Open with LWIS has been overwhelmingly positive. Likewise Open is available under a GPL/LGPL v2 license or with a commercial license.

I’d like to be clear on my own perspective on the Samba project. They have accomplished much and should be applauded. They are a diverse group with strong opinions and they are not shy about stating them. Users that are happy with Samba should continue to use it. Happy Samba users are not our target market. Incidentally, if you are a happy Samba customer that requires support I’d recommend our partner, SerNet (www.sernet.de).

As part of Likewise Enterprise, we had written a CIFS/SMB client in order to implement our Group Policy features as well as our RPC subsystem. SMB is the protocol used for Windows clients to talk to servers. Right after we released LWIS as part of Likewise Open, a number of our technology licensees started strongly pushing us to release a CIFS server. Having seen the quality of our authentication engine (LWIS), they encouraged us to do similar work around a CIFS server. This was consistent with the original vision of the company and something we had looked at several times in the past especially given our deep development expertise around SMB/CIFS. The culmination of this discussion and subsequent development work is the release of Likewise-CIFS today.

It has been a very busy couple of weeks for the company.  Last week, we exhibited at both VMworld and Red Hat Summit (we were a show sponsor) and had a chance to talk with a large number of prospects, customers, and partners.

Two things struck me at these events:

“Likewise Open just rocks!” was something I heard over and over. Likewise Open has a loyal and fast growing fan base.  While I, of course, enjoyed the discussions and feedback in our booth, I was struck by the fact that I was stopped a number of times on the show floor simply from my badge (”Barry Crist, Likewise”) by Likewise Open users that wanted to pass on their gratitude and encouragement of the project.  One of my favorite comments was, “Now that is how open source is supposed to work.”  Last year, we won a Red Hat innovation award and we continue to get very strong support from the Red Hat customer base.

The second observation was that VMworld was dominated by storage vendors, several of whom have licensed Likewise-CIFS as the building block of their storage solutions. Virtualization is driving significant changes in the storage arena. There is a strong tie between what is going on in virtualization and what is happening in storage. Industry analyst John Webster wrote about this in this CNET article.

Likewise-CIFS is a our Linux/Unix based high-performance, Windows-compatible file server. We’re uniquely positioned in the intersection of virtualization and storage. We’ve licensed Likewise Identity Services (LWIS) to several of the large virtualization companies (we’ve announced Citrix… stand by for more announcements) and we’ve licensed both LWIS and Likewise-CIFS to a variety of the storage players (we’ve announced Data Domain and Isilon).   Stay tuned… more interesting things to come from Likewise in this area.