Likewise Blog

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.

Jay Lyman has hit the nail on the head on the 451 CAOS blog regarding the open core debate. The primary reason vendors are exploring open core as a model is because customers have asked for it.

With Likewise Open we provide the features needed by our entire community, from individual users to enterprise customers with thousands of seats. The primary functionality, connecting to and authenticating against Microsoft’s Active Directory, is fully open source and benefits everybody. We’re pleased to be able to offer Likewise Open under the LGPL/GPL, and to know that this is working for more than 50,000 customers around the world.

Our enterprise customers have the added value of Likewise Enterprise, which adds a number of features to Likewise Open, such as directory migration, reporting and auditing tools, and single sign-on for enterprise applications. The added functionality in Enterprise benefits a very specific segment of our community, and we work closely with our enterprise customers to ensure we provide value here. At the same time, we work hard at making Likewise Open a solution that is robust and updated simultaneously (if not ahead of) Likewise Enterprise.

Simon Phipps and other open source advocates are right to watch for companies that would use the term “open source” abusively or deceptively. But this does not include all open core strategies. Phipps does many of the vendors (and their customers) offering open core solutions an extreme disservice by painting open core as some kind of nefarious lock in scheme. The converse is true: Many open core vendors are providing functionality that benefits an enormous user base whether they do business with the vendor or not.

Open core, when done right, provides value to the open source community and consumers of the proprietary software simultaneously. It may not be the ultimate ideal for those like Phipps who spend their time criticizing open source businesses that don’t achieve their desired level of software licensing purity, but it’s a workable solution that addresses the needs of the customer, community, and vendor.

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!

Virtualization has taken the one-to-one relationship of the physical server to operating system and turned it into a one-to-many relationship between the physical server and multiple guest operating systems running on the hypervisor.  As the management frameworks for running these guest operating systems within the hypervisor mature, creating in essence the “virtualization layer,” we are seeing an increasing amount of choice as out-of-the-box virtual appliances and purpose-built virtual servers catch fire in the market.

What is key here is the shift to a focus on the workload running on the guest OS – not the underlying OS.  Despite some vendor prognostications / protests, I predict the shift to a focus on the workload, meaning the applications / services the business cares about will continue and the OS will become more commoditized.  The key to success in this shift is meeting expectations of customers that the appliance or virtual server should just work with their existing legacy systems and processes.  If I spin up a virtual appliance, it must support seamless migration from (or integration with) legacy systems.

What is Likewise doing to support this shift?  Today Likewise provides platform interoperability for improved authentication and access control in virtualized environments for more than 75% of the hypervisor market (if you combine market-share for VMware and Citrix). Here’s what we do for each:

VMware embeds Likewise Identity Services to allow Microsoft Active Directory users to log-in to ESX/ESXi hosts.  VMware notes in a recent announcement, “As customers continue on the journey to cloud computing, they need to leverage existing security infrastructure for their virtualized environments,”

Citrix embeds Likewise Identity Services in XenServer, noting in a recent announcement, “It’s critical to provision users, applications and computing resources so that our virtualization technology has the same high levels of security as actual physical hardware.”

Likewise Enterprise then goes a step further, allowing users to manage authentication, access control, group policy, and reporting for demonstrating compliance for audit purposes across the physical and virtual environment, including the hypervisor and guest OS.  That end-to-end control allows organizations to address security–one of the main impediments to virtualization adoption.

With our focus on platform interoperability, we’re helping those progressing down the virtualization path focus on the workloads they are running, and doing our part to make the choice of what operating system on which to run a workload ubiquitous.

Exciting news announced yesterday — Likewise has joined the NetApp Alliance Partner Program — providing NetApp customers with identity management and authentication software for secure access control of NetApp unified storage systems. This will give Likewise access to Netapp’s technical resources (forums, simulators, support) and NetApp customers access to Likewise’s technical resources — what does that mean? It means a single system to manage authentication with a centralized policy definition point to control access to an enterprise’s most important asset – information.

What NetApp said: “NetApp is committed to helping our customers drive their businesses by making storage simpler and cheaper to manage,” said Patrick Rogers, vice president of Solutions and Alliances at NetApp. “With Likewise joining the NetApp Alliance Partner Program, together we can simplify storage management while improving security.”

So welcome NetApp customers!

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.

Bring us your use cases, and let us know if you would like to participate in an upcoming beta!

Recently I joined the Likewise Software team as vice president of Business Development.  One of the key reasons I joined the company was the increasing role I see Likewise playing in platform interoperability.  Take for instance one project–initially introduced a little over a year ago and more recently updated:  Likewise-CIFS client-side and server-side SMB/CIFS support, which  provides Microsoft Windows clients access to folders and files on Linux, Unix, and Mac computers.

We are seeing a broad array of use cases for the Likewise-CIFS server.  These include a Likewise-CIFS server virtual appliance, Likewise-CIFS as a NAS “head” on top of existing SAN devices, Likewise-CIFS as a front-end for cloud- based services such as Amazon S3, as well as supporting vendors looking to license our CIFS server capabilities as an OEM for a variety of other use cases (including HP and Data Domain).

Here are more details on a couple of use cases we’ve seen to date:

• We’ve had several customers in the midst of replacing legacy Windows desktops with Linux desktops on a large scale (1,000++ Linux desktop deployments).  These customers are looking to use Likewise Enterprise to manage authentication and provisioning of users leveraging their existing investment in Active Directory (for most enterprises, AD works, it is typically tied to the HR systems, and administrators know how to use it effectively for supporting group policy, reporting, etc…).  In addition, they frequently ask if we know of a solution to support a common home directory across Linux, Windows, and Macs where they can point their users.  Supporting this with the Likewise-CIFS Server running on Linux married to Likewise Enterprise for ease of user administration makes sense.
• Several OEM partners have begun embedding Likewise-CIFS in their products – an example would be HP StorageWorks.  The scalability, faster time to market, modular and tightly integrated code – as well as the ability to license under commercial terms – makes for a compelling option.

Do you have other potential use cases to consider beyond what we’ve detailed here?  We’d love to hear from you.

So I am out at Red Hat Summit for the fourth year in a row, and it’s great to see some old friends  — not to mention new ones (the crowds grow every year).

Speaking of old friends, one of our favorite integrators, Shadow-Soft, just won the Partner Catalyst award out here at Red Hat Summit. This kind of goes to show what I was talking about in my previous post: Likewise gives Systems Integrators so much flexibility — allowing flexibility of operating platform choice when trying to best figure out a client’s overall solution requirements. Not being tied down to Windows is rapidly making more and more sense for companies, and showing how Likewise can make Linux, Unix or Mac first-class citizens in a Windows environment turns many of our Systems Integrators into trusted solution providers. So congrats to the folks over at Shadow-Soft, you guys deserve it!

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.

Next week is Red Hat Summit and we’ll be flying our colors in booth 7.   In fact, this is our fourth year attending the event, and every year we’ve seen an increase in activity not just at the event but in the amount of Red Hat customers we are working with for Active Directory integration.  Yep, we’re big fans of Red Hat — especially considering  just how many of our customers use Red Hat as their primary server or desktop platform. And, we’re a previous winner of the Red Hat Innovation Award in the category of Enhanced Security.

As Barry Crist has noted, Red Hat is doing some exciting work in the Cloud, and we see them being successful there.  Our developers work hard to make sure our software, both Likewise Open and Likewise Enterprise, works well with Red Hat’s.

These are some exciting times for both Red Hat and Likewise, as both companies redefine the future of interoperability in the datacenter.  We’re doing this with commitment to community and open source,  focused and driven engineering and development teams, and creative thinking by our executives and project managers that dares to push the envelope.

Here’s what Tracy Lothringer, Director of Strategic Alliances has to say about Red Hat:

“More than half of Likewise customer server licenses are on Red Hat — so our relationship with them is a critical one. Red Hat is moving well beyond data center oriented Unix migration and is reaching into the broader market. We’re seeing RHEL adoption in market segments that hadn’t been using Unix previously — representing new growth for Linux.  These customers require solutions to unify their increasingly mixed environments.”

We’re really looking forward to this show.  If you’re going, please let us know in the comments, email us at info@likewise.com, or come see us in booth number 7!  We’re a ‘Silver Sponsor’ at this years’ show with a pretty good-sized booth, so we should be easy to find!  Stop on by and say hello, see a demo of Likewise in action, and enter to win an iPad.

Event Details:
Red Hat Summit – Likewise in Booth 7
June 22-25th, 2010
Seaport Hotel and Seaport World Trade Center
One Seaport Lane
Boston, MA 02210
www.redhat.com/summit

One more thing to mention–on June 29th (Tuesday of the week after next) we’re hosting a joint webinar with Red Hat titled  “Securing RHEL Servers with Likewise and Active Directory.”  The webinar is free and we’re encouraging show attendees to invite others in their organization to the webinar as well as anyone else who would like to join.  Register here

See you in Boston!