Open Source Research: One-on-One With Wikibon's Founder

Wikibon is a new type of IT research service for CIOs and other IT professionals based on an "open source" model. As its name implies, Wikibon's research is created and made available in the form of a wiki, enabling contributors worldwide to post content, add to existing content, and offer changes and amendments.

I spoke with Dave Vellante, founder of Wikibon, about his company's open source model, how it differs from traditional paid services, and its value to CIOs. Vellante is a former senior vice president of IDC, where he headed its hardware and software business.

How does Wikibon's open source model differ from traditional research services like Gartner, IDC, Forrester, Yankee Group and Burton Group? Unlike these traditional research firms, said Vellante, Wikibon's research is available for free. Wikibon makes money through vendor sponsorship of its research portals and through consulting.

"The material the traditional groups make available for free is emasculated," said Vellante. "The good stuff is for pay. The free stuff is teasers designed to get people to pay. Our good stuff is free and open."

A lot of research groups also have become "hired guns," said Vellante. "When research firms have become vendor advocates and write whitepapers for pay, they are being paid to say something positive. The research firms don't disclose that the vendor paid for the research. They fool the customers."

"We have great respect for Gartner and IDC," said Vellante. "However we feel the paid-for whitepaper business is a broken model. Akin to big pharma paying docs. It's tainted and half true."

While not every research group writes whitepapers that favor the vendors who pay for them, the practice is common, said Vellante. "I think many companies take vendor money for pay and will write whatever the vendor wants. Some produce junk, while others produce some good research wrapped in fluff to make the vendors happy. Either way, any criticisms are toned down to placate the vendors. These pieces are not very useful for practitioners."

While IDC does not misrepresent its vendor-sponsored whitepapers, said Vellante, the delicacy with which vendors tend to be treated in their sponsored whitepapers dilutes their value. "IDC has two businesses in my view," Vellante explained. "One is the numbers and data. The other is advocacy. I think IDC's data is very good and I think IDC in general does a good job of trying to be balanced. I think on balance they're better than most. However, when it comes to their paid-for whitepapers, you won't find much useful info for CIOs in these pieces in my opinion. In fairness, IDC specifies when whitepapers are sponsored. Most other firms don't."

Wikibon's open source model eliminates vendor bias, said Vellante. "Despite our sponsorship model, you won't find that on our site. It's a wiki and contributions can come from anyone. We edit the contributions to make sure that they're not rude or untrue, but opposing views are published and encouraged. Even if they're negative toward a vendor."

Relative to Gartner's for-pay research model, said Vellante, "our main difference is we're free and peer-produced. Free of charge and we're open source, which allows freedom of use. We're also open to Google's crawlers so all our content gets indexed. Other firms put all the best stuff behind a firewall and Web users can't get to it. As a result, we reach orders of magnitude more people."

Wikibon's research method is more open and democratic, says Vellante. "Our vision is to ask the community. Tap the knowledge of the community. We don't put the analyst on a pedestal to be the big guru. We want to be the source of quality information. And our information is not static. Our information in a wiki is organic. We can evolve."

To maintain and grow revenues, the traditional service firms also slice and dice their research offerings into increasingly more categories and specialties in an attempt to "squeeze blood from a stone," said Vellante.

Traditional analyst firms also make it difficult for customers to talk to analysts, said Vellante. "So many people buy these services. It takes a month to get in the queue to talk to an analyst."

"Everything Wikibon produces is geared towards the buy side," said Vellante, adding that "the sell side wants to reach those end users." The buy side gets everything for free, he said. As a free and open community for the IT buy side, Wikibon has built-in governance for its research that assures its truth and accuracy, Vellante explained. "It's open. It can be edited," he said.

Wikibon offers the vendor community a perspective on what users are saying and what they want, said Vellante. "From the users, the vendors learn what to put into their products and take out. They learn what they should watch out for, and what they should think about the economic value of the proposition."

The vendors see the value in interacting with the end users and gaining their feedback, and want to be associated with that, said Vellante, "so they underwrite the research portals."

Wikibon hosts open research meetings every Tuesday at noon in which topics are introduced and analyzed. Called Peer Incites, these meetings are modeled on the weekly analyst meetings Meta Group used to host, which Vellante says he admired and copied. "We invite the world and analyze the topic, explore it inside out, and rip it apart," says Vellante. Typically, 70 to 80 people participate in the calls, he said.

The open research model enables quick and thorough analysis of issues, says Vellante. "We've created this virtual organization. We can attack a topic in a week."

Besides free research, Wikibon gives CIOs the ability to participate in focused research projects that aim to solve the most relevant information technology problems, said Vellante. CIOs can provide input to shape the research projects and can enjoy the fruits of the findings.

"We've had contributions from many CIOs," says Vellante. "They feed into what the topics will be and how the topics will be covered in the rounds of research."

The Wikibon open research forum also allows CIOs to share information with other CIOs, he said, adding that "CIOs recognize the importance of sharing."

Typically the aim of a research project is to arrive at a useful reference model and architecture, said Vellante. This model is openly crafted and free of any particular vendor influence or agenda. "We create frameworks to guide the research," he explained. "What is the problem statement? What is the technology scan? What is out there? What's the reference architecture? What's the return on investment? We create a standard for an organization and the reasons for justifying the solution and cost to management."

CIOs who have participated in Wikibon's open research projects include members of major organizations such as Blue Cross Blue Shield, Johnson & Johnson, and Jensen, said Vellante.

CIOs also drop in to Wikibon just to read the free research, said Vellante. "CIOs are busy people. They browse the site. They read it. They're off."

Although some CIOs pay Wikibon for consulting and value-added advice, the bulk of Wikibon revenue comes from vendor sponsorships, Vellante said. The value for the vendors is in learning how they can improve their products and make their offerings more appealing to end users.

The current hot topic that Wikibon is tackling is the cost of building, maintaining, and searching silos of e-mail archives. "A big problem today centers on litigation and the enormous toll it is taking in time and expense to search large archives of information," explained Vellante. "Companies have to pay lawyers an obscene amount of money to search the archives. They are spending hundreds of millions of dollars on this problem. This is happening at 100% of large financial institutions and pharmaceutical firms."

"What everyone is doing is unsustainable," he explained. "They are shoving it all into an archive. It is not going to scale."

The solutions currently available for e-mail archiving and search are not adequate, said Vellante. The archiving solution from EMC, for example, "is junk," he said. "It won't scale. It's a fraud they're perpetrating."

Wikibon is attacking the problem through a dedicated task force, he said. The goal is to gather 50 organizations to thrash out a solution. New designs are needed for indexing, storing, and searching e-mail archives, says Vellante. "There is a lack of data classification tools. We need to classify the data at the point of creation. The tools must perform a technology scan and classify the information. The aim is to sketch out a reference architecture for doing this work."

Vellante left IDC in 1999 and founded a company called Barometrics that produced business intelligence tools. The company was undergoing a round of venture capitalization and seemed to be on its way to success in 2001 when the 9-11 attacks occurred. "The market crashed. The whole IT industry dried up," said Vellante. "After 2001, we hung on until 2003 and 2004. We thought we might come back. But nobody was buying IT."

His company sold off its key software business intelligence tool and folded, said Vellante, and he looked around for something new to do. When he came upon Wikipedia, he became enamored with its model. "The concept for the company is based on Wikipedia," he explained, combined with Facebook and the traditional research modes of firms like Gartner.

After the IT crash, said Vellante, "there were all of these analysts out of work, all this talent on the bench." He said he saw the Wikipedia model as a way to put these people to work and perform collective research online. Vellante said he had been investigating Web 2.0 technologies and was meditating at the sea shore when he saw a school of eight or nine dolphins leap out of the water. "It was a vision," he said. "All those dolphins leaping collectively. The idea for Wikibon crystallized and I knew what I wanted to do."

Building the site was a snap, said Vellante. "We put up a wiki using the same software Wikipedia uses. We put it up in less than a day for next to nothing."

Vellante started Wikibon with two ex-colleagues from IDC, Peter Burris and David Foyer. Burris has left to join Forrester Research. Wikibon originally was formed as a nonprofit entity, said Vellante. "We thought, let's put it up there and see what happens." The company was named Wikibon because it is based on the wiki, plus the French word "bon" for "good," said Vellante. Wikibon hosts its own site "in the cloud," he said.

The model eventually changed to a for-profit company, and so far Wikibon has been successful and is "cash flow positive, slightly better than breakeven," said Vellante. Wikibon has few salaried employees. Ninety percent of Wikibon analysts are part of independent consulting businesses, he said.

The Wikibon model is organic, said Vellante, allowing swift updating of the information. "Time for production is much less painful," he said. "You can make changes in real time. The wiki is truly collaborative. So much more powerful than a blog. A blog is not a truly collaborative tool. It's asynchronus."

Wikibon has been growing and expanding its amount of research and its diversity. In its first year, there were 500 pieces of research posted on Wikibon, said Vellante. "Today there are well over 2,000 pieces of research on the site," he says, "most of it by outsiders."

Wikibon is not the only research group that has embraced the open source model. Others include RedMonk, Freeform Dynamics, MWD, Enterprise Irregulars, and IT Toolbox.

What differentiates Wikibon from RedMonk and the others, according to Vellante, is that Wikibon provides its research under the open source GNU (GNU General Public License) and is truly open. "Like the GNU, we allow people to take our research and repurpose it," said Vellante. "You have freedom to do with it as you want." Other research groups copyright their information, he said. "Look at their research," saud Vellante. "They claim to be open source. I think their claims are dubious."

I checked the RedMonk site and found that use of its content is limited and is only free for "noncommercial" use. RedMonk says the following regarding reuse of its content: "As described above, our content is free for all non-commercial usage (i.e. for usage in marketing materials on your website, you'd have to contact us for licensing). Nor do we accept commissioned work of any kind. If, however, you'd like to purchase content after it's been published, say to support marketing activities, you're eligible to do so at fixed and discounted rates."

I also checked research on the FreeForm Dynamics site and found that its was copyrighted and bears the notice, "Copyright 2009 Freeform Dynamics Ltd." MWD Advisors' license is also limited. According to its Web site, MWD research is "Licensed under a Creative Commons License" with "Some Rights Reserved."

IT Toolbox also does not allow you to reuse its content without permission. The IT Toolbox terms of use state: "You may not post, transmit, or share Content on the Site or Services that You did not create or that You do not have permission to post, transmit, or share."

Enterprise Irregulars is a blogger site for analysts and consultants. It does not publish research. Because its content consists of blogs, it does not have a policy regarding reuse or restrictions on publishing research.

Like open source software communities, people contribute research and insights for free on Wikibon. Why? "People enjoy participating in Wikibon's open source research community and getting recognition," said Vellante.

Is the open source model here to stay, I asked? "The guys that are good will survive," said Vellante. "I'm thrilled to see this out there. I don't think open source will go away. The power is the user community."

	1. 08-23-2009 12:42
	Thanks for this article, as I was not familiar with Wikibon previously. Kudos to Wikibon for applying the open source model in a new arena. They seem to do a lot of content aggregation from other open sources (blogs, news feeds, etc.) as well, and that aggregated content almost seems more prominent than their own research portal content. I hope that they are able to gain enough traction to build a viable community and business model; ironically, the proprietary research firms that Wikibon is trying to differentiate itself from will be free to leverage Wikibon's content to add value to their own offerings (if they are smart). Registered

Fred Kauber