It's a man's world. That's common knowledge; it seems to be especially true in the land of IT, and even more so in the world of Linux and open source. The gender bar is so high that some women must feel as if Baud declared, "I love the smell of testosterone in the morning," as he set out to create career paths in these communities.
But hold on, pilgrim. There have always been those among us who refuse to accept a gender-specified place in the community. There's amazing Grace Hopper, for one, and Carly Fiorina, CEO at Hewlett-Packard, for another. And there's Bonnie Crater, CEO of OpenSales, as well.
I have to admit that when I first met Crater, I assumed that she was with OpenSales' public relations department. My daughter would not have been proud of me for making that assumption, and rightfully so. After all, when she achieved her dream of becoming a NASCAR driver and competed in that sport for five years, she did her part to remove a lot of gender-based role restrictions from my psyche.
Having made peace with my male ego, I recently asked Crater what it was like to be the CEO of an open source firm, a role that seats her at the captain's table in the very heart of the "boys' club." Her response was revealing. Where others see adversity, long odds, and bias, Crater sees nothing but opportunity. She told me, "I think we are very fortunate in our industry where it really doesn't matter if you are a man or a woman in these various roles ... I firmly believe that our industry has provided opportunity for lots of women to be successful and I am fortunate to be one of them."
With that sort of leadership at the helm, a lot traditional firms offering proprietary e-commerce products have even more reason to start worrying about an open source contender moving into their space.
Crater at OpenSales
OpenSales was founded in 1998 by the Ferber boys, Rob and Glenn. (Actually, the two are not related; they simply share the same last name.) Rob was previously with eToys and Glenn was with American Digital Media. Crater joined the firm as CEO in December of 1999.
Currently, the company's primary software offerings are OpenSales AllCommerce and OpenSales Retailer. Both are written in Perl, covered by the GPL, and available for download from OpenSales' developer site (see Resources for a link). The company's business model, of course, is to give away the software and sell service.
Crater's background is in traditional software and services. She cut her management teeth with Oracle, where she ended up as a VP managing two divisions. She also served time with Liberate.com and Netscape before joining OpenSales. But she is sold on open source, primarily because it gets software to customers at a much lower cost than the traditional business model does.
One firm buying OpenSales' services at present is NutriPeak, the second largest distributor of sports and health nutritional supplements in the world. NutriPeak's rapid growth, sparked by its acquisition of a chain of stores in California and another e-commerce firm, has left it with two sales channels: one for online sales and one for brick and mortar purchases. Quite naturally, NutriPeak's goal is to come up with a single system to handle both chores, and that's where OpenSales comes in.
Crater said, "We have been working jointly to build a new click-and-mortar system. We'll be adding two new modules to our product, a POS module and a warehousing module, later on this year."
Although OpenSales focuses primarily on customers from the ranks of the Fortune 500, small firms can still take advantage of its open source products. CollabNet agreed last month to provide developer support by hosting a community of developers called OpenSalesXchange, where firms of all sizes can find developers to tailor OpenSales products to their needs.
Some firms are able to get along with just the code. Crater told me, "They have built some fairly sophisticated e-commerce Websites using the software, with very little help from us -- a few questions here and there on the development mailing list and away they have gone."
The beauty of open source at work: later users of the software will benefit from the addition of the NutriPeak modules, as well as from enhancements added through OpenSalesXChange. As the CTO of another open source firm told me recently, the decision to make your most valuable asset, your source code, free for the asking is a difficult one to make. But he pointed out that it is also inevitable. Open source is not just for kernels and operating system utilities any longer; it is spreading to every application niche.
The addition of the POS module to the OpenSales product line could be huge. I know from personal experience coding retail POS applications that every major retailer in the world is keenly interested in finding a single software product to handle both traditional and online commerce. Pick a retailer: it's either looking for a product or working on one. For all the proprietary software firms out there slugging it out to provide that product, the fact that they will soon have competition from the world of open source does not bode well.
OpenSales is also hard at work on other additions to its product line. By the end of the year the company expects to have two new modules available: one that ISPs or ASPs can use to host multiple e-commerce sites, and another for customers who are building exchanges.
Crater is obviously bright. It doesn't hurt that she is also tough. In her first year as CEO, she has led the firm through a head-to-head competition with Microsoft to win an e-commerce development contract for a well-known firm in New York. If OpenSales is the victor, it won't be because the company was led by a woman; it will be because it offered the best solution. If OpenSales doesn't win the contract, and to my mind this is the more likely outcome, it will only mean the company has more work to do. Open source solutions will prevail in the end. It's inevitable.
Resources
