Open RAN and HashiCorp are making us rethink openness

While some enterprises looking at private 5G have followed 5G’s Open RAN development as part of their assessment or deployment plans, most tell me the technology is for network operators, and they pay it little mind. The announcement that IBM is buying HashiCorp stirred a lot more enterprise interest. As it turns out, both are linked to issues with the very concept of open technology that most enterprises depend upon.

Why do enterprises say they like “open” technology? Of 422 technology professionals who offered me an opinion in the last year, 403 said it was to “prevent lock-in” or “keep vendors honest.” I took multiple responses to the question, and another 385 said that it was for “innovation,” and 247 said “lower costs.” Through all the responses, there was a strong thread that vendors can’t be trusted. They will gouge you on pricing, stall innovation to boost their profits, pull products, slip schedules…you get the picture. Who’s afraid of the big bad vendor wolf? Pretty much every enterprise.

OK, but how do you square all of this “vendors are the axis of evil” stuff with this point: 379 of that same group, in the same period, said that over the last several years, they’d purchased a larger percentage of their technology from their dominant vendor? I didn’t get a lot of spontaneous guidance on that question from enterprises, but of 54 network operators I questioned on Open RAN, I did get some interesting views, and I think their input could likely apply to enterprises as well.

Of the 54 operators, 50 said that multi-vendor integration was getting steadily more difficult and costly, and that open RAN solutions were explicitly multi-vendor. Even more, 52 of 54, said that the “innovation” they’d expected from Open RAN hadn’t materialized (22 said) or was “significantly less” than expected (30 said). In all, 47 of the 54 operators admitted their policies were moving them toward a smaller number of vendors in 5G RAN, and 29 of these admitted they’d likely reduce the field to one vendor.

What about that greedy, lazy, exploiting, vendor you have to protect against? One CFO put it best: “We found vaccinating against vendor exploitation was too expensive, so we decided to wait till we caught the disease and then treat it.” This meant that open technology was a promise of an exit path from a bad situation, to be taken only if needed. Wait until your vendor does something you don’t like, then threaten them with migration to another member of an open ecosystem. Beat them up with openness, but go elsewhere only if you absolutely have to, and don’t try to pursue open-model tech on your own. Pick a giant source you can threaten.

OK, that’s the network operator space. Do enterprises really think the same way? For that, I offer IBM’s experience, first with Red Hat and now with HashiCorp. Why would a smart vendor buy a company whose product(s) are open source? The only possible answer is that the buyers of the product would rather get it in commercial form than in open form. Part of the reason is that it’s hard for enterprises to hire and retain specialists on all the open-source tools they might want. Part is because they want a deep-pocketed, legally-liable backer for their critical tools. Self-insurance, or being your own lawyer, is always a risk.

Some open-source supporters have been upset about license changes and other shifts that contaminate the original value proposition, but the biggest contributor to that pollution may be buyer/user behavior. Among large enterprises, in-house open-source expertise used to be subjectively rated as “high” by every player just a couple decades ago, but today less than one-third offer that kind of optimism. And among SMBs, the number who think they have and can retain the skilled people to manage their own open-source tools is in the statistical noise level.

To use open source, more and more enterprises rely on some large organization to back their bid, and that puts pressure on the open-source initiatives to adopt things like dual licensing to permit charging for some version of the tools. Enterprises cite the problems with openness as a reason why white-box network devices haven’t swept the market. Who backs a mixture of chips, generic hardware, and a couple layers of open-source software?

And how do you innovate in a complex ecosystem? Could a team have painted the Mona Lisa? I asked an enterprise CIO that question, and got a question in return, a better one. “Who would go to see it?” Putting that point another way, not only does the open-model innovation theory have to ask how a vision of a system can emerge from a series of parts suppliers, it also has to ask who has the incentive to promote it, and whose name can give it credibility.

That metaphor suggests another question, though: “How would the team know what they were painting?”

I’ve seen a lot of open-technology projects that were founded to do something useless, impossible, or both. Even more that had a potentially worthy notion that demanded organized initiatives to validate and promote it, which never came to be. Open RAN may well be a glaring example. OK, so we open up parts of the RAN model that the 3GPP work kept closed. What actual benefit, if we define “benefit” as something that can make a business case, does that create? Most suggestions fall into the “glittering generality” category, and the few more concrete ones have failed to pan out, so you have to question them all. Yes, it created a play for smaller vendors, but what kind of vendor is winning the 5G deals? Ones whose headcounts could fill a small city.

We have to go back to the opening point, which is that buyers see open-model technology as the final defense against vendor misbehavior. It’s a great theory, but what good is a defense alliance with a player who you allow to starve to death while you’re waiting for an attack? And how many guarantors of your defense will emerge if that’s the fate that awaits them all?

You can’t blame buyers here. There has to be a real value, not a simple threat value, to open-model technology. It’s up to those who want to advance it to ensure it can deliver that real value, which means that the promise of innovation has to be fulfilled. That means open projects, including open-source software, has to obey four rules:

• First, define a project around a need that’s truly and immediately valuable.
• Second, get everyone’s agreement to promote the business case, not the technology.
• Third, aim every project step at realizing that business case.
• Fourth, establish how collective support credibility can be established and maintained.

As a provider/promoter of open technology, you need to ensure these rules are followed. And you need to decide up front how media and web outreach will be managed so the project speaks with one voice.

As a consumer of that technology, you need to look at the things you’re thinking of adopting and be sure they address all these points – to ensure their success and your own.