28 October 2006 - 22:57At Last! A Chink In the Armor
HP IS USING OpenLDAP FOR ITS ENTERPRISE DIRECTORIES! Read all about it here. This is the first non-LAMP (Linux-Apache-MySQL-PERL/Python/PHP) Open Source Project product deployed in the fabric of a leading global enterprise's Information Technology infrastructure (to our collective knowledge). You'd think it would be news.
Those of you who read this page and/or know anything about OpenLDAP probably know that Howard Chu, mentioned in the article as a key contributor to this work, is a Founder and Chief Architect of Symas Corp.. The speaker, Ragavan Srinivassan, neglected to mention Symas or the fact that the OpenLDAP code HP uses is a version of OpenLDAP that's not yet released by the OpenLDAP Project. HP is running Symas's Connexitor™ Directory Services (CDS) that contains code developed for HP, partially at HP's expense. The unreleased code is scheduled for OpenLDAP 2.4 (now in Alpha) but Symas's customers have been using it for a long time.
So, this story is not just about all the great work of the OpenLDAP Project but it's about HP's leadership in helping strategic Open Source Projects take the last step to Enterprise Readiness. It is also a story about the emergence of credible business models for commercial technical support for mission critical Open Source Software Products.
We won't bore you with the ins and outs of why this hasn't been more widely publicized. Howard and I (Marty Heyman), pitched CDS/OpenLDAP at the HP Technology Forum to 35 - 40 hardy souls. Only one left in the middle 
... we figured it was a success. We didn't know about Srinivassan's talk or that it would to be so complimentary. We might have gone (and Howard could have stood and told the world about Symas and CDS). Oh well.
HP's Information Technology organization came to Symas several years ago after an extensive evaluation of the avaialble Directory Services packages, proprietary and Open Source. As an aggressive user of LDAP Directories, they had serious talks with Sun, Netcape then Red Hat, and other providers during the process. They were well briefed on all of the changes that have come down the line since their decision. The decision was to proceed with Symas and CDS (OpenLDAP).
It is HP's perogative to say what they want about what they replaced as much as we would like to. We've been told they considered OpenLDAP the leading candidate because they'd proven out its performance for themselves and after working with Symas, even only briefly, they realized they would get better technical support and dramatically faster response to defect reports than they were getting from their proprietary vendors (and for much less overall money). Once we all agred on the contractual approach that let them pay for contributions to OpenLDAP and on the technical details, we produced quite a bit of the function that went into OpenLDAP 2.3 and even more that's coming in 2.4 (now in Alpha). HP is effectively running a pre-release of OpenLDAP 2.4, supported by Symas. As support manager, I can report that there's only one annoying issue we're all watching and that no new issues have been raised for some weeks. Everything else is closed. There are some non-critical development efforts under still to be completed, but CDS/OpenLDAP is running HP's Enterprise Directories just fine, thank you.
We think that's news. We hope HP will think so soon, too.
one comment:
A major win for you and OSS! Great work.
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