Transcript

Sandro Groganz: Hi Andrew. Thank you for joining me for this interview. You’re doing global marketing at Canonical. Please tell me a bit more about your role at Canonical.

Andrew Rodaway: I’m Director of Marketing at Canonical and my role is to promote the company and a range of products, primarily Ubuntu, our open-source operating system, around the world.

Sandro Groganz: How did you get into open-source marketing, or doing marketing for an open-source company and project?

Andrew Rodaway: Well, my last job was 10 years in the mobile space. I was marketing director for a company selling software systems for the telecoms community. Which in some ways is not so different from what we’re doing in Ubuntu. We address a global market place, we address the business and the consumer marketplace, and in many ways our business model is not dissimilar to the mobile community, in that we have a very, very large number of customers based in hundreds of locations around the world, and our aim is to increase the spread of our operating system to as many places and people as we possibly can.

Though my background is not really in open-source, what we do, is actually quite similar.

I’ve been involved with the open-source community for almost 18-20 years, I’m familiar with the background. When the opportunity with Canonical came up, it was just very exciting. It’s a great company, it’s doing very interesting things in both the open-source and the mobile space, and it is a company that I felt would be an exciting career move for me.

Sandro Groganz: You joined Canonical two months ago?

Andrew Rodaway: Yes, I only joined Canonical a couple of months back. So, it’s been a fairly steep learning curve in the open-source space for me.  It’s different work in open-source. I came from a high-end enterprise software business where we sold our software licenses for 1, 2, 5, or 10 million dollars a time. To move to a company where you essentially give away your software and have a different business model, is quite strange for me.

That said, I think there are some similarities because if you look at the average software enterprise company, they do perhaps 5-10% of revenues in software licenses and 90-95% of their revenues come from software and services. And that’s really the business model of us open-source companies: you give away your software in most instances, then you make money on the back end from support and engineering and maintenance and customization. So it’s actually not so different.

I guess the principal difference is the way that you use the ability of free software to generate excitement and buzz and to essentially market itself. So marketing is slightly different in the open-source world, because you rely on a huge community of enthusiastic users to help you market your products around the world.

Sandro Groganz: That’s what I realized when working with our customers at Initmarketing, that often they don’t understand that their community is their best marketing vehicle in terms of word-of-mouth marketing. Can you tell us a bit more about that?

Andrew Rodaway: One thing that you realize when you join a company like Canonical is that community is just the most important thing you have in the business. It really is, because without the community, without their support, their advocacy, their technical contributions, the relationships they do for you, you simply couldn’t do it. They are just absolutely vital to everything that we do.

Learning to work with the community, learning to appreciate the breadth and the depth of the community, the variations in the people, the personalities, the approaches, is an important part of understanding how a company like Canonical will succeed.

Though we don’t specifically market out to the community, a lot of our work is in support of the community. We produce materials and events, communications, information, Web sites, Wikis. They are directed to help the community go out and work with the Ubuntu and the Linux community broadly. That is an important part of my role.

Learning ways to engage with the community, to be effective with them, to support them, to help them and to deal with the occasional issues is a big part of our role.

Sandro Groganz: Do you have experience in contributing to an open-source product yourself like programming?

Andrew Rodaway: Well, I have a technical background. I have a degree in computer science, which is very important. You have to have that technical background and credibility to work in a company like Canonical, there's no doubt about that. I have a very, very small personal contribution: about 15 years ago or 10-12 years ago, I contributed about 6 lines to the Linux kernel. I helped fix a bug with a tape driver, that was an Iomega tape driver, but I can’t really claim any real level of technical expertise beyond that. Though as I said, I do have a technical background.

Sandro Groganz: Does it help to have a technical background to do open-source marketing?

Andrew Rodaway: Yes, I think it would be quite difficult to do marketing within the open-source community without that, without the understanding of how the community works, because you have to engage with very deeply-technical people, who often have no interest or no appreciation of marketing. You almost have to explain to those kind of people why you have a marketing organization in an open-source company, because there is always a disconnect there. They don’t really understand why an open-source business would need marketing. After all, you give the software away for free, so why do you need to market it? What’s the benefit? What’s the value in that?

Having marketing expertise, combined with technical expertise, is important to be able to engage with the community, to understand their thinking, to explain, to listen to them, to understand the technical benefits they want to communicate and to find ways to communicate those benefits outwards. But also, to come back to the community and explain why you do things the way that you do.

Marketing is marketing, I don’t think it’s any different marketing in open-source than it is in any other kind of software, but you do have this difference in this vast community around you. You need to understand ways to, not justify marketing, but to explain to them the benefits of marketing an open-source product.

Sandro Groganz: What do you tell open-source developers who are critical of, or hate marketing?

Andrew Rodaway: I’ve not found a single one that I would say characterizes "hating marketing". I think you find those that are simply uninterested in it, or non-believers, and chances are you’ll never persuade those people to have any interest in what you do.

But I would say that 80% of the people in the community absolutely get marketing, they understand the importance of it.

People become involved in open-source development because they want the world to see their contribution. You know, there’s a whole ethos that "we do this for the kudos of doing it", as with many things in life. And I think people who are in that place understand that the better their contributions, their product is marketed, the more people will see it, the more people will benefit. So the vast majority of them have absolutely no issue whatsoever with marketing. They see it as a positive and beneficial thing.

The key point we have to make back to them is that, if you have an open-source company, if you can market it, if you can make it successful, profitable, self-sustaining, then that feeds back into the community. Because the reality of life is that everything has to be paid for sooner or later, and if you can build a self-sustaining open-source company as we intend to do with Canonical, then that has multiple benefits that feed back into the developmental process. We’re a stronger company, we have more resources, more assets, we can support the developers, we can support the development process and the community, but we can only do it if we have the resources to do so.

Marketing the company, making it successful, stable financially is a good thing for everybody, as far as I can see.

Sandro Groganz: What are the major trends you see in open-source marketing?

Andrew Rodaway: We’ll see more return to mainstream marketing methods. What’s visible to me is that open-source companies are definitely riding a very strong wave of interest right now. If you look at some of the open-source companies like...well, MySQL is the obvious example but there are others like Alfresco. Some have been acquired by bigger companies in the past year or so. There’s lot of very strong, very successful open-source companies out there who are getting a lot of interest from the wider business community.

I believe you’ll see a lot of the stronger players be acquired, or partnered with, or invested in over the next few years, so I think a lot of money will come into the open-source movement over the next few years.

That definitely drives the marketing agenda because clearly if a company goes public, or if it’s acquired or invested in by a VC, those guys have a commercial interest in the business and therefore they will want to see a much more commercial marketing approach in the organization. You’ll see more marketing emphasis, more marketing dollars, more marketing expertise being brought to open-source companies over the next few years as they become, maybe not mainstream, but certainly an element within the mainstream.

My view is that open-source is definitely gathering pace as a software model, it has many many advantages. Not just economically but in terms of the speed at which you can do things.

For example, in Canonical, we do two major software releases every year. We do them on hard dates. The only way that’s achievable is having a vast community of developers behind you to make it happen. I see very few major enterprise or commercial software companies that would commit to doing two major releases on fixed dates, every year, year in, year out.

The open-source model has extraordinary benefits to the commercial software community. I think if more and more companies adopted that open-source model, they’d see massive benefits working with those development communities.

Sandro Groganz: Today the term "open-source" opens doors  - in the media, for example. Do you think there will be a day when open-source will sound just as lame as "seen on TV"?

Andrew Rodaway: Well, I think there is always a danger that something becomes over-hyped. You know, over-hyped technology cycles are a regular feature of the landscape for the last few years. We’ve seen it with things like rapid application development, databases, in telecoms, we’ve seen it in GSM, 3G, 4G and WiMax. It’s a continual thing, this over-hyping of new technologies. I guess there could be a danger, that open-source could become the new over-hyped technology.

The thing is, it’s a relatively small danger because there’s a lot of very down-to-earth, very sensible people who would be very quick to stamp on any nonsense in this area. I think if any open-source company gets too big for its boots, its support will fall away, its community will fall away and it will very rapidly come down to earth with a bump.

I hope that open-source won’t suffer from that kind of hype cycle that you find in many technology industries. But it is undoubtedly riding a wave. It’s a very exciting wave. I’m pleased to see that it is happening.

I think that a lot of very big companies who are in the enterprise software space are starting to see the benefits of open-source development. Just in terms of speed of development, quality of development, in the wisdom of crowds, in the whole Wikinomics thing. As that gains pace, we’ll see more and more companies coming to realize that open-source has significant benefits...not just in terms of free software, but in speed of development, in community support and in public acceptance of a different model of doing things.

Sandro Groganz: What is the percentage of the marketing budget at Canonical compared to the overall company budget?

Andrew Rodaway: Well, that’s an interesting question, I suppose. It’s a very hard one to answer, because the company has developed enormously. When I joined two months ago we had, I think, 150-160 staff and we’re pushing rapidly towards 200-200+ staff, and that’s just in a couple of months. Questions of budget allocation are very hard to answer in that kind of scenario.

It’s not a massive amount of budget, we have a relatively small marketing department. We’re growing that department, we’ll probably double it in the next year or so, but I think you have to recognize that we have a lot of things to do. We have money to spend on development, on support, on sales, and on marketing. Therefore, we have to spread the budget around. I’d be surprised if it was any different from a traditional software enterprise.

A good metric for software companies is 2-5% of revenues as a marketing budget. I guess we’re in about that kind of place. I don’t see it being significantly different, to be honest.

I’m consciously trying to bring commercial marketing disciplines into Canonical. It's had a great marketing department in the past and I see my role as being added on to that and bringing knowledge and expertise from the enterprise marketing community into the business. One thing I would like to do is build a marketing department which consciously has the same kind of skills and metrics you would find in a typical enterprise software organization.

At the same time we recognize that open-source companies do different things in marketing and we will allocate our budget in a different way than you would do perhaps in a commercial organization.

For example, I don’t think we’ve ever done any advertising in Canonical. I’d be very surprised if we ever did do any advertising at Canonical, because the nature of the open-source community kind of does your advertising for you, really. If you look at the amount of press coverage we get, the amount of blogging about us, the number of newsgroups that follow open-source, stuff like that, you see that advertising would be irrelevant to the way that we operate. We consciously spend our marketing dollars on things which we feel are more relevant to the open-source marketing model.

Sandro Groganz: Which weblogs do you regularly read and how do they inspire you?

Andrew Rodaway: Okay, I have to confess, I am not a great blog reader, partly because that was never a big feature of my previous roles, and I'm still getting up to speed in the whole blogosphere. I guess the danger with blogs is that there are a lot of them, many of them aren’t actually that great, you know it’s very easy to start a blog. Finding the blogs that are useful, informative and that are written on a regular basis is harder. I tend to be more a newsfeed kind of person, I get my information that way.

We have our own blogs, I have a few of my colleagues’ blogs. I don’t personally have one, but I have contributed to the occasional blog. Those I do go to, tend to be the industry leaders. Jonathon Schwartz of Sun Microsystems has a great blog. There are a couple of people in Microsoft actually that have interesting blogs. Obviously they’re competition for us, therefore important to read what they’re doing. There’s one or two people in some of the associated areas like GNOME and KDE, couple of guys in Google, people at Firefox, but I’m honestly not a great blog reader, is the honest truth.

You can spend your entire working day reading great blogs, but you actually wouldn’t get any real marketing work done, so I’ve cut down the amount of stuff I do in that area. But you have to be aware of what people are saying. I use services like Google News Alerts to keep tabs on what's going on, and if people are saying things about us, then clearly I read it, but if I was to spend all day reading those blogs, I would not be able to get anything done.

Sandro Groganz: Thank you very much for some great answers.