This might date me - but one of my favourite movies is flick called "Network".  It features a psychotic newscaster who leads a revolution of TV viewers who charge to their window screaming, "We're mad as hell, and we're not going to take it anymore!"

I must have a soft spot for that type of sentiment.  Because one of my favourite books is the Cluetrain Manifesto.  I love the line - "We are not eyeballs, or clicks, we are human beings -- live with it!"

About bloody time, is what I've said.  And apparently so have a lot of others.  Today's customer isn't going to take it anymore.  Anyone with a business knows that.  All those predictions in the original Cluetrain Manifesto have come true.  In today's world, if you aren't better, faster, cheaper --- your customer is gone in a click.

For the longest time, IT has been exempt from that.  If you had an IT provider you'd bitch and whine, but it was what author Don Tapscott called the Hotel California syndrome.  (For those who are too young to remember the Eagles, the quote comes from a line in their song Hotel California which goes - "You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave!" )

Microsoft, IBM, HP, Oracle -- it didn't matter which monolith we talked about.  You didn't own them -- they owned you.  You had such an investment in them that you had to stay.  Even if you outsourced, you never left them that far behind.  Either they supplied the outsourcer -- or they were the outsourcer.

Well, those days are done.

The cloud is coming.  Gartner Group - one of the big think tanks made it official this year.

By 2012, 20 percent of businesses will own no IT assets. Several interrelated trends are driving the movement toward decreased IT hardware assets, such as virtualization, cloud-enabled services, and employees running personal desktops and notebook systems on corporate networks.

It has to be true.  Gartner doesn't predict anything until long after its inevitable.

For a lot of folks, the past will be just like the future.  They've gone rushing from the expense of a big legacy provider to the expense of a big cloud provider. From Siebel to Salesforce.com.    That's okay.  I take my hat off to Salesforce for becoming the 300 pound Gorilla in the cloud.

They'll take their share. But the cool thing is you don't have to go to one of the usual suspects.  There are options.  So now, if you are "mad as hell and not going to take it anymore" you have a number of options.  Two little magic words - "Open Source".

Open Source puts the client in control.  In the CRM world for instance, we offer SugarCRM as an open source alternative.  We use it because we like it - it has amazing features, it's cost of ownership is low -- and it's source code is open.  As I'm fond of saying - most software, if chosen well, will meet 98% of your real needs.  The problem is that the remaining 2% is often related to your competitive advantage.  With big, standardized systems if you hit this problem -- as my kids say, "sucks to be you."  You either live without it or buy an add on to what you've already paid.  By the way, did they tell you that "add on" wasn't available with the lower priced version?   Yup - you are back in the old days where you don't own the vendor - the vendor owns you.

With Open Source solutions like SugarCRM if you hit that last 2% and it's a problem, you go into the source and change the code if you have to.  Most of the time you don't even have to change the code because there's a utility to allow you to do it.  And before the fear mongers get to you, there are many "upgrade safe" ways to make those customizations.  Or if you are majorly unhappy with the vendor -- you can go your own way.  A couple of vendors - including "Info At Hand" and "vTiger" have made that decision and forked the SugarCRM code to have their own solution.  While these have a minor market share right now, they are a continued warning to SugarCRM that Open Source lives in the Cluetrain land.  Do it better, do it cheaper, do it faster -- or get done in.

It's the same with hosting and support.  Even if you customize a solution for someone, that doesn't mean you own them.  This is open source code.  You can pick it up and move to a new host or even a new developer.  We know that.  As does every quality developer out there. We can't afford to be less than our best.   We can't afford to be anything less that a strong business partner.  You get what you need to make your business successful -- that's what keeps you coming back.

It's the Cloud Com puting Manifesto.  You own the solution -- not the other way around.

Enjoy!