OPENDMS
hearts and minds
the dream
all journeys start with a dream and then just become hard work
the reality
head in the clouds is fine as long as feet are on the ground
the other bits
the road to bringing the dream and the reality into sync
the dream
All philosophies start with a dream but must become a theory or attitude that act as a guiding principle for behaviour if they are to succeed. With this base tenet in mind, “to act as a guiding principle for behaviour”, it is important to state the dream and then align it to the guiding principles that will lead the opendms project’s behaviour.
THE DREAM – simple enough really
The dream has a number of salient points but it is based on creating an open source crowdfunded community that will;
- be open to dealers of all kinds (automobile, agriculture, haulage, heavy equipment, leisure, marine etc. Et al);
- provide a portal and middleware environment that all dealers will be able to access;
- provide access to the portal and middleware at a cost that covers the not-for-profit running costs of the opendms administration;
- engage in many projects to value add the member dealers’ existing IT systems; and, absolute the holy grail,
- introduce all the middleware and cloud-based components needed to empower the opendms project to be able to replace the dealer members’ existing dealership management systems (DMS).
Building the first tier of products (Project Forward and Project Terra) will create the corner stone for a world-best cloud-based portal and middleware layer that will be added to by the opendms team, and hopefully dealer members and third-party providers, to provide valuable functionality to the dealer members’ IT libraries.
It is the ultimate goal of the opendms team to make additions and enhancements to the core product until the product and services suite includes all the elements needed to create a completely standalone DMS solution; allowing member dealers to sever their ties with their traditional DMS service providers and get complete control of their business with software they own.
If this is achieved, the dealer members’ will be paying a single monthly membership to the opendms community to cover the cost of the operation of the management team and effectively reducing their monthly external IT service charges to a few dollars not the thousands or tens of thousands paid today.
the reality
It is safe to say that the one thing that keeps dealers locked into the traditional DMS products and services is that the equally traditional DMS companies have spent many years and hundreds of millions of dollars developing their products.
It it the shear scale of the development hurdle that a) protects the market-space from new entrants and b) keeps dealers limited to choosing different versions of the same hamburger; they are all hamburgers just on slightly different buns.
In fact, one can not argue that building a new DMS product would take all those years and dollars to achieve and it would be difficult for any company to justify a green-field development given that they’d have years of investment before a single penny of revenue would be generated and then, when the product was complete, they’d have to launch it into a price-leadership market-place. They’d have to launch into a market-place where their only difference could ever be price; they’d have to be cheaper, no, they’d have to be the cheapest.
That is the reality of the DMS market-space.
Some third-party providers have built small pockets of functionality that sit off to one side of the DMS core BUT they are not competing with or replacing DMS core functionality. So why would opendms be different; why would the opendms program succeed against these odds?
CHUNKWARE – the new project paradigm
The key to opendms being able to burst into this closed DMS bubble is that it will be;
- looking to introduce a series of products and services that will compliment the dealer members’ day to day operations;
- creating a portal and middleware to bring a raft of world-best yet disparate IT products and services into a single user experience; with the portal providing a seamless integration of these products and services; and,
- offering these products and services at NO costs (other than the dealer members’ monthly membership fee).
Regardless of whether a single project (e.g. Project Forward) is every created or a raft of projects are rolled out, the dealer members’ will pay a single membership fee and will be able to audit the operations of the opendms project accordingly.
This ability to identify units of functionality that add value to the dealer members’ operations is the power of the opendms paradigm. We term it chunkware and it is the ability to add chunks of functionality to existing dealership practices, whilst not interfering with existing DMS processes.
The opendms chunkware will grow and cover the existing DMS functionality until it can completely remove the need for the DMS core.
This does not have to happen immediately nor is their the major blocker of having to finish a complete solution to take the product to market. The opendms project will create chunks of functionality in its own right, introduce existing cloud-bases solutions to the middleware layer and leverage these into the portal and welcome community development of product.
If it takes a few years to build the opendms products to a viable replacement for core DMS functionality it won’t matter one iota as each chunk will be valuable in its own right and if the opendms project stops short of the DMS replacement goal each dealer member will have the existing products and services; paid for with their low monthly membership fee.
That’s the reason opendms will succeed and why every dealer member will consider their ownership of the opendms community the best investment they’ve ever made.
the other bits
Just a little to say here. opendms is not about ownership per se. Any development of any products, the creation of the middleware layer and the management of the opendms community are seen to be “service delivery” by the opendms team. Like a broken record we’ll say again opendms is not-for-profit; a facilitator if you like.
If we accept that the opendms project is about facilitation (and aggregation) we also need to understand that, to be successful with this facilitation, there can not be any block to entrance at any level; in fact it would not tick the open source box if there were.
So, what does this mean in the strictest sense?
Simply put, this is opendms strongest point; the project looks to encourage input from anyone. The core portal and middleware will always be under the control of the opendms team; that is struck in concrete. That said, the middleware layer will provide access to the various interfaces required for community developers to access and work with any dealer member’s or members’ data in a controlled secure environment.
The opendms team will facilitate a world-best middleware layer introducing the best in identity authorization and authentication and anyone that registers with the opendms public access control (PAC) system will be able to develop solutions that align with the opendms products and services.
The opendms team can work with these community developers to embed their management processes into the portal to further imbue the solutions into the opendms DNA and these third party products will be available to the dealer community through the opendms market-store.
This opens the opendms project up to dealers developing solutions themselves and then offering them to the community. Third-party software houses can do likewise, in fact, the traditional DMS companies are also welcome if they want to interface an existing opendms product or service to their core DMS offering through the opendms middleware layer.
The key to this cooperative development is that these “extra-curricular” developments can exist in their own commercial sphere. The providers of these solutions can develop and market their solutions to the community as they see fit and the community members may agree to their commercial terms. In this model opendms facilitates these relationships whilst continuing to add product and services to the opendms offering.
It is the middleware and portal that is the key. As more and more products and services are added to the opendms offering we get closer to a complete DMS solution. It matters not that these various products may be from disparate providers, the opendms portal and middleware facilitate and aggregate the many into a single whole; all for a single monthly membership fee.
In this model it make perfect sense for all products and services to be developed within the opendms core but the reality is that it will be a melding of opendms core and external third party products that will ultimately form the opendms universe.
