I’m on quite a few slack channels and I got a message today on the radpanda/kafka slack:
Which if you follow to their website (Aiven):
- They describe themselves as: “The trusted open source data platform for everyone”
- They offer hosting on AWS/Azure/Google for all the new hip open source data technologies. Kafka, Flink, Influx, Redis.
- Under technology partners page, all their partners are hosting firms.
- They are not partnered with any of the firms that build the software. None of the management team has worked on or in open source.
For end consumers this is good, get reliable hosting from a “big firm” that supplies many other systems that you may use. For bigtech it’s a win as it will be hosted on their cloud. For startup/tech companies this is deadly. Why would anyone wait to host on their platform?
This feels like the next evolution of the spat between technology companies and bigtech aka google/amazon. Previous disagreements have forced some technology companies/startups to change away from open source licensing e.g. Elastic but the big guys also received bad press for doing it. Now with an smaller intermediary party, the bad press has only a positive effect in advertising them more.
Half the work in building a new SAAS offering is building and supporting the general platform, user logins, system backup, recovery etc. If this middle company spreads that cost over multiple offerings and doesn’t pay to contribute any open source back, they can supply it faster and cheaper short term.
As I look at startups or new tech companies like questdb, redpanda, timeplus, materialize, redis, superset, clickhouse….if a company like this starts offering their tech early I think they could get a lot, if not most the business while the other company pays the cost of development. In some cases as we seen they are on the open source slack channel engaging customers away….
What do you think?
Ryan Hamilton 