SpikeSource's Polese on open source

23.01.2006

Polese: That's right. So the customer [has] to make one call to us, although we can, as they need it, provide third-level support from JBoss or MySQL or other commercial providers. And we have strong relationships also with open source [providers] and the open source community in general, so we're able to tap into that expertise as needed. And we're also building relationships with other providers that are not household names necessarily, but commercial providers of open source, support providers of those components.

InfoWorld: You mentioned you have some people working overseas. Do you want to weigh in on the outsourcing issue? Sun Chairman Scott McNealy last week said that there's a false notion that if a job is outsourced overseas, that means a job is lost here. Do you have any perspectives on that?

Polese: Yes, well I agree with that statement. I don't think we can make an assumption that it's a job lost here. In fact in our case, we were a global startup from day one. We started with a team in India, and specifically because we believed that talent is everywhere and [we access resources] from the global market when we're aggregating and supporting open source [software]. We're selling to the global market. Our first customers, in fact, were U.S.-based companies [but] we're finding great demand outside the U.S. as well as inside.

So it makes sense that we would have development and support teams that are located outside the U.S. as well. This is a team that's very much part of our engineering team. We didn't decide to shift jobs over to India, these are positions that we [intended] from day one to be based there, but we continue to hire here. So I think Scott's point is a good one, you can't always draw a sort of black and white conclusion about having an offshore team. It does not mean a job loss over here necessarily. In fact, it can mean growth straight across for the companies, and as we get bigger, we'll add more headcount here too as well as over there.

InfoWorld: Do you have any other topics you wanted to discuss?