“Don’t be involved in 50 or 100 things. That’s a Noah’s Ark way of investing – you end up with a zoo that way. Put meaningful amounts of money in a few things you know well.”
Warren Buffett.

There are a lot of OSS products on the market. From that list, you can probably name a handful that have been very profitable. The reason why, I believe, can be distilled down to two primary factors:

1. Successful OSS have a specific focus
2. Successful OSS help a large number of people

Specific Focus – One of the best* OSS that I’ve worked with had a brilliant core and covered a large portion of the TM Forum TAM map (ie delivered a lot of the components that make up a “complete” OSS). I still have a soft spot for this vendor but unfortunately they went out of business, in part because they didn’t narrow their focus tightly enough. Their product development was spread out across the whole zoo. By contrast, unlike this company, some of the OSScompanies with largest market share (and profits) don’t directly develop resource performance or fault management tools. Those segments of the market are already well serviced, so those big vendors focus their efforts elsewhere.

Extend helpfulness – I believe that the fastest way to achieve success is to first assist a large number of people in succeeding. The larger the number, the better. If you think about the most profitable companies in the world, you’ll notice that they tend to help a large number of people. The same is true in OSS – the most successful vendors either support a large number of customers, or if supporting a relatively smaller customer list, then each customer tends to be large a organisation with many operators.

The way I like to think of it is:

• For point 1 – know what’s on the left side of your whale curve and therefore what to focus attention on
• For point 2 – without breaching point 1, think laterally about how your focussed product / suite could assist a larger customer group. For example, this might be thinking about how it can assist your customer’s sales / marketing / executive / etc business units, not just operations

This isn’t just an organisational-level perspective. From a personal level, these are also the same two personal growth questions I ask myself regularly. What are your thoughts? How could I (or you) improve on these two factors (or others)?

* When I referred to the vendor as being one of the “best,” I was clearly judging on metrics other than profitability.

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