Here is an idea for a business model:
- take a piece of open source software that everyone in consulting uses and loves
- dress it up some with your own shim of extensions so that you may call the new thing (the free thing with your tweaks bolted on) a commercial product
- put a helpdesk in front of it so that your commercial software may become enterprise software
- start selling support engagements
What? You don't think that is a good business model? Well, that seems to be the business model of both StrongLoop and Datical as best as I can tell! That is correct, not one but at least two Austin-based ventures are doing this. How can this possibly work? Why wouldn't an enterprise just use the free version? The answer is that enterprises hate free stuff as they fear there will be no one around to support it. They need to be able to call someone in the middle of the night when things go South. They are all about engaging with vendors for IT solutions.
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