Group pushes software sharing
Inspired by the success of freely shared software like the Linux operating system, some corporate technology executives want to share their custom-made software programs with each other.
''Why reinvent the wheel?" said Jay Hansen, chief executive of the Avalanche Corporate Technology Cooperative, a Minneapolis group formed by seven local companies, including electronics retailer Best Buy Co. Inc., magnetic tape maker Imation Corp., medical equipment manufacturer Medtronic Inc., and agricultural supplier Cargill Inc.
Many companies need specially tailored programs that aren't produced by the big software makers, like Microsoft Corp. or Oracle Corp. For instance, a retailer like Best Buy may need a piece of software to link its cash registers to an Oracle database server. Big firms maintain their own programming staff to produce such code. But other retailers who use Oracle servers probably need the same software. Today, each company makes its own version of the code. Avalanche plans to save member companies millions of dollars by letting them share each others' work, instead of duplicating it.
''Instead of each company doing that independently, they can cooperate and split costs down the middle," said Scott Lien, chief technology officer of ePredix Inc., a Minneapolis human resources firm, and an Avalanche cofounder.
Lien first toyed with the idea in 2001 while working as vice president of application development at Best Buy. He and Andrew Black, chief technology officer at jewelry maker Jostens Inc., were interested in teaming to cut software development costs. They were impressed by the open-source software movement, in which programmers freely share code for use by anyone who wants it. The popularity of open-source products like Linux, the Apache Web server, and the MySQL database convinced Lien and Black that code sharing could result in first-class software.
Avalanche was incorporated as a cooperative in March 2003. So far, seven companies have joined, but about 60 others have expressed an interest in joining. Members pay annual fees that vary depending on how much software they want to share. For instance, a firm that only wants to share software for particular specialties would sign up for an ''affinity membership" at $15,000 a year. But for $30,000 a year, companies get the right to use any software shared by any Avalanche member.
Members can keep the software even if they choose to resign from the cooperative. They get full access to the raw source code used to write the program and the program itself. But unlike Linux, Avalanche programs remain private property.
Even companies that compete against each other could benefit from the Avalanche plan, according to Hansen, the cooperative's chief. That's because companies needn't contribute any code that gives them an edge over a rival. Hansen estimated that about 90 percent of the software in a typical company is similar to software used by competitors, and therefore doesn't provide a competitive advantage anyway.
Still, there are risks to the Avalanche concept. Andre Pino, chief marketing officer of Segue Software Inc., a software testing firm in Lexington, said no firm can simply take someone else's code and run it without checking it out.
According to Phil Murphy, a software analyst for Forrester Research in Cambridge, large companies will want an array of services that Avalanche may not be in a position to provide. The cooperative must prove that the shared code will run on many different kinds of corporate computer systems. Murphy was skeptical Avalanche shared software can meet the standards of large businesses. ''Is this something I want to use in my mission-critical business situations?" he said. ''Probably not."
Hiawatha Bray can be reached at bray@globe.com.
