By Geoff Fein
GoAhead Software, a player in the Navy’s Common Processing System (CPS), is taking what might be seen as an unusual step in making its SAFfire software completely open, according to a company official.
The Bellevue, Wash.-based company will be focusing its attentions away from doing things in a proprietary fashion to doing open standards and open source, Bill Yaman, vice president sales and marketing, told Defense Daily recently.
“We made a decision to move our business model from a proprietary product model where we had our SAFfire product as a proprietary implementation to an open source business model where we will be creating a distribution of OpenSAF upcoming release 4.0 and calling that Open SAFfire,” Yaman said.
GoAhead’s SAFfire solution delivers on one of the key goals of the CPS architecture by ensuring the high availability of mission critical applications, according to the company (Defense Daily, Jan 6).
“GoAhead offers the only proven combat-ready and operationally proven Service Availability Forum (SAF) compliant solution in the commercial market and SAFfire adheres to the open standards of the Navy’s Objective Architecture (OA),” the company said in a January statement.
GoAhead helped found SAF. The company will now stop marketing its SAFfire product.
“We will stop marketing a proprietary implementation on that commercial side and put our energies behind OpenSAF implementation, which will be open source implementation of OpenSAF,” Yaman said.
GoAhead will offer the SAFfire code base to the OpenSAF community, he added. “Offering that code will further accelerate the commercialization of that OpenSAF implementation and strengthen the quality of that code base.”
GoAhead will introduce its own OpenSAFfire distribution in the mid-May time frame, Yaman said.
In addition, the company will continue to support and enhance SelfReliant, its proprietary high availability solution.
“A lot of the Aegis implementations are deployed on [SelfReliant],” Yaman said. “We will continue to enhance [it] as a proprietary solution.”
Yaman said there will be those in the market that will for one reason or another choose not to go open source, so GoAhead will have an alternative for them. “It is very functional, robust, just not built on the OpenSAF standards, but rather with proprietary APIs (Application Programmer Interfaces).”
Moving to open source products might appear risky to some, but Yaman said GoAhead did a lot of work to make sure that it’s a sound business model.
“Certainly, the value proposition we are bringing to our customer shifts. It shifts from being the developer of the software to being the developer and provider of the services that surround that software,” he said. “We feel very comfortable that this is the right shift for us to be making now.”
In fact, GoAhead officials think the number of users of the open source distribution will actually drive more revenue for the company, Yaman added.
Yaman doesn’t expect people to download and use the open source technologies without the proper testing, support and infrastructure around it.
GoAhead will also be focusing on integrated development environments for developers to help them more quickly develop SAF compliant applications, he added.
The company will also focus on a number of enhancements that will allow GoAhead to build a serviceability framework that will make it easier for organizations to diagnose problems in the COTS infrastructure world, Yaman said.
The telecommunications industry took the lead with SAFfire, but it is now being adopted by the aerospace and defense industry, Yaman noted. “This is really simply a shift in the implementation that we are going to deliver to market.”
GoAhead officials see their OpenSAFfire answering the need for open standards-based solutions, just as they have seen with CPS and Navy Open Architecture.
“We’ve seen an appetite now in the federal space for open source as well, so we think this is a natural evolution not just for telecommunications but for aerospace and defense,” Yaman said.
And, by GoAhead being part of Open SAF distribution and being the only commercial distribution of OpenSAF, the company will be an enabler for the SAF implementations to make its way into defense systems, Tyson Moler, director of federal operations, told Defense Daily recently.