The Open Database Alliance for Product, Service and Solution Providers

Strengthening of the commercial ecosystem around Open Source Databases is one of the primary goals of the ODBA. To achieve this, the ODBA maintains a Sales Referral Program that allows members to combine revenue opportunities and facilitates the Formation of Consortia to tackle larger projects.

Sales Referral Program

The ODBA provides an interactive reference selling consortium between many vendors who provide products and services surrounding Open Source databases. ODBA's Reference Selling Program allows vendors to (a) receive sales referrals for customer sales opportunities from other ODBA members, and (b) reference sell other vendors' products and services to complement their own offering.

In summary, the ODBA Sales Referral Program allows you to tap into other vendors' revenue streams, while they provide you with new customer opportunities. Furthermore, once the ODBA's Reseller Program is launched (coming soon), resellers/VARs who are ODBA members can resell your products or services without you having to build your own VAR network.

By opting into the Sales Referral Program, ODBA members enter a high-value reference selling consortium with teaming between members, which substantially outweighs the benefits of usual low-value, low-touch vendor partner programs with communication only with the vendor. In aggregate, ODBA members offers a product stack and services suite which can compete with offerings by much larger vendors.

The Sales Referral Program is governed by the ODBA Membership Agreement and the ODBA Commercial Program Guide which establish a clear set or rules that apply to all members equally, reducing the administrative overhead and allowing mutual benefit references that will increase the overall volume of business for ODBA members.

Formation of Consortia

Through its Code of Conduct and the common governance, the ODBA provides an environment in which good citizenship in the Open Source and Free Software communities is supported, encouraged and -– if necessary -– enforced through peer pressure. This allows member companies to rely on certain principles in dealing with each other, such as seeking to build long-term business relationships becoming more profitable than seeking short-term gain at another's expense.

Addressing the Bottleneck

Most technical projects develop certain bottlenecks as they mature. These are often invisible to the end user and if resolved lead only to little immediately visible improvement, making them a low priority to most users who are not willing to invest extensively into such developments. Resolving those bottlenecks is however essential for the future development of a project, making these a high priority issue for the developer. The result is a classic deadlock in which developers cannot afford to give the bottleneck sufficient priority, while no customer is willing to provide the time and resource to address them properly.

The Open Database Alliance can play a central role in overcoming such deadlocks by allowing members from all constituencies to pool resources and prioritize them both through the membership fee allocation policy as well as through specific efforts from the ODBA overall to overcome such bottlenecks.

By joining the ODBA, companies can more effectively address such bottlenecks and resolve them in a more focused, collaborative and resource efficient way.