- GPL v3 on the way...Palamida trying to help make it easier to understand
- Guest Post: Stuart Cohen, Collaborative Software Initiative
- Hyperic blazes ahead with HyperFORGE
- When to Buy, When to Build
- Email survey says: "Exchange 2007 is a big jump"
- Oracle inching out SAP in the mid-market (WSJ)
- SAP gives new meaning to closed platforms
- Zimbra on Ubuntu
- Palamida launches vulnerability reporting solution
- Mozilla: Desktop email still better
June 28, 2007 | Comments: (0)
GPL v3 on the way...Palamida trying to help make it easier to understand
Palamida announced that it has enhanced it's IP Amplifier product with the addition of the GPL v3 analyzer functionality. The company has also created a comprehensive GPL v3 online educational resource repository, gpl3.palamida.com, to assist organizations looking to implement software licensed under GPL v3.
I think this is a cool idea and would like to see some more data about the relationship of v2 and v3. It would also be great to see someone clearly bullet out the differences in the versions. For that matter, I would like someone to explain how things like the Java classpath and FLOSS exception work, and how someone might go about creating their own exceptions should they need to.
Links:
gpl3.palamida.com
Free Software Foundation GPL v3
Posted by Dave Rosenberg on June 28, 2007 05:51 AM
June 27, 2007 | Comments: (0)
Guest Post: Stuart Cohen, Collaborative Software Initiative
Stuart Cohen, former CEO of OSDL launched a new company in May. The Collaborative Software Initiative offers a comprehensive set of services to take a project from the assessment phase through its lifecycle and beyond.
The practice of collaboration
I hear a lot of people talk about collaboration. It kind of makes us all feel warm and fuzzy, right? No one is going to tell you they don’t want to collaborate in today’s market. The problem is "collaboration" is so overused that it has come to mean many different things to many different people.
For the latest generation of 20-somethings, it's the buzzword for building social networks online. For the Linux community, it's about all the ecosystem stakeholders truly working together. But for a growing number of business and IT managers, it’s a tool for completing non-core software projects that meet compliance and regulatory requirements.
What's even more interesting is that these IT professionals are collaborating with competitors within their own industries (i.e., financial services or state governments) in order to get the work done, split the cost and gain the efficiencies from everyone using the same code. We are finding that there is a class of applications that better serves everyone in a business ecosystem where shared code translates into shared data and simplified compliance.
This is why I’m excited about the company I founded a few months ago – Collaborative Software Initiative - and want to thank Dave for letting me share that passion here. We are really bringing to market a whole new way for building software among like-minded companies. We think it will change the way software is developed and subsequently the economy of software. We're looking forward to announcing our first project in the coming months, which will provide a vivid example of this evolution.
Something I also want to mention here is that CSI is not an open source software company in the traditional sense. We start with the customers to understand shared issues that can best be addressed with a collaborative approach, versus the creation of a single open source project that needs to be enhanced or supported. Due to my history, many people have gotten that confused. But the approach most definitely borrows best practices from the open source development model by bringing together stakeholders with a common need to build "community" software that uses an open source development stack but can run on any user's operating system of choice.
The bottom line is we're on the verge of a market transition for enterprise business and IT managers. A very good market transition.
Posted by Dave Rosenberg on June 27, 2007 02:25 PM
June 18, 2007 | Comments: (0)
Hyperic blazes ahead with HyperFORGE
The team at Hyperic just announced their HyperFORGE site to provide developers with an easy way to create plug-ins to Hyperic HQ. They also started a plug-in of the month program to reward contributors.
Good for the Hyperic team for getting HyperFORGE into place and keeping the communication between in-house and outside developers going. Of all of the OSS systems management vendors I believe that Hyperic has the best technology for the broadest array of systems management and have become the clear innovator in the space. The Forge is starting with quite a few projects and I look forward to seeing more come down the pipe.
Hyperic is at an inflection point in the state of their business growth along with the growth of open source in general. These types of communal development projects help to bring in a wider audience and prove that there is a large number of educated users--both of which create confidence for buyers. We've seen the Forge approach work well for SugarCRM, Zimbra, JasperSoft and Alfresco as they have expanded their partner networks and made it easy to contribute.
Side note: I can tell you that it's a big pain in the neck to get a good Forge system setup. We'll be launching the MuleForge in early July to allow contributions and extensions to Mule and it's been a huge grind. I fear that we have over featured by a long shot.
Posted by Dave Rosenberg on June 18, 2007 12:36 PM
June 17, 2007 | Comments: (0)
Dave Linthicum outlines six steps to follow to make a build vs. buy decision. (Spoiler: Ultimately you will probably need to do both.)
With service-oriented architecture (SOA), Ajax, the enterprise service bus (ESB) and other new technologies maturing, application architects and business analysts have tough decisions to make about whether to buy packaged applications, build them, or more likely, do some combination of the two.The buy-versus-build question is even more important now that we have infrastructure to support the mixing and matching of applications and services. Best practices are beginning to emerge, and sources for applications and services are rapidly multiplying, including open source, new SOA interfaces for traditional packaged enterprise applications and SaaS offerings. The SaaS vendors, in particular, are making new and innovative applications and services available at price points that were previously unheard of.
So, how do you know when to buy and when to build? There are no hard-and-fast rules, but this article presents a six-step approach to make sure you're making the right calls.
Posted by Dave Rosenberg on June 17, 2007 10:22 PM
June 12, 2007 | Comments: (0)
Email survey says: "Exchange 2007 is a big jump"
I spent some time talking with Michael Osterman of Osterman Research, which today announced a survey it completed dealing with enterprise email. The survey was conducted with 100+ enterprises that have an average of 6,636 e-mail users. It was commissioned by PostPath, a Linux-based email provider (which offers drop-in Exchange compatibility), so the findings are likely a bit skewed.
Still, even at a serious "discount," users contemplating an upgrade to Exchange 2007 appear to be in for a world of hurt.
Of those surveyed, 67 percent indicated that they intend to make an investment in e-mail servers, either for upgrades or migration to a new e-mail server sometime this year. The survey reveals some key findings:
- 70 percent are concerned or extremely concerned about the complexity of the Microsoft Exchange migration effort.
- 69 percent are concerned about the amount of time the Exchange migration will take.
- 59 percent of organizations indicated that messaging storage growth is a serious or very serious problem.
- 48 percent of companies have NOT allocated budget to meet e-discovery or compliance requirements. [This is surprising given the importance of compliance.]
But the license is only one component of the cost involved. There's also time, and Osterman Research's findings indicate that the difference beween migrating to 2007 from 2003 is huge compared to migration from 2000 to 2003. It's a major effort. Performance is better with Exchange 2007, but the road to get there is non-trivial.
I asked Osterman what enterprises' options are: migrating to Domino or an open source email server won't be any easier than migrating to 2007. He suggested that the best of both worlds would be to stay with Outlook but find an easier server to manage. Postpath, from my past conversations with PostPath, seems to offer this in spades: you can swap out an Exchange server for PostPath and it looks like just another Exchange server node on the network, but is more robust and easy to administer.
Osterman stressed that the desktop experience must be kept inviolate: enterprises are married to Outlook, not so much Exchange. To the extent that an email solution can preserve their Outlook experience for their end users, but replace the Exchange experience with something easier to manage and compatible with Exchange.
I asked him if enterprises are actually looking to replace Exchange. Better the devil you know than the devil you don't, I suggested....
He indicated that enterprises are actively looking at alternatives. Many are a few revs behind the Exchange roadmap, which puts them in a position to seriously consider alternatives. The differences between 2000 (or previous versions) and 2007 are significant. "Upgrading" to 2007 is essentially a move to a completely new product, so moving to a truly "completely new product" is not as revolutionary or disruptive as it may sound.
All of which surprises me. I really wouldn't have thought that email could get innovative and interesting again, despite the fact that it's at the nexus of most everything we do. I'm glad to see Exchange getting some competition - from PostPath, Zimbra, GroupWise, Scalix, etc. - and hope that the upgrade path to Exchange 2007 proves as complex as Osterman's research suggests it will be. Why? Because negative feedback will help Microsoft improve its product, and will drive more competition in the email market.
We need it.
Posted by Matt Asay on June 12, 2007 08:00 AM
June 05, 2007 | Comments: (0)
Oracle inching out SAP in the mid-market (WSJ)
Ostensibly, SAP is the loser as Oracle moves past it in mid-market enterprise software [Sub'n required]. But the real loser in this is Microsoft, which has owned the consumer through SME market for many years. Microsoft has won this market through savvy distribution and (comparatively) easy-to-use software.
SAP and Oracle have approached this market in different ways, but for the same reason: they have largely saturated the large enterprise market. They need new hunting grounds, as the WSJ reports:
How the two fare will be crucial to their growth. The large corporations that installed SAP and Oracle products in the 1980s and '90s already have much of the basic software they need, so SAP and Oracle have had to develop new products and strategies to reach smaller customers in a business-software market that could be worth $15 billion to $30 billion by 2010.The research released by Nucleus Research is hardly conclusive, tracking only 27-29 customers of Oracle and SAP, each, but it's significant that either company is creating software that appeals to the mid-sized enterprise market at all. Oracle has, to me, the better strategy, because if it does its acquisitions well (no small feat), then it already has the DNA required to go after the mid-market whereas SAP must try to culturally retrofit its company to appeal to this same demographic. This is non-trivial for any company, but particularly one like SAP that has been so successful at defining customer requirements in big, complex, and expensive ways.Oracle has broken into the midmarket by buying companies that already sold products tailored to smaller firms. Germany-based SAP, meanwhile, mainly is developing software for the midmarket on its own and has built its customer base mostly from scratch. "It's the classic debate over whether it's better to buy or build," says Brad Reback, an analyst at CIBC World Markets.
Anyway, it will be highly interesting and entertaining to watch Microsoft and Oracle butt heads in the mid-market space. Both are fierce competitors with a huge array of weapons in their respective arsenals.
It will also be interesting to see if any open source companies take the opportunity to draft off these larger competitors as they teach the mid-sized enterprise market to expect a certain kind of software/solution. Let the big, proprietary companies define the solution, and then bring in the open source artillery to disrupt the market with a free offering that is easier to use, and much cheaper to deploy.
That's the opportunity. Not easy to fulfill, but it's how open source has succeeded in many other markets....
Posted by Matt Asay on June 5, 2007 08:18 PM
May 08, 2007 | Comments: (0)
SAP gives new meaning to closed platforms
SAP's never-ending product development cycle (~3 years at $1 billion) for their new product has resulted in a hosted system built on top of Netweaver. The amazing part is they have created a system designed specifically to not be open to development--only SAP tooling.
A1S will feature 2,500 interfaces that serve as modules that users can choose to plug into their platform to handle such tasks as manufacturing, payroll and project management. The modules, or structure, will be exposed to users, but the code base will not, Plattner said."No code will be exposed, so you have to stick to the interfaces," Plattner said.
Just what the world needs--another closed platform from a monolith vendor.
Posted by Dave Rosenberg on May 8, 2007 08:12 PM
May 03, 2007 | Comments: (0)
Zimbra, one of my fave OSS products just announced support for one of my other fave products, Ubuntu. Good to see adoption of both on the rise.
Link:
Zimbra to offer Ubuntu Linux support
Posted by Dave Rosenberg on May 3, 2007 10:02 PM
April 23, 2007 | Comments: (0)
Palamida launches vulnerability reporting solution
Palamida today announced that it has extended the reach of its extensive compliance library and launched a new service, the Vulnerability Reporting Solution (VRS). VRS works seamlessly with Palamida's code audit compliance solution, IP Amplifier(TM), to identify, prioritize, and report known vulnerabilities within open source code used in customers' projects.
Open source or not, its good to know if your applications are secure. And yes we used it on Mule and we checked out with only one minor issue related to an old version of Jetty we support. But if you had downloaded the code already you would know that.
Posted by Dave Rosenberg on April 23, 2007 12:00 PM
April 09, 2007 | Comments: (0)
Mozilla: Desktop email still better
I have tried/used pretty much every email client in existence (remember when Pine was like gold?) I've found that the biggest issue -- even beyond the UI is the ability to easily get mail in and out of various clients if you want to switch. I was a sworn Thunderbird user then switched to Mac Mail only to find that the file formats were different. The same goes for Outlook etc, with email, the data is what matters, not the app. Odds are I will switch to Thunderbird again if the next version of Mac Mail is as lame as this one. And yet, I long for an integrated suite...
Via Wired News:
WN: What advantages does Thunderbird offer that a web-based app like Gmail doesn't?MacGregor: Some users want to have their data local for privacy and control. Furthermore, you can integrate data from different applications on the desktop in ways that you can't do with web-based solutions, unless you stick to web solutions from a single provider. For example, you can use your Outlook address book with Thunderbird. We'd like to continue to expand the kinds of data you can share between Thunderbird and other apps (both web and desktop applications).
Posted by Dave Rosenberg on April 9, 2007 12:17 PM
March 24, 2007 | Comments: (0)
Sync iCal with Google Calendar (SpanningSync is great so far)
In my initial posting on Google Apps Premier I noted that sync was the one thing that it lacked for *real* enterprise adoption. The fine fellows at SpanningSync solved the problem (at least on the Mac for $25/year) and I can now say that Google Apps will likely be our corporate email and calendaring within the next few weeks. For $75/user/year ($50/google and $25/spanningsync) you have 10GB of email, shared calendar, Sync and whatever other goodies Google drops on you. Just over $6/user/month is well worth it to know all your data is available. I do find it odd that 3rd parties figured out how to do the sync part before Google did...or maybe they weren't interested?
On the one hand I am terrified of lockin, and on the other hand I think that we have way too many services that we depend on too widely disparate. I am sure that Google will have some kind of meltdown sooner or later, but they will still be better than normal users will be about backups and archiving.
Right now we use Zimbra@Maccius for calendar, Rackspace for email and web hosting and we are just bringing up Contegix to host the Mule project stuff along with some new features. It's just too much.
The funny thing is that my staff is willing to deal with the random Google issue just to get the Gmail interface. It just proves that apps still matter way more than operating systems. It also proves the power of the Google brand.
Posted by Dave Rosenberg on March 24, 2007 11:20 AM
January 31, 2007 | Comments: (0)
Josh Greenbaum is reporting that Oracle has not started writing code for its Fusion product yet. What is Fusion? Well, Oracle bills it as "The Only Comprehensive, Hot-Pluggable, Unbreakable Middleware." And it would be, if only it existed.
This is the same product that Oracle was talking up two years ago as a way to tie together its disparate acquisitions. Two years later, it seems that not a single line of code has been written. Greenbaum learned from Oracle that this isn't cause to worry, because writing the code is the last thing that needs to be done (after mapping out the business processes, etc.). What a relief! I mean, it's comforting to know that the code will just magically appear overnight after two years of talking about it.
This is one of the biggest problems with big, proprietary enterprise software. Oracle has been sitting on its marketing bravado for two years with nothing to show for it. In an open source world, where everyone can see exactly what you have and evaluate it, this could not happen. If I were an Oracle applications customer, I'd be furious.
However, as Greenbaum notes, maybe Oracle's inability to ship a product isn't all that injurious to them:
It's clear from looking at Oracle's numbers that maintenance revenues are becoming a bigger and more important slice of the pie, and, if I were inside Oracle betting on cashing in my options, I'd be placing every resource I could on making sure those Big Four applications were up to date and their customers loving it.Here's a word of advice, Oracle: learn from open source. Release early and often. Let your customers see and use the product before they fork over mountains of cash to you for it. Your proprietary model may have worked in the past, but you're quickly nearing the point where it won't work anymore.It's also clear to me that no matter how solidly behind Fusion Oracle is today, or how groovy the prototypes look in six months, a solid Fusion-based revenue stream isn't very likely for a number of years. Mostly because it's going to be hard to justify going with Fusion 1.0: Even if Oracle does a bang-up job first time around, the 1.0 curse will keep a lot of customers on the fence waiting for the 1.0 pioneers to debug the software well-enough to make 2.0 the real GA release....
But the 2009 timeframe does mean that customers sitting on the fence about where they are going to be in three years with Oracle are paying a lot for their uncertainty: at 22% of their license fee, the maintenance costs for most customers will have paid by 2009 will be darn close to their original license cost, if they haven't already topped the 100% mark by then....[A]ny Applications Unlimited customer looking to truly cut costs and streamline the IT budget has to ask him or herself what price that uncertainty might be costing.
And, frankly, wouldn't that be a relief? For customers, yes, but also for you?
Posted by Matt Asay on January 31, 2007 12:38 PM
December 19, 2006 | Comments: (0)
Sourcefire IPO complete with IP hassle
Via 451 CAOS: Snort creator Sourcefire addresses lawsuit from rival NetClarity
In court filings, among other things, it seems that PredatorWatch is asking this question: Did Check Point discover anything in its due diligence – the process investigating the provenance of the technologies Check Point was buying - which might relate to the lawsuit?The suit alleges that after PredatorWatch approached Inflection Point Ventures in June 2004 for an investment and possible partnership with Sourcefire, IPV called in Roesch to review PW's technology. IPV admits PW gave it a slide deck marked ‘Corporate confidential and trade secret' and ‘Copyright,' and that PW CTO Gary Miliefsky presented it to IPV. It admits Miliefsky told IPV that PW had patent applications pending. PW claims the presentation contained confidential and proprietary trade secret information about architectural features and operational mechanics of its product. The suit claims that a year later, Sourcefire upgraded its RNA/3D system to provide this functionality.
The response in court filings is unambiguous: IPV denies showing the information to Roesch; Roesch denies the key conversation that Miliefsky says took place between them, and also denies seeing anything confidential of PW's. Sourcefire denies all substantive accusations.
It's amazing to me that there can be IP questions when source code is readily available for review.
Good luck Sourcefire. We're pulling for you.
Posted by Dave Rosenberg on December 19, 2006 09:24 PM
November 28, 2006 | Comments: (0)
I remember when Hula launched a few years ago at LinuxWorld and it was all the rage--sadly the project is no longer being funded by Novell. Truth be told, Zimbra and some of the other OSS MS Exchange replacements are far better than Hula ever was. It's just disappointing to see a promising technology from Novell bite the dust.
The quick synopsis is, Novell no longer has anyone working full-time on Hula. As a team we have spent some time looking at where the Hula
project is and the opportunities in the market and in the end we had to conclude that we couldn't justify investing at the same level in Hula going forward. So those of us who have been developing Hula full-time will be moving on to other roles and to other parts of the company.
Posted by Dave Rosenberg on November 28, 2006 09:10 PM
November 09, 2006 | Comments: (0)
Google opens up your data...to you
In the biggest news to come out of the Web 2.0 Conference, Eric Schmidt, Google's CEO, made a huge announcement:
Making it simple for users to walk away from a Google service with which they are unhappy keeps the company honest and on its toes, and Google competitors should embrace this data portability principle, Eric Schmidt said at the Web 2.0 Conference in San Francisco.This is welcome, welcome news. I've been a harsh critic of Google in the past (though less because of its data lock-in and more because of its open source policies), but this move has neutralized much of my criticism."If you look at the historical large company behavior, they ultimately do things to protect their business practices or monopoly or what have you, against the choice of the users," he said. "The more we can, for example, let users move their data around, never trap the data of an end user, let them move it if they don't like us, the better."
The lock-in of data is my strongest complaint about Microsoft's SharePoint product (regardless of whether they ever figure out what SharePoint 2007 actually does). It is, plain and simple, the future of enterprise lock-in. It's free to use the base version, free to let SharePoint suck in your content, free to let these manacled repositories mushroom throughout one's organization...but very unfree (in terms of both cost and its proprietary nature) to migrate that content out of those repositories. Easy in, difficult out.
Google is now pushing the agenda on what office productivity applications/services look like. I'm glad to see that they are also now pushing a healthy agenda on who should own the content these services create and consume:
You
Great work, Google.
Posted by Matt Asay on November 9, 2006 08:21 AM
October 20, 2006 | Comments: (0)
MySQL's Marten Mickos is probably my favorite CEO. He is a great leader for his company and the OSS movement. I can only hope to be half as good a CEO as he is. **Please note I am not being sarcastic.**
Check out this Q&A with MM--lots of insight into MySQL and the overall OSS marketplace.
Mårten: This is a great question. First, I think closed source vendors are proving the hypothesis incorrect, because they are the ones who have un-friendly products although they have a licence revenue stream. And open source products, which typically lack a licence fee, are the ones with the best user friendliness. Why is that? I think the reason is that popularity is worth more than the marginally improved fees you could get for a user-unfriendly product. Sure, we lose some purchase orders because customers simply don't need our support. But at the same time we gain millions of new users, and they in turn help us develop the product and drive our marketing.I think one of the reasons MySQL is so popular is that we continue to take user-friendliness seriously. We may joke about leaving some bugs in the product in order to have more support fees, but in reality we take the bugs very seriously. And when we at times have more bugs than we would like to have, the whole organisation is in pain until we get the upper hand and kill more bugs than we produce. Version 5.0 was such an example - when it first came out as GA it had more bugs than earlier versions. It didn't feel good to see the list of incoming bugs, so we rearranged tasks and expanded our QA test coverage in order to fix the situation. I hope you who have used the latest versions of MySQL 5.0.26 have seen the significant improvements.
Posted by Dave Rosenberg on October 20, 2006 10:28 AM
October 18, 2006 | Comments: (0)
Will Zimbra crack the $1 billion barrier?
TechCrunch is reporting that Zimbra is up to 4 Million mailboxes and with some simple math we can calculate the following:
4 million@$25/per mailbox = $100m in revenue.
Now consider that MS Exchange has 150million seats.
150m@$25/per mailbox = $3,750,000,000
While it's unlikely that Zimbra will take the whole 150m mailboxes there is a clear trend and market potential. There was much discussion a few months ago about open source cracking the billion dolar mark. Clearly it is possible.
Posted by Dave Rosenberg on October 18, 2006 06:22 AM
October 16, 2006 | Comments: (0)
At a user conference in London, MySQL announced MySQL Enterprise, a departure from their existing business and development models.
Essentially MySQL will have two versions of the core product: Enterprise and Community. This is very much like RHEL and Fedora—an approach that I support. I will let Matt dive further into the business aspects, but I am in the camp that it's OK to make money from open source, at least if you are paying for the development. I would expect a bit of squawking from the community about the MySQL change, but the community version remains good news. Marten Mickos said "we'll have many things that will make the Community version have features and functions that may or may not ever make it to the Enterprise version."
MySQL Enterprise is available as an annual subscription in four different tiers (Basic, Silver, Gold, Platinum.) Existing (and new) subscribers gain access to new management tools which Marten described as "leading edge." The new tool is an on-premise application that communicates with the MySQL mothership to get access to various rules—which can be database specific, like checking indexes; or can be custom developed by users. There is real potential value in the rules and the rules development as users can enhance and tune MySQL for their infrastructure. When I asked about ease of use Marten claimed he was able to get the new monitoring up and running in about 30 minutes despite his non-technical background. The product is in final beta right now with plans to ship in the near future. There is "no effect on pricing just more value to the existing offering" according to Mickos.
I think it's a great move for MySQL as a business and do believe the community continues to benefit from the great work that MySQL has done and continues to do.
Posted by Dave Rosenberg on October 16, 2006 10:43 PM
October 05, 2006 | Comments: (0)
PostPath 2.0: Finally, a better Exchange
I've been bullish on PostPath for some time. I like the management team, like the investors, and like the idea: Exchange replacement at a fraction of the cost and a boost in the functionality.
What's not to love?
Well, PostPath just got better. Duncan Greatwood, the CEO and someone I've known since his Virata (and my Lineo) days, just sent me an update. With his permission, here's what they just released in PostPath 2.0:
We’ve finished porting the Zimbra web UI to PostPath’s backend. So now you get the open-source Zimbra web client – but seamlessly interoperable with mixed Exchange and PostPath environment.Very cool stuff. If you want to see a demo of some of it, check it out here.[Matt note: This is one of the great things about open source, and at times the most frustrating as a vendor. Zimbra's web client is fantastic and open source, allowing PostPath to marry excellent Zimbra technology with its own excellent server. Very cool. Not sure how Zimbra feels about it, but imitation (or adoption?) is the sincerest form of flattery....]
For instance, you can pull up the Active Directory global address list from the Zimbra client.
And you can pull up free/busy for users on Exchange, and users on PostPath, all from the Zimbra web-client.
In other words, now you can take an AJAX / web 2.0 app and use it in a mixed enterprise environment. Isn’t that’s what’s needed to actually make web 2.0 an enterprise reality?
Other cool stuff includes being able to do automated failover – on or off-site – without having to use any proprietary components. We just use DRBD and Linux-HA, both normal Linux components, and they give us on- or off-site redundancy and DR.
Of course, we’re still the only ones with drop-in compatibility with Outlook, Exchange, A.D., and ecosystem apps like Blackberry.
Good work, Duncan and team.
Posted by Matt Asay on October 5, 2006 08:12 PM
September 27, 2006 | Comments: (0)
How to drive blog traffic: Insult the right companies
Matt and I have noticed that certain subjects get far more comments and pageviews than others. Pretty much anything negative we post about Apple or OpenOffice get a lot of action, though rarely from the companies themselves.
My post last night on my Salesforce.com actually made me feel a bit uncomfortable. Not in the sense that I feel what I wrote was wrong, but in how fast people from SF.com were all over me. They were trying to fix my issues, keep me as a customer and presumably working to make sure I wouldn't say anything else negative (which BTW you can see in this post that I appreciated the effort.)
As a technology user and a bit of an influencer (snarky or otherwise) it's not my goal to make a big case of the problems I experience, I'm pretty much always looking for help or information. Unless of course we are discussing Microsoft and then all bets are off.
So, kudos to the Salesforce SWAT team for watching blogs and subscribing to google alerts but more importantly addressing the concerns of their users who are without a doubt far more annoying to them then my one sf.com issue was for me.
My only complaint is that I heard from too many sf.com people (though the more readers the better.) Please take that as a kind endorsement that I figured it out, I was confused by the help docs and my own disdain for CRM, the issue is resolved, and I don't need anymore guidance ;>
Posted by Dave Rosenberg on September 27, 2006 11:51 AM
September 27, 2006 | Comments: (0)
My data is free from Salesforce.com!
I was pretty infuriated last night when I could see no obvious way to get my data out of Salesforce.com. Fortunately it was fairly easy, just not obvious.
I wanted to note that the Salesforce team took my case and frustration very seriously and I immediately heard from them in relation to an excel plugin as well as just how to export my data from the system (you can run a report to get anything you need.) Good job Salesforce team.
Posted by Dave Rosenberg on September 27, 2006 08:03 AM
September 26, 2006 | Comments: (0)
Salesforce.com lock-in is a huge risk and massive annoyance
I've mentioned before that I am trying to move off of Salesforce.com and onto SugarCRM. The final piece in the process is to export my data from Sf.com and import into Sugar. You would think this option would be available fairly easily for backup purposes but it seems that it's a "feature" that has to be paid for (in addition to every other nickel and dime thing they ding you on.) Note the photo that is missing the link to Export despite everything the help pages tell you.
The weekly export service is available for all Enterprise Edition customers, and is included in your license fees. The weekly export service is available to Professional Edition customers as an add-on service, for $50/month.
The trick to the whole experience is that the 'help' pages all make mention of exporting MY data--they just won't let me do it. This is so obnoxious and offensive to me as a user that I can't wait to get off this platform.
The worst part of this is that I can't actually get MY DATA until a Sf.com sales person writes me back and sets me up to pay for it! What a joke, and what a terrible customer experience.
Posted by Dave Rosenberg on September 26, 2006 06:05 PM
September 14, 2006 | Comments: (0)
Zimbra is the answer for cross-platform email and calendar
As I have mentioned before, shared calendaring on the Mac has been a burden to say the least. Our problem from a business perspective was that we had no way to share calendars and schedule events across multiple time zones.
Very rarely am I rewarded for my status as a Tier 3 blogger and open source monkey-lord but today was a glorious exception as I was visited by Scott, the Mac/Zimbra Ace.
The story goes like this: We tried Zimbra 3.x previously and the core product worked fine, but the sync client was a little unpredictable. In terms of the web client there are a few minor things you need to get used to but its pretty shocking how quickly you forget you are in a browser. But the sync client was a real drag--it got a little wacky if you killed the sync while in process-something about Mac SyncServices needing to be killed manually.
Thanks to my previous nagging we got shortlisted by the Zimbra crew to work out the issues with the beta sync. Also, our pals over at Maccius upgraded to Zimbra 4 and the Z-team just finished the .9.16 release of the iSync plugin. Verdict: It works!
One key feature that Scott just built in is a progress bar during the sync, which tells you exactly what stage of the process you are in. It makes it much easier to determine root problems and is a general user nicety.
The moral of the story is that Zimbra went from being almost great to being really great and we are really pleased. Go out and get some Zimbra for yourself.
Thanks to Kevin H, Scott, Scott and Satish for helping us out. A side note to this is that these guys are willing to go way out of their way to make a great product and help their users. Not that I expect this to go wrong (hah) but if it does I am sure they will fly into action.
Posted by Dave Rosenberg on September 14, 2006 09:03 PM
September 06, 2006 | Comments: (0)
Funambol Community Code Sniper Program
Funambol, everybody's favorite open source mobile company just launched a new bounty program to reward developers for contributing code that has been deemed most wanted.
The Funambol Community Code Sniper Program will provide bounties of up to $2000 to community members who develop specific open source Connectors/Plug-ins (which, ultimately, will be open-sourced back to the community).
I like this idea, and Funambol seems to have figured out the smart way to deal with the hassles of the program--including paying people. OpenLogic launched a similar program a while back and ran into some glitches.
Posted by Dave Rosenberg on September 6, 2006 12:03 PM
August 31, 2006 | Comments: (0)
CrossOver Mac runs Windows programs without Windows
CodeWeavers announced the beta of CrossOver Mac, which allows you to install your favorite Windows applications and games on Mac OS X without a Windows installation and without a high-price Windows license. The Windows license aspect makes both Boot Camp and Parallels a bit of a bummer.
Speaking of Parallels I wowed a whole crew of people with the fact that I was running MacOS, Windows and Ubuntu all on the same laptop. If only the laptop itself didn't heat up like a Viking range the whole thing would be more impressive.
Also this week OpenOffice Premium was launched which brings clip art and templates to OO.org. Personally, I'd prefer the ability to run Excel macros to clip art but as we've seen previously my opinion is meaningless.
Posted by Dave Rosenberg on August 31, 2006 10:18 PM
August 17, 2006 | Comments: (0)
ECM consolidation is helping no one
John Newton is back from vacation, and is back on his blog. Thank goodness. It's good to see a considered perspective on the various ECM mergers from the man who created the industry in the first place (when he co-founded Documentum in 1991). Seth Gottlieb also weighs in on ECM consolidation, but I can't agree with him that Red Hat will be buying Alfresco any time soon. We're not for sale, for one thing but, more pertinently, I can't see Red Hat getting into the applications market anytime soon. (Yes, ECM is arguably infrastructure, but still....)
Anyway, John calls out the consolidation trend, but points to a problem that consolidation doesn't solve: non-standard and proliferating repositories:
What do these acquisitions mean for the ECM industry? It means that consolidation is truly on its way, regardless of what happens to Hummingbird. FileNet was the leader in imaging, which is the area where IBM got started in ECM. IBM is now the undisputed leader in ECM and by far the dominant force in imaging and records management. OpenText potential merger with fellow Canadians Hummingbird brings a similar dominance to document management. Supposedly according to Gartner Dataquest, OpenText is the leader in ECM with a 13.2% market share. If so, they have a very poor market cap to prove it. The merger, however, should help to sustain them toward that market position.One would think that consolidation would trend toward fewer repositories, but that has yet to evidence itself. Instead, we get fewer companies with the same volume of confusion.From a practical perspective for the companies themselves, this exacerbates an on-going problem that all the ECM companies have had - too many repositories that don't interoperate. OpenText already have a problem with their existing iXOS repositories and will have a bigger problem with the more overlapping capabilities of Hummingbird as well as Hummingbird's Red Dot acquisition. OpenText’s announcement that it will incorporate Oracle’s repository can only increase the complexity. IBM also has multiple repositories, especially if you count Notes and Domino. Oracle too has said that they need to rationalize their various content repositories. EMC also has issues of multiple repositories, although they seem to be collapsing them all into the Documentum repository.
Clearly, the reason for these mergers is not for technology, but for market share and customer base. With the level of overlapping technology in these systems, the problems inherent in consolidating the repositories must be outweighed by the desire to consolidate customers. This is very similar to what happened in the late 80s and early 90s in the relational database industry when Oracle took on DEC's RdB products and IBM purchased Informix.
Consequently, we find composites of formerly separate companies internally struggling with what was formerly just te customer's problem. Vignette is juggling with its v7 repository and its old v6 repository. Documentum has several. Hummingbird and OpenText will have to duke it out over which one wins out (with the likely answer being "neither").
This is why it's so important to adhere to industry standards like JSR-170 (which none of the companies above do). Only Alfresco, Day (Apache Jackrabbit), and some few others do. So, if you're an enterprise that doesn't want to have its content locked up and owned by a vendor, why would you ever entrust your content to a proprietary repository? It's foolish. And it's by no means necessary.
Posted by Matt Asay on August 17, 2006 07:13 AM
August 15, 2006 | Comments: (0)
FiveRuns announces General Availability
FiveRuns announced the general availability of their namesake FiveRuns systems management platform today. They call it Web 2.0 systems management which in addition to core functionality means slick user interface.
Vp of Product Management Dave Wilby says that response to the beta has been outstanding--1500 beta signups with 300 activated by the company.
Previously:
Five Runs-Open Source Systems Management
Posted by Dave Rosenberg on August 15, 2006 04:28 PM
August 11, 2006 | Comments: (0)
News: Zenoss lands $4.8m for OSS IT Management
Not only did founder Bill Karpovich announce the funding of Zenoss, his wife launched their first human child today. Congrats Bill and team.
Somehow systems management/monitoring has become the hot button for OSS fundings. Off the top of my head: Zenoss, GroundWork, Hyperic and FiveRuns all raised money and have different approaches. I like all 4 of these guys so it will be interesting to see what happens next.
Posted by Dave Rosenberg on August 11, 2006 09:11 AM
August 10, 2006 | Comments: (0)
Cnet is reporting that users of Ruby on Rails have been told to update their installations immediately, following the discovery of a security flaw in the popular open-source Web application framework.
The Ruby on Rails team members released a patch on Wednesday that they describe as "mandatory" for all public sites built using recent versions of the Web-application framework.
Download a new version.
Posted by Dave Rosenberg on August 10, 2006 12:38 PM
August 09, 2006 | Comments: (0)
Upperware: good concept, terrible name
InfoWorld's Dave Margulius talks about his lunch with IBM VC guy Drew Clark in which Drew coined the phrase "upperware." It's a great concept, but a truly awful name.
What sits on top of middleware? Not applications (which IBM presumably leaves to its partners), but...upperware! Drew touted the appeal of a Web-based marketplace for enterprise on-demand upperware that could run on top of a standard, Web-based utility infrastructure. And the perfect distribution vehicle for such modular components? Well, of course, Upperware Parties (my bad joke, not his).The reason I like the concept is that open source software already provides the layer on top of which much of the world's SaaS and Web 2.0 "upperware" already runs. There is an obvious appeal to having an open, standards-based platform on which to build on top of.
It's interesting though that this came from an IBM guy...does it portend a further commoditization of operating systems--or even to stacks like LAMP and .NET?
Posted by Dave Rosenberg on August 9, 2006 10:01 PM
August 03, 2006 | Comments: (0)
Zimbra, Jira and Alfresco test drives
I am currently having a developer friend test drive several open source applications that could ostensibly make up a full enterprise architecture. I suppose the main idea is to be able to move away from Microsoft server products but keep the same level of features and management functionality.
Content Management: Alfresco
I have given Matt a hard time about how boring CMS is since he started working there but the Alfresco product is surprisingly cool (I also remembered that all enterprise software is boring.) Alfresco was easy to install and came with good instructions, but you do need some RTFM to make it doable for your users. This is the kind of product like CRM systems where if/when your users adopt it they will become addicted. The tough part is getting people to change the way they work.
The struggle we hit immediately with users was "why can't I just use a network share?" I don't really have a great answer but I am sure Matt does [ASAY COMMENTS: Dave, had you actually bothered to use the product, you'd notice that we're unique in offering a .... network/folder share view of the system. Ta DA! Your wish is granted.]--point of clarification--what I meant was why bother with CMS if you are just storing docs. The answer is pretty obvious once you get involved with a decent CMS product. Stephe Walli seems to have an answer:
So instead of thinking of Alfresco as "an Enterprise Content Management" system, let's for a moment treat it like a quick-and-easy document sharing system. Every project, workgroup, department, and medium sized business (or school, or non-profit, or religious organization, or community center) could drop down such a system instead of all those important Microsoft Office, Wordperfect, and OpenOffice documents being stuck in people's laptops and desktop machines, which we all know is becoming a problem.This could be the laymans' answer...the other important thing is that I didn't really "get it" until we downloaded and used the product.
Project Management: JIRA
There are few software products that suck as much as MS Project and as noted in the past, Basecamp just doesn't do enough related to workflow and general project management. JIRA is a bit too much on the developer tip, but has all the functionality you need. Our marketing guy's eyes glazed over but he seems to be getting the hang of it.
JIRA is far more realistic for business users than this article about running Subversion at home. Cool idea. Not realistic.
Email: Zimbra
I've mentioned Zimbra before as a very innovative alternative to Exchange, and I still like it. We had half-intention to run it internally so we installed and found that it was pretty straightforward, we just didn't want to run a mail server. Period. So, just like RedMonk we had the guys at Maccius set us up with some hosted accounts so we could experience the functionality without having to deal with the sys admin side. So far, so good. I am just waiting for the iSync adapter from Kevin H. and I will file a more detailed report.
Posted by Dave Rosenberg on August 3, 2006 09:03 PM
July 25, 2006 | Comments: (0)
Your enemy is your best friend: Zenoss and Hyperic collaborating
I am sitting with Doug and John Mark from Hyperic and Bill from Zenoss talking about how you manage relationships with your competition. According to both parties, neither is the enemy-rather they are both fighting a common enemy in IBM, HP, CA and BMC. It's a $9 billion software market--bigger than CRM, content management etc.
So can two competitors meet in the middle? In collaborating, Bill says that what's important is being clear what each partner does and where they fit in and what are the things that can be put into a common project to make better for all parties.
Posted by Dave Rosenberg on July 25, 2006 03:58 PM
July 17, 2006 | Comments: (0)
Taking user-generated apps to the enterprise--A quick look at Coghead
Coghead is a web-based application for the creation and delivery of web-based applications. (Yes, that is the correct description.) Coghead allows savvy users (those who have dealt with Excel macros and such) to become the mythical "business analyst" and develop workflow and applications on their own. The essence of the product allows a broader group of people to leverage technology to solve their own problems and create their own applications. There are a variety of applications that make sense--workgroup oriented workflow, places where you have form submissions for data collection etc.
What's interesting about the approach is that it's a development and deployment platform all in one. The goal is to allow non-programmers to create web-based applications in a collaborative manner and allow access to anyone who has the proper credentials.
The founders set out to create a model that was conceptually simple and based on my demo mostly succeeded. The product does require some solid computing experience but isn't like writing code by hand. Free accounts are available for single-users, but they see the value of the application as used in a collaborative manner. The company is driving people to use the free product as an end run to get them to pay.
On the technology side the stack runs on Linux, is Java-based using Tomcat as the servlet container, and uses the Sleepycat database and an Open Source BPEL engine.
The company is planning to launch to consumers in September with an affiliate program follow-on that will allow partners to develop their own applications, increasing the reach of the Coghead product itself.
Posted by Dave Rosenberg on July 17, 2006 02:51 PM
July 07, 2006 | Comments: (0)
Open Source replacement for Basecamp
activeCollab is an easy to use, web based, open source collaboration and project management tool. It's basically the OSS version of Basecamp, a tool I like but would love to customize. I have a developer installing activeCollab right now...it's all PHP/MySQL so should be straight ahead development.
Also today I saw Coghead, which offers a very interesting drag and drop project management as a hosted tool. Screenshots are available, but no demo...the website contains arguably the best marketing fluff/BS web copy I have read in a long time. I love when Web 2.0 empowers me.
Posted by Dave Rosenberg on July 7, 2006 10:39 AM
July 04, 2006 | Comments: (0)
As Sun continues to debate just how they will open-source Java and deal with things like forking and perceived loss of control they would be well served to take a look at how successful open source projects are managed and developed. In the majority of cases there is a company or organization that acts as the Shepard of the project and manages the development roadmap. Case in point: the MySQL database is managed by MySQL AB, Apache is managed by the ASF, and Spring is guided by Interface 21. There are exceptions where the community takes over either and self-governs (like PHP) or creates fissures that result into multiple iterations of the base code (like Linux) which likely concern Sun. But, generally, it's good to have a community guide. The key is balancing the needs of the community with the demands of revenue generation for the sponsor company.
Sun should take a cue from MySQL and give up the code but manage it through community process. Sun has proven to be good at community and there is no reason they can't build on previous successes. And as Sarah Lacy points out "There are other benefits for Sun. It's not really giving up revenue by open-sourcing Java, and the more prevalent the language, the more Java gains a foot in the door to sell compatible operating systems, Web servers, and the like. Then there are the less tangible effects. It's likely to reinvigorate Java's software development community, give Sun some good PR, and be another important step in proving Sun can be an open-source good citizen."
On a separate standards related note, I was searching through a bunch of old computer junk and came across a dozen Zip disks. I assume that Iomega has a product that could potentially read them, but the Zip drive reiterates the danger of locked-in formats. I am sure anyone who was heavily into computers or design around 1996 is still sitting on a bunch of disks like me—all of them useless.
Previously:
Simon Phipps on "The Zen of Free" (OSBC London)
Sun's Open Source Outreach
Open sourcing Java = incompatibility risk?
Three Simple Things Sun Should Do to Win
Posted by Dave Rosenberg on July 4, 2006 08:47 PM
June 30, 2006 | Comments: (0)
Bad product strategy gets you press (Google)
In the past both Matt and I have been critical of Google's mediocre offerings beyond its core search. BusinessWeek is running an interview with Google VP Marissa Mayer where she essentially says "we throw things at the wall and see if they stick" which seems in stark contrast to an engineering driven organization. It also speaks to Matt's post about the lack of innovation coming from Google.
Typically, companies succeed because they tackle a problem and do the best possible job solving it. Throwing a bunch of things into beta is an interesting "strategy" but not what great long-term products and companies are built on. There is a point when all this Web 2.0 development stuff leaves users with an abundance of mediocre products to use. This aspect is pointed out by BusinessWeek in a different piece So Much Fanfare, So Few Hits
Google's problem isn't a string of failures, then, but rather the middling performance of many products that survive. In fact, it seems far from achieving even its intended 20% to 40% success ratio. This may be contributing to the internal debate that rages at Google's Mountain View (Calif.) headquarters over how to deliver more search users to the new products.
I point the Google situation out because they have a luxury that most small companies don't have, a whopping market cap associated with their core advertising business. They can experiment with homegrown products that cost virtually nothing to build and if they don't generate huge revenue it doesn't matter in the near-term. But this strategy doesn't work for startups. Period.
I've recently been through meetings with several companies who are contemplating tossing new products over the fence in hopes of growth and community. On the OSS startup side it's very difficult to maintain focus. The whole company must be heading in the same direction and working toward a common goal. It's the only way to survive and succeed. And really the same goes for proprietary companies who are putting old code out as OSS--they run the risk of being distracted with no discernible benefits. Building community is extremely difficult. Just because you open source your software doesn't mean people care. It takes a long time and a great deal of dedication to be relevant in the OSS space.
Previously and Links:
Marissa Meyer on Valleywag
Google...innovative?!? Come on!
BusinessWeek/Open Sources Vulcan Mind-meld
Open the Door for Open Source Deals
Levanta--the comeback kid of Linux?
Novell: Better than it appears
The most hated man in open source?
Posted by Dave Rosenberg on June 30, 2006 09:09 AM
June 29, 2006 | Comments: (0)
Shocking! Microsoft Office 2007 delayed again
I am finally back to sitting in front of a computer and not sitting in meetings all day (more on that in the future) and have been trying to catch up with a ridiculous amount of email. I also learned the hard way that the T-mobile Blackberry doesn't allow you to create folders for your messages unless you use Exchange, so I am doubly burdened. Since I was so overwhelmed both with work and data I am trying to simplify and organize better so that I can keep things in the right places and access them as needed. So, when I saw that Office 2007 (note to MS marketing--get rid of the year in the product name, it looks incredibly silly at this point) was going to be late I started thinking again about replacing Office both personally and on larger scales. The fact is Office 2007 dramatically overshoots most user needs but forces you to pay for apps like Outlook which are currently included. The strategy behind the new Office product seems to look like this:
1. add-in as much crap as possible
2. take away the apps people are familiar with unless they buy a more expensive version
3. change the UI
Take a look at this chart for more confusion.
It's possible that Office 2007 will be the greatest product ever known to man, but I can't find a single compelling reason to pay for an upgrade. In fact, many businesses want to take features out of these applications as daft users and insecure applications=total IT and business meltdown.
Literally the only MS product that I use on an even remotely regular basis is Office on the Mac. This is primarily because the replacements are not quite there yet, but they are getting much closer. NeoOffice is actually better than OO.org but still a little weird in terms of interface. For a while I was concerned that my documents would become corrupt or hit some kind of voodoo then realized that I was thinking that because it has happened so many times with MS docs. (Don't make me recount the story of my masters thesis getting corrupted between Mac and PC versions of Word. Suffice to say that my Ned Flanders-like swearing on Sansome Street was a diddly.)
Office 2007 represents a huge opportunity for an open source Office replacement to stick MS where it hurts--in the wallet. Enough with social networking, can't someone do this already?
MS Office generates ~$11 billion in revenue for Microsoft and dominates the market. Its a tough market but a huge opportunity.
Previously:
Let's go build a great Open Source MS Office replacement
MS Office and open source office productivity apps
My 15 seconds of OpenOffice (in)fam(e/y)
Posted by Dave Rosenberg on June 29, 2006 07:40 PM
June 27, 2006 | Comments: (0)
Frustrated by Web 2.0's lack of multi-site integration
I assume that if you read this blog then you spend a fair amount of your life online. Sadly some of us spend all our time connected to some screen, be it monitor, Crackberry, Treo or Tv. As such, I am always looking for ways to better manage my information and share things with my cohorts. Today I came to the realization that there is no simple way to manage all of your disparate stuff in one centralized manner. Nor is there a way to then collaborate with your cohorts on all of these things (wikis simply are not great for to-do lists.) I need to go beyond MyYahoo and get to MyDave where I have my vast array of crap centralized.
Case in point. I refuse to use Windows unless absolutely necessary. I came to the realization for the hundredth time that there are not many business viable unified email/PIM/calendar apps except Outlook (Lotus sucks, Novell is pointless) or Evolution on Linux (a little crashy for business users and then forces OpenOffice.org) Really, Outlook is what is maintaining Microsoft's stranglehold on the corporate desktop. On the Mac I use the not-really-well-integrated iCal, Address Book and Apple mail pretty much exclusively. It's not a great setup but it's usable. It's the browser-based applications that are killing me now. I have been a long-time user of both MyYahoo and Gmail and in bouts of self-flagellation am on and off with RSS readers...RSS is annoying to me in that I want to interact with the data as I do with sites like Backpack. Adding to the pain, today we decided to re-introduce Basecamp into the mix.
If you haven't seen any of the 37 Signals stuff, it's great. Easy to use, well-designed etc. But even they don't offer a completely integrated suite of all of their own apps. I need Basecamp integrated with MyYahoo and Salesforce.com to really be productive. I want all my stuff on one page at one URL, in sync across multiple computers and visible on my handheld. This was the promise of portals but it remains unfulfilled. It was actually my visit to Zimbra and their unbelievably well integrated application that made me so frustrated that this problem isn't being better addressed across the major players.
To me the big opportunity of Web 2.0 development is the ability to create a better user experience based on features etc. Instead we are ending up with a morass of social-networking, photo-sharing redundancy. And while much of this stuff is cool and potentially usable, it's not enough.
Dear Web 2.0 companies,
Please make us all more productive.
XOXO
-dave
Posted by Dave Rosenberg on June 27, 2006 09:36 PM
June 21, 2006 | Comments: (0)
I constantly try to gauge what the generic strategies are for open source companies. Are the products competing on price or feature differentiation? The reason I am such a believer in open source software is because the development and distribution models allow for both. Essentially, open source allows you to not only be less expensive than proprietary vendors but have features that are better. The new version of Zimbra is a great example of this open source continuum. It's more innovative and better engineered than the competition but remains less expensive to buy and manage.
You may have already seen Zimbra's ultra-slick AJAX based email client but the server itself is really what matters. The UI is merely the transport for all of the cool features. But for the moment to get all the slick stuff you need to use the browser. CEO Satish Dharmaraj said that customers were giving feedback saying "don’t give us this experience and then take it away when I get on a plane. Since the user experience mismatch was/is too jarring they have started working on a client-side solution. The plan is to take everything that’s in the product today and take the experience offline by creating a service that runs locally on your PC and does server-to-server sync on the back-end. The goal is present the same experience as you see online with Zimbra, but done via a small footprint. Meanwhile you can still use Outlook or whatever email/PIM/calendar client you desire.
Zimbra will soon be launching a Zimlet Marketplace Directory (a Zimlet is connector from the Zimbra server to another website or service) that will allow developers and customers who are writing Zimlets to donate them back and/try to get generate revenue ala Salesforce.com AppExchange. Things like SMS, traffic reports and Evite are all natively designed into the server. These Zimlets are very cool but there is probably some level of learning curve for users to really take advantage of them.
Speaking of Salesforce, the beta of Zimbra 4.0 will be out over the next couple of weeks and includes some very cool integration with Salesforce.com including the ability to drag and drop emails, contacts etc into the Salesforce.com. It’s actually far slicker than any of the Outlook integration tools I have seen.
The Zimbra 4.0 beta release also includes a new application, Zimbra Documents which includes Wiki functionality based on ALE which allows you to embed things like spreadsheets into your document.
I think it's a very cool product and I would absolutely kill for a integrated email/PIM/calendar solution for the Mac. They sell direct for companies needing 500 seats or more but there are plenty of partners and channels to buy from.
Posted by Dave Rosenberg on June 21, 2006 08:46 PM
June 16, 2006 | Comments: (0)
Open Source and the Mobile Market (Guest post from Funambol)
Seems that the guys at open source mobile shop Funambol have been hearing my pain regarding mobile phones and data services. Funambol CEO Fabrizio Capobianco thinks there is a way out of cell phone hell.
Open Source and the Mobile Market We recently had the pleasure of hearing Dave rant about his mobile phone and BlackBerry death-spiral. Fortunately, he won't have to start rubbing sticks together to send out smoke signals any time soon - I promise.
RIM is starting to target the consumer space by inking deals with operators. The latest: Cingular in the U.S. In theory, this should make email easily integrated with cell phones... and RIM does have a pretty good email solution. Problem is, RIM's solution -- and their business model -- has depended on their proprietary hardware. They are stretching a device built just for the enterprise to adapt it to consumers. So far, only lowering the cost... That is not the way to do it. Consumers need a different type of device. Do you believe my father will ever use a QWERTY phone? I do not think so. However, he uses SMS today. And he receives emails on his desktop. One life, two separate worlds (mobile and web). I does not have to be that way. Good news: it is already changing.
How are RIM going to make their business work with all the phones from dozens of vendors in the consumer market? How do they extend functionality and interoperability to address this myriad of devices with proprietary software? They're smart enough to know that email is the killer app for mobile... reaching the mass market handsets (like your Razr) with email (or SmartSMS ;-) has nothing to do with being smart and everything to do with open source and open standards.
Open source software can do more for the mobile market than any other market it's disrupted to date. Why? Because there are 750 million phones in the world that are compatible with an open standard for PIM and, soon, mobile email (it is called SyncML). And because the only way to test all those phones (with the variations of software builds and network operators) is to harness the power of an open source community. The lousy customer service you were getting from the operators? Open source communities provide better support than that because of natural incentives for cooperation -- look how fast Linux fixes happen and the Linux device drivers history.
The trick is making sure operators "get" the idea of open source software as a real business value both on the cost and revenue side. It's not a religion or philosophy. We have some work to do but I know Dave can hang in there. Hold on -- we're nearly there. With open source and open standard your mobile life will change (and it will be finally integrated with your web life).
------------
Fabrizio Capobianco is CEO of Funambol. You can read his blog here.
UPDATE:
I switched a Verizon Razr, which is fantastic but battery life is weak, and a T-mobile 8700 Blackberry. All good for nearly a week!
Previously:
I am in a mobile phone death spiral
Comparison: Blackberry 8700c vs. Treo (Verdict: all carriers suck)
Posted by Dave Rosenberg on June 16, 2006 05:13 PM
May 29, 2006 | Comments: (0)
Some friends of the Open Sources blog are asking for advice on how they should consider options relating to the open-sourcing of their project. All feedback is welcome and the person providing the best advice gets to have lunch with Matt and I at OSCON where we will bore you with talk of Soccer and Heavy Metal.
We are developing a very sophisticated Ajax Development Platform primarily for Java developers. To enable developers to easily access the product, try it out, understand how it works, and provide feedback, we think it would be best to have some type of 'free' version.We are wondering if there are any strong feelings among developers regarding how much, if any, of the source we make available. For example, should we just make a freeware/community version of the product available or is Open Source really critical for people to feel comfortable with it? Also, if we do go Open Source, is it best to be 100% Open Source or is some lesser amount, like 80/20, considered to be 'ok'?
Please don't be obnoxious. These are guys new to the market who support OSS and need help understanding. It could be you someday :>
Posted by Dave Rosenberg on May 29, 2006 01:58 PM
May 26, 2006 | Comments: (0)
Google/Dell deal : Good or Bad?
Yesterday's deal to ship Dell PCs with Google apps pre-installed is much more interesting than I had originally thought. In the near term it means Firefox as a default browser and productivity apps that are far better (though not as well integrated) as Microsoft offerings.
Besides being a direct affront to Microsoft it leads the way for Google to create a Linux based OS and drop it onto Dell computers. Being that Google is so proficient in creating browser-based applications, my obvious slant here is that a Google Linux should become the base for Dell PCs. This would eliminate the hassle of online/offline applications and means that PC makers can get out from under the MS thumb.
For the moment Google is still far less evil than Microsoft.
Posted by Dave Rosenberg on May 26, 2006 10:02 AM
May 22, 2006 | Comments: (0)
Key Questions About Java's Move To Open Source
"It's not a question of whether, but a question of how." Said Jonathan Schwartz...InformationWeek has taken a pass at what matters in the Open Source Java conundrum in 7 Answers To Key Questions About Java's Move To Open Source.
Previously:
Sun's Open Source Outreach
Posted by Dave Rosenberg on May 22, 2006 02:50 PM
May 14, 2006 | Comments: (0)
OpenClovis-Open Source Telecom Middleware
Here at the Open Sources Blog we are often lucky to get an early look at new open source companies and besides helping them get some press, we also inform the world of products that might be interesting.
Today we have an example of an audacious play backed by investment from AT&T and Intel as well as industry partnerships with HP, IBM and others. And it's in one of the most conservative IT markets of all -- telecommunications.
The company, OpenClovis (www.openclovis.com), is open sourcing a middleware HA and management layer of code that runs on Linux. The idea is that vendors write applications on top of this layer and hey, presto, instant HA and manageability. It apparently sits beneath the new telco platform stacks recently announced by Oracle and BEA.
OpenClovis is a bet on some big trends in telecommunications. When telco tanked in 2001, the shaken survivors of the industry began a race to escape the high costs of their broken business model. It started with the shift from proprietary, integrated hardware and software stacks. Smart vendors recognized that their competitive advantage and real value add were further up the solution stack. Plumbing was a commodity. That's when Linux began to gain traction on the software side. On the hardware side, Intel stepped forward with ATCA, and IBM with BladeCenter. These were all commodity volume opportunities for big vendors who know how to play this game to win.
While network equipment providers and telecommunication equipment manufacturers are re-examining the cost structures of their business models and embracing this trend to commercial off the shelf, wouldn't that be an excellent time to enter the market with open source middleware? Every telco application and service requires carrier grade-level availability and management. What if there were an open platform that provided that layer? Hey, no need for everyone to keep recreating that piece hardcoded into every new application. Vendors and carriers can focus on their real value add -- developing the actual service or application.
OpenClovis certainly has impressive industry backers. Now it's up to them to build the open source community and ecosystem they'll need to succeed.
Posted by Dave Rosenberg on May 14, 2006 11:19 PM
May 11, 2006 | Comments: (0)
Open Source enables--try my blog aggregator
For some reason I still can't get used to using a feed reader so I keep going to actual websites (!!) to read blogs or whatever. I think part of that is because I want to see everything available to me on one page--either a list of links from multiple sites, or the full text blog. We're still dealing with template issues here on Open Sources, but suffice to say that I am not a huge fan of the layout right now. I want to see things in a manner that is convenient to me, not the publishing system.
Meanwhile, I am a frequent visitor to Freshnews.org which displays RSS feeds in a 3 column manner that's pretty close to my liking, but contains a bunch of sites I never visit.
So, I channelled Jon Udell and hacked (and I do mean hacked) together my own blog aggregator based on PHP and MagpieRSS. Then I remembered why I left development for management and didn't feel like adding or editing any more links. You can check it out at http://www.opensources.com and download the code to create your own.
The moral of the story: open source is an enabler. I downloaded some code, used the LAMP stack to host my new apps and in theory can make money from advertising.
Posted by Dave Rosenberg on May 11, 2006 03:26 PM
May 09, 2006 | Comments: (