A hundred million miracles
While I've been writing about IBM and Microsoft, about the the biggest trees in the open source forest, thousands of little shoots have been growing, ignored.
- Zoho has been quietly building its SaaS business and now can translate spreadsheets into native languages.
- Mulesource quietly launched its forge site for open source infrastructure.
- OpSource and Boomi quietly partnered to allow any set of applications to be delivered as SaaS.
- PDAs equipped with an open source program called EpiSurveyor are transforming the public health sector in sub-Saharan Africa.
- Terracotta and Kaazing began enabling build-on-demand Web 2.0 sites.
- Helium created a new business model for blogging.
- Untangle announced its security solution can now be delivered with virtualization from VMWare.
- QNX opened the source code for its Neutrino real time operating system with a support site dubbed Foundry27.
- Etelos and Entrecore announced an application development partnership.
- Belgium put its education records on the open source Intalio BPMS system.
- JasperReports was integrated with Hyperic HQ.
- Groundwork launched a customer support portal called Groundwork Connect.
- Cloudmark launched Cloudmark Authority for Apache SpamAssassin, an anti-spam, anti-virus and anti-phishing solution for the open-source market.
I also got a note from the CEO of Continuent complaining that even larger vendors like mySQL, JBOSS and EnterpriseDB are no longer getting the news coverage they once were.
"MySQL used to have any given time between 600-800 'news items' in Google News and lately they have been hovering between 200-300," Eero Teerikorpi writes.
He's right. All these stories deserve more attention. As any market grows larger, it gets harder to be heard. Yet these companies still make a sound. A glorious sound.
As the late Oscar winner Miyoshi Umeki (above) sang in Flower Drum Song nearly 50 years ago, "a hundred million miracles are happening everyday." She passed away just a few weeks ago, and you probably didn't know.
Don't let the big trees obscure your view of how the forest is growing.