Hot new open source ISVs, projects make the grade at OSBC
Six hot open source startups and projects got notice at the Open Source Business Conference this week.
Not surprisingly, many of them are in software categories deemed most vulnerable to open source disruption, including collaboration and conferencing, social publishing, sales automation, application deployment and developer tools.
Alfresco CMS business development chief and OSBC founder Matt Asay said open source keeps moving higher up the stack, and into niche areas. “Open source has moved beyond CRM into new territories,” Asay said during his opening remarks at the San Francisco conference. “It’s been an even better year for enterprise open source.”
At the show, executives from SugarCRM, Zenoss and the Olliance group were asked to weigh in on what they thought were the most promising open source commercial offerings and open source projects.
SugarCRM CEO John Roberts' pick is the open source collaboration project and company DimDim whose web conferencing and meeting service -- now in private beta testing and soon to move to public beta -- will rival WebEX and Citrix Go-To-Meeting. The Web 2.0 service company employs former Apple executive Steve Chazin and offers free, professional and enterprise editions of Dimdim.
Several observers at OSBC expressed high hopes for Acquia, an Andover, Mass. company founded in 2007 that plans to ship its first commercial product based on the Drupal open source social web publishing platform this fall. The software, code-named Carbon, was highlighted in several sessions at OSBC.
LoopFuse, BitRock and MindTouch, all exhibitors or panel participants at OSBC, got the high sign from Mark Hinkle, a well known opne source advocate and vice president of business and community development at Zenoss.
LoopFuse, of Atlanta, provides an open source sales automation platform that is offered on demand as a hosted web service, on premise and in open source. The company’s platform is based on JBoss and Apache. LoopFuse OneView 3.0 upgrade was recently launched.
BitRock, which was founded in Spain and has offices in San Francisco, has developed a multiplatform installer for open source stacks such as the LAMP stack. Products include BitRock Installer and BitRock Custom, Web, Rubu and Mono Stacks. “It’s a point and click installer for LAMP,” said Hinkle about the solution, which helps reduce the complexity of deploying open source stacks.
At the OSBC, the company launched a new product called the BitRock Network Service that works in conjunction with the BitRock Customer Stack and enables full open source application deployment services for customers.
MindTouch is another OSBC exhibitor whose open source Wiki and application platform got a lot of attention on the show floor. The San Diego, calif company’s recently released its Deki Wiki “Itasca” version offers not only sophisticated wiki services for authoring, aggregating, organizing, and sharing content among development groups but also support for Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud.
Enomaly, an open source consulting firm based in Toronto, Canada, offers an open source virtual server manager called the Enomalism Virtualized Management Dashboard.
The open source software is a virtual machine manager for the Xen open source hypervisor and caught the attention of Andrew Aiken, founder and managing partner at Olliance Group, of Palo Alto, Calif., (pictured below) who led a panel at the OSBC on open source mergers and acquisitions on Wednesday. Enomaly also offers the ElasticDrive web-based virtual storage system and ElasticLive utility hosting platform.
