Web publishing, CMS, BI most hot for open source disruption, but ESB and security are not?
Acquia, KnowledgeTree and JasperSoft touted new open source web publishing, social software, content management and business intelligence products at the Open Source Business Conference this week.
Acquia, of Andover, Mass., said it is on track this fall t ship a new social web publishing platform code named “Carbon” that is based on the open source project Drupal. KnowledgeTree is an open source document management company whose first live software-as-a-service version will be announced within the next several weeks, said company CEO Daniel Chalef in a brief OSBC meeting.
Aimed primarily at the SMB crowd, the hosted software-as-a-service offering runs on the Amazon Web Services Elastic Compute Cloud and gives customers full document management and collaboration capabilities. Support is provided for Windows drag-and-drop and Office as well as the ZoHo office suite.
Meanwhile, San Francisco –based BI specialist JasperSoft announced at the OSBC tighter integration of its open source software with Microsoft Excel. JasperSoft, for example, announced a deal with Microsoft to enhance its BI software with Windows Server 2008 and also the release this week of its Jaspersoft ODBO Connect product which allows Microsoft Excel to be a front end to its data analysis server, JasperAnalysis.
Incidentally, those four software categories – web publishing, social software, content management, and BI -- are among the most vulnerable to disruption by open source, while while security, configuration management and enterprise service bus software sectors are cited as the least vulnerable to disruption, according to an informal survey of attendees who attended the Open Source Business Conference this week.
Not all agree with those survey results.
MuleSource is a hot open source ESB company which now has 3,000 enterprise deployments and is growing exponentially, CEO Dave Rosenberg said.
The San Francisco, Calif. is speeding ahead to meet enterprise requirements. MuleSource 2.0 Community Edition is set to be launched at the company’s MuleCon 2008 conference next week with the enterprise edition due later in the year. Major improvements in the 2.0 release include significant ease-of-use enhancements, support for OSGi, enhanced patch management and a new drag-and-drop IDE like the one in Tibco, Rosenberg said.
Perhaps even more significantly, MuleSource is getting ready to release in May a new SOA governance tool code-named "Galaxy" that offers a repository for services, an alternative to UDDI and RSS option for the enterprise, he noted.
Open source security is a very disruptive technology that is increasingly a concern for established vendors such as Cisco, maintains Michele Perry, chief marketing officer at Annapolis, Maryland based Sourcefire.
In a conversation at an OSBC party, Perry told ZDNet that the company’s expanded security software platform and acquisition of open source anti-virus company ClamAV makes it a viable threat to established players.
Sourcefire now has an OfficeCat data leakage prevention product designed for Office document inspection and a Demon logging product to help customers meet SOX requirements. Sourcefire is also planning to ship an upgrade of its commercial open source intrusion detection system -- version 4.8 -- that offers a host of new widgets and "Google-like" user interface that will please end users.
The 3D System is based on the Snort open source intrusion detection software project. Snort 3.0, which is expected to be completed this spring, divides the platform into two pieces: the engine and traffic analysis platform for handling high performance systems.
During a panel on the future of open source that examined these trends, Ubuntu Linux founder Mark Shuttleworth questioned why mobile platforms such as “Android” and other Linux mobile platforms were not listed among the top potentially disruptive open source technologies. To him, it's obvious.
"Linux will be at the heart of the cloud and mobile devices," said the Ubuntu creator, pictured here at the far right at the OSBC panel on the future of open source. Execs from Acquia, MySQL, SugarCRM and Ingres (from left to right) also sat on the panel.