Commercial Open Source Software

Nextanalytics , a business intelligence company based in Ottawa, announced the availability of the Nextanalytics 3.0, a business analytics platform with a proprietary analytic engine and an open source tier needed to integrate it with third parties’ applications and solutions.

In a marketing move, nextanalytics claims to be open source while making source code available only partially.

Marketing claims by Domenico Sav

Reading some posts on the subject I found Ward Yaternickh, Nextanalytics founder and CEO, saying:

We’re actively soliciting a community of third-party consultants, ISVs, and sole proprietor developers to offer services and products that employ nextanalytics to do their data integration and processing. We have great technology and now, with our new open-source inspired, community-driven Web site, we have made it easy to work with nextanalytics. Now, any dev shop can distinguish themselves with our software as their analytics engine. Through this strategy, we hope to be the next MySQL, but with a focus on business analytics.

The developer zone doesn’t look community driven at the present stage, as honestly recognizes Ward who told me that the ROI to create a proper forge is still uncertain. Nextanalytics has clearly also very little to do even with new MySQL’s approach (where some add-ons could be eventually distributed as proprietary pluggable features), so I asked some clarifications.

How open source you are?

For a nominal, (interpret “fair”) annual fee, people can get some analytic functionality to improve what they use to make business decisions, and as much open source code as they need to integrate into their environments. If they can find something useful in our list of features, then the cost-benefit is obvious. If we don’t have what they need, then they have to go up-market and pay a lot more. That is why nextanalytics exists, to sell to that market.

Nextanalytics is aiming at making programmers’ lives easier, providing them with open source reference implementations and documentation to do things faster and easier. So far, so good.

Does it make them an open source company? I don’t think so.

Technorati Tags: open source business, open source business intelligence, business intelligence, nextanalytics, wardyaternick

Sun’s open source strategy overshadowed by legacy businesses - (via google alert) Larry Dignan is skeptical about the possibility that open source will turbo charge the rest of Sun’s businesses.

Managing Toward Open - Sam Ramji writes about how the interrelationship between Microsoft and open source is changing. Matthew Aslett commented Microsoft’s move to jump into cross-platform system management.

Last June the former Italian Minister of Reform and Innovations in Public Administration, Luigi Nicolais, announced the creation of the second Italian Open Source Commission, and last week the commission coordinated by professor Angelo Raffaele Meo released a first draft of the report (Italian).

The Neapolitean coffee is finished. Any more coffee? Valpopando (LYJR)

The commission, composed of sixteen members and supported by the National Center for Information Technology in Public Administration and the Department of Innovation, would have probably needed more time to define procurement policies for IT Public procurement of open source software.

Will also the next Italian government take good care of open source?

Technorati Tags: open source government, open source procurement, Italian government, open source report