Commercial Open Source Software

Since last week I started to cover the “Open Innovation Awards” winners, assigned at the  Open World Forum 2009.

Let’s have now a closer look at Kaltura, the open source video platform for online video management, now powering over 32800 different sites.

Continue reading ‘Open Innovation Awards: Kaltura’

The mission of the CodePlex Foundation - enabling the exchange of code and understanding among software companies and open source communities - could be a roaring success. But in order to  create an open, neutral and business friendly environment first some work has to be done.

Continue reading ‘How to Make CodePlex Sexy for Business’

The following 5 “Open Innovation Awards” were assigned on Friday afternoon at the Open World Forum held in Paris. This year a jury of ten international open source experts considered as the most promising and representative of open innovation the following companies: Bonitasoft, Kaltura, Scaledb, SonarSource and Ulteo.

Let’s have a closer look at all of them by alphabetical order.

Bonitasoft, a provider of open source BPM software, recently raised 3 Millions from Ventech and Auriga Partners:

“The team, the business model, and the BonitaSoft solution completely captivated us. Given the reputation that this BPM solution has in the open source community, we are confident that BonitaSoft will contribute to the ‘democratization’ of BPM in business through its technological innovation” says Claire Houry, Ventech. “BonitaSoft has everything it needs to quickly become the open source BPM leader in the marketplace,” says Philippe Granger, Auriga Partners.

The idea of ‘democratizing’ BPM sounds fascinating, but justifying a BPM project maybe not trivial. Download numbers - if these were meant to mean anything - are  ’big’ (140.000) considering that we are talking of a BPM software, but converting users into customers is a different matter.

While Intalio - probably the most famous open source BPM player around (see 2008 BPM Gartner’s magic quadrant) - goes commercial by layering editions (open core), Bonitasoft today generates revenues only through support subscriptions and services. The business model paragraph of their manifesto reports:

BonitaSoft will develop additonal versions of Bonita with professional grade technical support and advanced features to facilitate collaborative work and to industrialize Bonita deployments. BonitaSoft reserves the right to give access to these versions on a subscription basis to its customers only.

My suggestion in this respect is: the sooner the better, upselling is hardly welcomed by the users, and being clear about the business strategy can help potential customers to make their decisions.

From a community standpoint, Bonitasoft is starting to get traction, at least in terms of bug reports and feature requests, much less in terms of code contributions.

Sharing R&D costs doesn’t appear to be a major concern at the present stage, along with standards co-creation and alike.

BonitaSoft business strategy might take inspiration from Talend, but they need to work hard on fostering their ecosystem, provide third-parties with documentation and tools to ease extending the platform and maybe consider to move (also) in the cloud.

Microsoft Office to OpenOffice.org/StarOffice Migration Overview - A white paper edited by Sun Microsystems (requires a registration) providing a simple migration blueprint introducing to a six step process (Implementing a test phase, Creating an inventory of tools and Microsoft Office dependent solutions, Identifying documents and macros that are still in use, Organizing the migration team, Converting work-flow critical documents, templates and macros and eventually Training and post-deployment support). A case study and scenarios are also discussed.

Nearly there - John Mc Creesh says it is almost time to go to the OpenOffice.org conference. Look at the Conference Programme and if you can make it don’t forget to register online, Orvieto waits for you!

Git and OpenOffice.org - ideas about how could be possible to auto merge OpenOffice document from Git.

Sign the online petition for an open and free Internet in Europe at www.euopeninternet.eu.

Funambol just announced the availability of Funambol v8, a redesigned AJAX version of the MyFUNAMBOL web portal, a proprietary product tailored for carriers based on their open source piece of software.

The differences between Funambol community and carriers’ editions is key to understand Funambol business model. Knowing the importance of external contributions I asked Stefano Maffulli, Funambol Community Manager, to tell me about how  he passed the message to the Funambol community.

Continue reading ‘How Funambol Walks the Commercial Open Source Rope’

The Open World Forum next week will bring together speakers from all over the world at the Eurosites George V in Paris.

Paris on the 1-2 October will be for the second time the European open source hub. Look at the program to figure out which of the 34 open source conferences is your favorite to learn, share and discuss about the technological, economical and social impact of open source technologies.

Continue reading ‘Open World Forum 2009, Paris, 1-2 October’

The Olliance Group is back in Europe with the Open Source Think Tank, a simplified version of the classical format encapsulated within the Open World Forum that will be held in Paris on the 1st of October.

Continue reading ‘Open Source Think Tank Europe 2009′

Technology BIZ, is the first event taking place in Naples aimed at responding to the demand for complex ICT solutions of the southern Italian market. The event will be held on the 28-29 of October at Città della Scienza, Campania region’s organizational body that supports innovation and international openness of the regional system.

TechnologyBIZ will allow visitors both for the public and private sector to attend seminars, participate to workshops and set up one-to-one meetings covering areas related to ICT such as Healthcare, Homeland Security & Defense, Mobile Computing, Open Source, Web 2.0 and more.