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.
Roberto Galoppini, 
Stefano Maffulli 5:35 pm on December 17, 2009 Permalink
Setting up a non profit foundation may be an elegant solution to the problem. I think Sun should have enough experience dealing with communities (Java Community Process, for example). I believe that the non profit foundation would help also OpenOffice.org
Roberto Galoppini 5:43 pm on December 17, 2009 Permalink
Oracle or Sun maybe or maybe not interested in takin part in the MySQL foundation, it could be named FreeSQL or something like that to avoid all IP issues in case. I believe a relative high number of vendors could have an interest to support it.
OOo is different, very few players could be really interested and all in all the EU didn’t mention the office suite and without any pressure I can hardly imagine any change at Sun or Oracle.
A. Rebentisch 12:07 am on December 18, 2009 Permalink
So Monty sells MySQL to SUN and then wants it back for free when SUN is overtaken by Oracle. I find that a bit creative use of antitrust law for such objectives. The more critical technology of the merger is probably Java.
I am sure Monty could sell certification/support instead of licenses, regardless of the software “code” license. Florian’s relicensing request put the stakes a bit high.
Roberto Galoppini 1:32 pm on December 18, 2009 Permalink
Apparently Monty has been taken pretty seriously from the EU, and he is definitely one of the most important voices taking part into this antitrust investigation. So said, I believe that Monty’s concerns about the viability of his business approach shouldn’t be relevant in this case, though. What matters to me is code production sustainability, and nothing else.