ZDNet Must Read:
Google makes Chrome OS open source
Google made the early code available to the open source community and claims external developers will have the same access to the code as internal Google developers.... Continued »
Category: Software as a Service
November 19th, 2009
MindTouch launches its open source cloud
You can argue that clouds are fast becoming synonymous with SaaS, but MindTouch has launched its own cloud to serve up its open source collaboration solution.
MindTouch bills itself as the open source alternative to Sharepoint and recently named our own Matt Asay as the second most-influential executive in open source. (You’re number one in my book, Matt.)
Pricing starts at $7/month, but you can try it free. It allows non-programmers to overlay data from a variety of internal and external resources in a single collaborative environment.
You might consider it an enterprise mashup service akin to Salesforce.com’s Chatter. But while Chatter is focused on social media MindTouch is focused on enterprise data — Chatter is about social and MindTouch about media.
Of course that last may be a comparison of sales pitches, not feature sets. MindTouch is launching its cloud just a week after announcing its Enterprise Dashboard, so these features may just be at the top of its mind right now.
Clouds will bear careful watching in 2010. They not only abstract complexity and virtualize everything, but they also blur the lines of open source and proprietary with a unitary business model based on SaaS. Which means everyone in software competes with everyone, and on the same playing field.
Which would leave me with nothing to write about. Maybe I can finally start that novel.
November 17th, 2009
What a decade taught Larry Augustin
At 46, Larry Augustin is much too young to be the grand old man of anything.
But he is one of the grand old figures of open source. He was in the group that coined the term back in the late 1990s.
Larry was Sourceforge, he was VA Linux, back during the dot-boom 10 years ago. He rode the stock to $240/share, then watched it plummet to nearly nothing in the dot-bomb.
Once had had a Web site, made it run. Made it race against time. Once he had a Web site, now it’s done, buddy can you spare a dime?
But Larry kept his hand in. He became an angel investor and adviser, a “go-to” guy for any open source start-up looking for some street cred. His current bio has him on 9 different corporate boards, topping the list of the most influential people in open source a few months ago. (Our own Matt Asay was number two.)
The news today is that Larry is the permanent CEO of SugarCRM. Appointed on an interim basis in May to replace co-founder John Roberts, he has pointed the software into the cloud, adding a business model to its large community.
What has he learned in that time?
- Influence is not a contest among bloggers. Augustin’s last blog post is dated July.
- Companies grow through teams. The next negative word about SugarCRM’s people I hear from Larry will be the first.
- The future of open source is in SaaS, in the cloud.
Larry Augustin’s story is proof that second acts in business are possible. Most of those who boomed during the dot-boom were never heard from after the dot-bomb. But not Larry.
His story reminds me of the man who was managing my Atlanta Braves when I first moved here in the early 1980s. He won a pennant, got fired, got kicked around. He got a few gigs, did some broadcasting, advised a few people here and there.
Then he got another shot, in New York, and he took it. His second chance made Joe Torre a sure Hall of Famer.
I can’t guarantee Larry Augustin the same success, but after a decade in the wilderness he has a team again. Hard for me not to root for the “old guy.”
November 4th, 2009
Sam Ramji has his head in the clouds
Sam Ramji, formerly the face of open source at Microsoft (cue the Star Wars music) is settling into a new life as vice president for strategy at Sonoa Systems, a cloud start-up.
He told me it suits him.
“Instead of pushing boulders up the hill I’m going down the hill. Sonoa has 65 employees. I talk to customers directly, daily, instead of monthly. There’s less operational overhead. So I’m getting out more, talking at events more, talking to journalists and analysts more.
“At Microsoft there is no such thing as a staff job. You have to always be driving strategy, be a subject matter expert, and get into detail as much as necessary. I had a 120 person team in a 90,000 person organization.
“As Vice President for Strategy at Sonoa Systems I’m a one man show.” He also gets more family time — he describes himself on his personal blog as an “avid husband and father of two.”
That blog (now part of the blogroll here) is also now a great place to get Ramji’s honest views on cloud computing, CodePlex, and open source in general, as in this piece “free is not the opposite of commercial.”
Ramji describes 
Sonoa as being among the many start-ups working to define what will become the LAMP stack of cloud computing. (That’s a close-up of its home page, describing its offerings, to the left.)
This means competitors are often collaborators. “We’re all trying to figure out how our technologies connect” with the primary competition coming from clients’ in-house development.
He described one Sonoa solution, for MTV, involving RightScale, Amazon, Sonoa and Xen, all working together. “It seems like we do the same thing, but when we get deployed you realize that managing the virtual infrastructure is different from managing cloud service traffic. Stacks are just starting to emerge and each component is important.”
So Ramji has gone from a world where everything is defined and the fight is continuous to one where nothing is defined and contention is nebulous. It’s more wide-open and, he says, more fun.
So there is life after Microsoft, in the clouds.
October 20th, 2009
Nimsoft takes another step forward in cloud monitoring
Nimsoft, which specializes in monitoring tools for data centers, is entering the cloud market.
CEO Gary Read said that, as of today, all the company’s performance monitors will become available for external environments, meaning they can deal with hosted providers, managed services, SaaS or clouds.
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“The computing infrastructure of the future will no longer be hosted internally by the customer, but customers will have a combination of internal and external resources. They’ll want to see the performance and service across that entire environment.”
The initial release will cover the Amazon cloud and Rackspace, but Read said the company is taking measurements on Salesforce.com and has plans to expand to Microsoft and Google cloud offerings.
Read insisted this is not like those “cloud weather reports” we wrote about last year. <!– @page { margin: 0.79in } P { margin-bottom: 0.08in } –>
“You haven’t been able to monitor a single customer’s usage, and you haven’t been able to pull all the different threads, and combine that with an internal environment, into a single integrated view of the service delivery.
That’s the big play. It’s not about one provider. It’s about pulling all the threads together, because everything then becomes part of the same fabric of service delivery.”
Read said that, for cloud vendors, his move and that of his competitors will help in cloud adoption and make clouds common parts of computing infrastructure.
The company will be hosting a Web conference on its site today to discuss the new release and new direction. I wonder if the name “rainbow” is taken?
October 8th, 2009
Moore's Law of Software is the key to the cloud
In my new e-book on technology history, Moore’s Lore, I devote a special chapter to what I call Moore’s Law of Software.
Fact is there is no Moore’s Law of Software. Productivity has improved over the years, but arithmetically. Code is still being written, and tested, by hand. Software falls further behind hardware every year.
In his excellent Cloud Computing Rethink series over at C|Net, Cisco’s James Urquhart yesterday revealed a very important truth about the cloud that most executives and analysts have not fully understood.
This is all about programmer productivity.
Urquhart begins by describing what Forte Software tried to do with 4GL 15 years ago, offering it as a utopian past that cloud computing hopes to rediscover.
it starts this journey with an economic model that budgets can accommodate, and Urquhart then issues a call for better development tools. It’s the loyalty of software developers that must be won, and their shared endeavor can rebuild the 4GL utopia.
That shared endeavor is what connects cloud computing to open source. The same force that drives open source forward, developers sharing and improving tools, also drives the cloud, Urquhart writes.
It’s a brilliant insight.
That’s what the Amazon and Google brands bring to the party, software development environments that can be turned into profitable services quickly. As he explains:
How much more powerful is AWS with other developer-focused services, such as DevPay, Simple Queue Service, and Elastic Map Reduce? This attracts developers, which in turn attracts CPU/hrs and GB/hrs.
I keep thinking of one of these cloud guys doing the Ballmer dance. A Ballmer dance in the clouds?
September 2nd, 2009
Will new Skype owners deal differently with open source?
There is growing speculation, especially given its deal with Digium, that the new owners of Skype may take a different attitude toward open source.
That would be a good thing.
Skype has long been the most popular Voice Over Internet Protocol (VOIP) client, but it is also closed. It was proprietary, not just in terms of its coding but in terms of eBay’s attitude toward doing business.
Its proprietary nature gave Skype the marketing budget it needed to win in the marketplace. But it also hampered VOIP efforts to go beyond voice.
While VOIP gained popularity as a telephony replacement its importance goes well beyond that. Once voice is integrated as a normal Internet service, it can be combined with other services in any number of ways.
The difference between a VOIP program and a Web conferencing system is not that large. You can not only mimic all the common voice services using VOIP, but add more as you need them or imagine them.
This has not happened up to now, partly because much of our voice traffic has moved to cellular networks which digitize it as a matter of course and monitor their networks to gain the most revenue they can out of every bit. For cellular, VOIP is just a way of squeezing more calls into limited bandwidth.
So the question becomes, what can Skype offer, alongside the open source movement, that will make it part of a compelling suite of services rather than just a way to get around telco gatekeepers? How, if Skype is to become part of the open source movement, will we get the word out to the mass market?
Vonage has shown a way to reach the mass market with a service based on open source, but investors are turning away from it due to coming competition from Skype and Google. So can Google deliver an open source VOIP service worth advertising, and what might it add to one?
What is the future of VOIP, and what part will open source play in it?
August 4th, 2009
Funambol to monetize cloud sync for mobile VOIP
How’s that for a headline, if you just came here from Google News? Let’s break it down:
- Funambol is an open source software company. They specialize in software for synchronizing mobile devices, and claim they serve over 2 billion of them.
- Monetize is a verb form of making money. But it doesn’t just mean making money for yourself. In technology it often refers to turning on some invention so it can make money for lots of people.
- Cloud. A cloud is a big hosting center. Your stuff no longer runs on a particular computer using a specific operating system. It’s just in the system somewhere. It’s in the cloud.
- Sync is short for synchronize. Synchronizing, in this case, means making two things the same. The file here is the same as the file there, and they’re kept the same even after one side changes.
- Mobile is what Europeans call cell phones or cell-like devices. Funambol was originally Italian, but they’re now based in Redwood City, Calif. I think there is an Olive Garden in Palo Alto.
- VOIP is an acronym, short for Voice Over Internet Protocol. Make a phone call using your Internet connection rather than a regular phone line and you’re making a VOIP call.
Now, dear visitor, what does this mean to you?
Let’s say you’re traveling to Toronto or Taiwan. To avoid your carrier’s hefty “gotcha” fees, you call home using a local number and an Internet connection through a service like PennyTalk. You’re doing big business so you collect a lot of business cards, and put those contacts into your phone.
With Funambol software, you can now synchronize those contacts with a big system somewhere on the Internet, and share that synchronized file with co-workers, who may start calling those contacts before they even get home, before they have had time to deal with your competitor.
Or, when you’re visiting grandma in India, you can take some pictures of her and share them immediately with the whole family back in Duluth, Georgia.
This is a valuable capability. Funambol hopes enough money is made from all this that its software can earn a chunk as well. You may never know Funambol is involved in this, or (if you use their myFunambol portal) you may indeed know their name.
It’s a business model, and if you want another acronym it’s SaaS, which stands for Software as a Service. You don’t pay for the software, but what the software does.
By saving you money and making profitable new services possible, companies like Funambol keep their open source projects alive. You may not pay for that open source package directly, but you do pay for it, and they make money on it.
And that’s what makes the world go around.
July 29th, 2009
Was 4chan block about censorship, security or net neutrality?
AT&T insists its temporary block of 4chan was about security, that the site was hosting a Dedicated Denial of Service (DDoS) attack aimed at one of its customers.
Others aren’t so sure.
The Inquisitor calls it censorship. Writers at The Daily Kos call it an attack on net neutrality and predict it will backfire before the FCC.
Tristan Louis combines it with the Kindle “1984″ erasure and Apple’s control of iPhone apps, writing “a dark cloud” puts all technology trends into question.
It’s clear this is not a one-off. It is part of a growing trend, corporate attempts to enforce law remotely against property people consider their own.
This is especially relevant as we move into an era of cloud computing, where resources we consider our property are, in fact, dependent upon computing environments owned by others.
It doesn’t matter in this case whether the software in question is open source or closed source. What matters is the remote control of that software exercised by a service vendor, and the legitimacy of that control.
Can people trust clouds, or devices dependent upon clouds, if cloud owners act as judge, jury and executioner, zapping what we consider our own? Wouldn’t a book be more ours, or a simpler, voice-only phone? Should we perhaps only use modems to reach the Internet, and shut the connection when we’re not behind the keyboard?
In the case of 4chan, AT&T’s story is fishy. DDoS attacks come from botnets, not specific sites. While sites may control botnets, and users may launch botnet attacks from sites, those are almost always throwaway URLs today, not popular, well-known sites like 4chan.
Moreover if 4chan were hosting malware then all security professionals should have been made aware of it, and the block should have been universal, backed perhaps by a government warrant.
Corporations are individuals under U.S. law, and subject to legal authority, but they are not law itself. They are not law enforcement agencies. They should not act as such without clear legal authority.
For cloud computing to succeed we need national and international policies that define when companies can act, and how they can act, so those who are acted upon have legal recourse.
Private law enforcement without legal recourse just won’t cut it. The opposite of government is not freedom, but anarchy.
July 14th, 2009
Reputation key to success in an open source world
For two generations the key to success in computing has been “lock-in.”
(Picture from the 2000 film, filmed in Atlanta, “Remember the Titans.” From Monsters & Critics.)
Companies have fought to protect their power over customers by protecting their intellectual property from use by others. IBM’s hardware monopoly in the 1950s and Microsoft’s software monopoly of the 1990s spring from the same tree.
Lock-in doesn’t require a monopoly to be real. You can argue Oracle does not have a monopoly in databases. But it does have lock-in, and its profits are based on that lock-in.
The search for lock-in goes on. It has moved from hardware to software to data formats. Where does it lie in an open source world?
That world has two hemispheres, it seems to me.
On the enterprise side it lies, as Matt Asay writes, precisely where it does in proprietary software. The cost of conversion gradually rises as a system grows more complex, so that a lower price, or even no price, can’t cause the customer to switch. That’s lock-in.
On the consumer side, I think it rides more on reputation. Microsoft’s reputation hampers its ability to sell online services, even free online services, and it has for years. Google’s good reputation is its most important asset in this regard and Apple’s reputation within its niche is made of iron.
Reputation in this case creates lock-in. Your preference for Firefox over Microsoft Internet Explorer, or Google Chrome, may be based less on features than on your feelings about the maker. The same is true in other niches where open source competes for consumer attention.
There is a cycle to corporate reputation. As companies grow it becomes increasingly difficult to maintain a positive reputation. We like the underdog.
I’m old enough to remember when WalMart and Microsoft were underdogs, against Sears and IBM respectively. Their positive reputations helped get them through those fights, but now both face enormous push-back, in part because of their size.
As Google has grown, and as Apple’s share within niches like music players and phones has become enormous, both have also faced challenges to their reputations. They can easily be found in any talkback thread here. Google is evil, a threat to privacy, some say. Apple practices lock-in and seeks monopoly, others say.
Reputation, as an asset, grows in importance the more our business is done online, because other forms of lock-in drift away. Reputation is a prejudice based on personal experience, your knowledge of others’ experience, and (to an extent) the company’s advertising, marketing, and public relations.
In the end, then, the lock-in of reputation is put best by Denzel Washington in Remember the Titans.
Who’s your daddy? In an open source world, you decide.
Loading ...July 14th, 2009
Google and open source finally kill Clippy
Microsoft’s decision to offer Office 10 free online proves that its competition with Google is as serious as a heart attack.
It is interesting that analysts just shrugged at the news. At this decade’s start Office was a bigger financial deal to Microsoft than Windows. Its long fight to make OOXML a standard was designed to reinforce a monopoly users were paying big money to stay a part of.
According to Microsoft’s Web site upgrading any Office product costs hundreds of dollars, and if you got yours cheap — if you were a student — there is no upgrade available.
Now you can go online and use the stuff inside a browser? That’s leaving serious money on the table.
Admittedly, the definition of Office has changed over the years. To Microsoft, Office is the entry point into a host of products — databases, design products, management products — which lead to five-figure server licenses for things like SharePoint, available only when bought in volume.
Why did Microsoft cut the bottom rung off this ladder? Because it had to. OpenOffice.org and online alternatives like Google Apps and Zoho have made Office unprofitable at the consumer level. Besides, as reviewers have noted, word processors and spreadsheets are mature products — what is there to upgrade to?
It’s funny that Microsoft is selling Office 2010 as an action flick whose first scene is at the graveside of Clippy, the paperclip help icon. Because the gang at Wait Wait was right. Clippy must die.
July 10th, 2009
When you see Chrome OS think business model
The trolls are out for Google Chrome OS, months before the first delivery of beta code.
It’s as bad in its way as Windows, stealing your privacy and adding proprietary tweaks. It’s going to destroy Android, Google’s Linux for smart phones. It’s an attack on Ubuntu. It’s an attack on Microsoft.
Here’s my two cents.
Chrome OS isn’t an attack on anyone so much as it is an effort to crack the Netbook business model.
I have tried both Windows and Linux Netbooks and they both have problems.
- The Linux kit can’t deliver a business model that works in the sales channel, so if you’re talking about this attacking Ubuntu there is nothing to attack.
- Microsoft has tweaked its business model to fit the Netbook, but that model doesn’t really work for either Microsoft or users.
The problem is that Netbooks are cheap and, while they will gain in power they will stay cheap. I spent $270 on my HP Mini and that’s about right.
Microsoft has reportedly cut the price of Windows to $3 to capture Netbook OEMs, and it’s offering a cut-rate price on Office, too.
But when you consider the $50/year price to license an anti-viral, the $30/year to license a malware program and the additional $30/year you need for a registry cleaner, the software price of a Netbook gets completely out of line with its hardware cost.
Chrome will solve the channel problem because Google has the cash to subsidize it at retail. Chrome hopes to solve the software problem by moving as many functions as possible into its cloud.
Amazon’s cloud has a great business model, based on Web hosting. Google’s cloud has been struggling to build a business model beyond advertising.
Netbooks, and the Chrome OS, are that business model.
The idea is that the Netbook is a true client, which syncs its files regularly, via WiFi or a cellular data link, with the Google cloud. That cloud, in turn, can sync necessary files back to a Google Android phone.
More important, the cloud can manage the Netbook. Security can be handled centrally, whenever the device is connected.
These are valuable services, well worth paying for. Netbooks will create larger files than phones, they’re editing rather than data gathering devices, so now it starts coming together.
You use Google free, and you use many Google services like mail and calendaring free, but now Google can sell syncing, security, and integration with your corporate resources at a designated price.
Think of it as the third leg of a cost triangle, one being the device, a second being the connection, and a third being the online service behind the connection.
WiFi in a coffee shop can reduce that second cost, but as more cellular carriers (or Clearwire, which Google has invested in) offer all you can eat (or at least high bandwidth and high bit limit) pricing plans you start to see how it works.
A Chrome OS Netbook thus has a revenue stream that can let it subsidize the initial price. Just as Android phones are subsidized by a contract on the cellular link.
We make a mistake in the tech business when we focus too much on the technology and the rivalries among various companies. We should focus instead on the business models, how investments will come back in ways that are attractive to customers.
And in this case it comes back in monthly fees.
They say life is all about the Benjamins, but when it comes to Chrome OS Google’s plan is that we all be Aaron Burr, killing all the Hamiltons. The money comes out of your pocket by tens, for services you’re happy to pay for, because you save hundreds in up-front costs.
July 2nd, 2009
With clouds license arguments become fog
Matt Asay makes a great point.
When you are using a cloud software licenses don’t matter much. (Picture from NASA via Visible Earth.)
This has always been true, of course. Ever since the Web was spun, users of Web services have remained blissfully ignorant of disputes over software licenses. Licenses, we don’t need no steenkin’ licenses.
What is changing today is simply the balance of where client computing takes place. Power and responsibility are moving to what used to be called the server side. Â
Things I used to do on my PC, like get my mail and manage my calendar, are now done online. What matters is no longer who controls my software but who controls my data.
To Matt, this becomes a question of “data-driven lock-in,” with Google becoming Microsoft due to its “control” of my data.
But do they really control my mail? That’s not the deal implicit in the transaction. Just as with Google Health, I own my mail and my list of appointments.
What Google owns is not the data, but data about the data. They know I’m on those pages, and they have the right to sell ads against those page views. They can aggregate data about my use of the resource, both to manage it and to sell billboards alongside it.
You can argue it’s better than the deal you get here. When you post a TalkBack, that legally becomes the property of ZDNet.
This is not because ZDNet is greedier than Google. It’s convenience. Managing hundreds of licenses to the hundreds of comments on my controversial Steve Jobs post would drive everyone crazy. But it’s easy, once you aggregate all your mail in your inbox, to give you control.
What we’re entering, in license terms, is not a cloud era but a fog era. Clouds and fog are the same thing. The difference between them is in the eye of the beholder. If you can see clearly licenses and their terms are in the far distance. If you can’t, then you need a legal guide.
June 24th, 2009
Zoho embraces Sharepoint lock-in
Zoho, which offers Office-compatible applications as services, is now offering a version of Sharepoint, aimed at extending Microsoft’s lock-in of customers.
Last year Alfresco began offering support for the Sharepoint protocol, essentially a lock-in key. With Zoho Office for Microsoft® SharePoint® customers have a viable alternative for sharing files, under Microsoft standards, even if they’re not currently paying Microsoft server licenses.
Among the new functions Zoho is offering:
- The ability to create new documents and save them to SharePoint in MS Office formats.
- The ability to view existing documents within SharePoint using Zoho Applications.
- The power to edit existing documents with Zoho Apps and save them back to SharePoint.
- Collaborative editing capabilities based on SharePoint’s sharing permissions.
On his blog Zoho evangelist Raju Vegesna pushed this, not as a way to get away from Microsoft, but to extend the embrace.
If you have already invested in Microsoft SharePoint, this add-on is a great compliment that brings in the advantages of online productivity applications to SharePoint. If you are able to access SharePoint, you’ll be able to view/edit documents without having to invest on productivity suites for every desktop in your business.Â
The software is priced at $3 per user per month, $2/month if you buy it on a yearly basis. The main benefit seems to be that it enables collaboration for non-Sharepoint shops working with those who have the software.
June 15th, 2009
The many faces of small business and open source
One of the laziest behaviors of politicians, journalists and analysts lies in how we define a “small business”.
(Most businesses visited by Mike Rowe of “Dirty Jobs” (right) are what I call legacy businesses. For more on that read on.)
We define the term too broadly. Politicians routinely call companies with as many as 500 employees “small businesses” when tax breaks are under threat. Reporters never call them on it.
Analysts are little better. They have this catch-all called “SMB” — small to medium businesses — which can include firms with nearly 1,000 employees.
The definition lumps too many different markets into one.
It includes entrepreneurial enterprises, slow-growing legacy enterprises (often family-owned) and true small businesses, which are single-location shops with only a few employees and a closely-defined mission.
Which brings me to Matt Asay’s latest, a complaint that open source still doesn’t have the SMB market right. It’s a follow-up to a 451 Group effort from December saying open source doesn’t get much from the SMB market.
If we’re talking truly small businesses, this is an immense opportunity for Value-Added Resellers (VARs), as I wrote concerning my own pharmacist a few years ago.
You can give your customer more hardware, and yourself fatter margins, by selling open source and adding Windows through emulation or virtualization when necessary. You also get more control over your customer.
The lesson for vendors is to build their channels. Open source is the best pitch a VAR has to get new business.
Many entrepreneurs are big users of open source, but don’t pay for open source (or anything else) until they have a going concern.
These going concerns are great opportunities for hosted solutions, and the client need never know he’s on Linux at all.
The lesson for open source here is to focus on hosting and clouds that run Linux, selling their software as a service because it’s the best way for entrepreneurs to scale.
The real weakness for open source lies in what I call legacy enterprises.
These are not small businesses, and they’re not usually new businesses. They’re going concerns which scaled their systems when Windows was the only client-server choice.
Switching now may seem like a big, “bet the business” change. And most legacy enterprises are conservative in the best ways — they know what works and resist changing their operations.
These folks are tough to switch. Their budgets can afford Windows, Office and Oracle. The update and upgrade “taxes” these firms impose are just a cost of doing business.
You can’t try to hit these clients up in a crisis, either. If a big client goes toes-up, or a tornado blows through, computing does not top their list of concerns.
Your best chance lies at a time of positive change. When there’s a big new contract requiring a general expansion or a new facility, then these folks can see open source savings coming to their bottom line.
But that’s a rare event. This is the heart of the “SMB problem” for open source.  Legacy businesses may be where the money is, but it’s not where the growth is. Go for the real little guys, and the entrepreneurs, first.
May 31st, 2009
SugarCRM, SourceFire, Compiere upgrades almost ready to roll
As the month of May closed, a number of top open source application vendors announced beta releases and forthcoming upgrades.
These include open source CRM, security and ERP vendors.Â
SugarCRM, of Cupertino, Calif., announced the beta release of version 5.5 of its namesake open source CRM package. The forthcoming upgrade will offer advanced mobile, collaboration and web services. Version 5.5 , which is expected to ship this summer, offers a new mobile studio that allows enhanced customization of SugarCRM for mobile devices and new dynamic teams capabilities that allows end users to easily add individuals or teams to a specific CRM record to allow for better collaboration on solutions.Â
The enhanced web services framework in version 5.5 improves performance of and the integration of applications into CRM applications. The upgrade will also feature a REST interface and easier REST services development, which enables complex interactions between the CRM system and e-commerce systems, billing services and social networks, the company said. Version 5.5 will also offer a new themes frameworkand advanced password management.
SourceFire, which oversees development on the Snort open source intrusion detection and prevention engine, announced last week the release candidate of Snort 2.8.5 as well as plans to deliver virtual security appliances and cooperate with Intel on next gen Snort technology, the company announced. SourceFire said Snort 2.8.5, available for preview at http://snort.org/downloads, will offer:
Policy-per-VLAN functionality, so administrators can apply different security policies to distinct traffic sets.
Rate-based attack prevention, for blocking potentially malicious network communications.
 Improved handling of SSH traffic.
Meanwhile, Â open source ERP player Compiere launched last week a manufacturing module for its open source ERP solution that can be deployed on permise or in the cloud. Compiere Manufacturing can be customized without programming and will offer advanced cost management and analysis and reporting tools to improve production costs. The Compiere Manufacturing module will be available starting June 15, the Redwood Shores, Calif. company said
May 21st, 2009
Wolfram Alpha won't ask and won't tell
In everything being written about Wolfram Alpha, here and elsewhere, an obvious point is being missed.
Its attitude toward the Internet. (Picture from the Richmond Library childrens’ blog, Batavia, NY.)
Stephen Wolfram does not trust the Internet. He doesn’t trust its inputs, he doesn’t like its outputs. He doesn’t like what it has done to “intellectual property.” He does not like it, Sam I am.
Notice what I just did there? I alluded to a copyrighted work without attribution. Wolfram wouldn’t like that.
Wolfram promises that all Wolfram Alpha results will be “vetted.” The freewheeling attitudes of Google or even Wikipedia are forbidden.
It’s the site’s attitude toward Internet inputs, as opposed to Matt Asay’s revelations on Internet outputs, which I am afraid marks Wolfram Alpha for failure.
The Internet, for all its messiness, for all its lies and lying liars, usually does come up with the right answer. Maybe it’s not on the first reference, certainly not on every page, but if you page through a dozen good links on a subject, collected objectively, you’re going to get around the answer to your question.
Wolfram Alpha takes a different, more proprietary approach. They control their inputs, and their results are essentially reports. Ask about Google vs. Microsoft and you get financial charts. Ask about me and you get nothing. Â Same with Matt. Same, for that matter, with Palamida.
What Wolfram Alpha wants to build is an authority, and my point is that on the Internet there is no unitary authority, no final answer. Questions on the Internet lead mainly to other questions, or to data, or to opinions, usually all three.
Personally I don’t want a cul de sac. I prefer the superhighway. Wolfram Alpha won’t ask the Internet for the data it needs and it won’t tell you what it hasn’t checked. That is not a strength.
May 4th, 2009
SugarCRM launches express edition that comes with onsite and cloud accounts
SugarCRM has introduced an express edition and with it a two-for-one deal that includes an on-site software account and cloud account for one low price.Â
And it’s a good one: $7 per user per month. The express edition is based on the community edition, which, of course is free, but the express edition comes with additional services s well as commercial support.
The Professional Edition is priced at $30 per user per month and Enterprise Edition is $50 per user per month.
SugarCRM launched the Express edition on April 29.Â
 ”There’s been a big disconnect between the community edition and the pro edition in cost but we’re at a point where we could launch a mass market product,” said SugarCRM CEO John Roberts, noting that ther four-year-old open source multinational company has a mature code base and employs 160 people. “Before the cost went from zero per month to $30 per month and now it’s zero per month to seven dollars per month to $30 or $50 per month. We needed a product that fills the gap between community edition and pro edition.”
The Express edition gives users the code and functionality including a module builder to create custom modules and cloud connectors to integrate  third-party data services from companies such as Hoover’s and Jigsaw.
Sugar Express is offered as an annual subscription at $499 for up to five users or $799 for up to ten users per year, the Cupertino, calif., company announced.Â
SugarCRM built out its internal cloud much like Amazon and Wikipaedia, using the Linux grid. It has offered on demand services for three years.Â
The two-for-one deal — which gives mainstream users and SMB companies a $7 per user per month subscription for on-site use and a cloud account  – also represents a hardware savings since customers don’t have two servers for different services.
“Why have SugarCRM and Sugar On Demand as two separate products? We say you can have both for the price of one. You get an on demand and on site account at the same time and that’s unlike any other CRM vendor out there,” Roberts said.Â
“The net net is a convergence of on demand and on site products represents twice the value for a lower price,” ” Roberts added.Â
Roberts also noted that the company’s Sugar Open Cloud puts the customers in control of the software and the flexibility that allows them to customize on the cloud as well as on site.Â
“We’re bringing the method of open source to the cloud. Sugar Open Cloud preserves the attributes of open source where the customer is in control.”
April 8th, 2009
Any friends OK for open source?
The folks at Pentaho, trying to generate marketing momentum and buzz for their open source business intelligence suite, put out two press releases recently:
- A partnership with Groundwork Open Source integrating its software with the latter’s IT monitoring technology.
- A partnership to offer Pentaho ”on demand BI solutions” with Satyam of India. Â
One of these things is not like the other.
ZDNet has been writing about the scandal at Satyam for months. It is being called India’s Enron. An indictment against the Chairman and other top managers, opened this week, runs to 65,000 pages.
What’s left of Satyam will be auctioned next week. Among the reported bidders is Cognizant, which recently paid out $509,000 in back wages over an H1-B scandal – it was paying imported workers less than Americans. Zack’s considers Cognizant one of the good guys in its industry.
I need to repeat here that Pentaho has been accused of nothing, that I am making no accusations against them. I’m just asking whether there is such a thing as appearances. This Satyam scandal has been brewing for months, and Pentaho signs on the line which is dotted just as it explodes?
Anyone else find this just a little bit icky? Or am I out of line for mentioning it?
April 8th, 2009
How will Netbooks change our computing lives
Royal Pingdom has a post up about how Netbooks change the way we live. (Picture from JinJin80, a chef’s blog.)
It’s mostly tongue in cheek. Wardriving from the bathroom. Comparison shopping on the High Street. Copying recipes in a neighbor’s kitchen.
A lot of these are also smartphone applications. As I’ve said the difference between a smartphone and a Netbook in 2010 will be its case. Many will share chip sets and software.
Which leads me to ask, more seriously this time, how will Netbooks change our computing lives?
Despite the Microsoft triumphalism, they can’t be seen as a winner. Yet.
Winning the OS war here meant dropping XP at $3/copy. Even if you add old versions of common applications to that bundle, fact is you’re not making money, and you’re making your margins wafer thin.
You’re not going to spend $300 for software on a machine that cost you $200, maybe less. You’re going to use what came with the device, and treat it as disposable.
Instead of being an end in itself, which a laptop becomes, a Netbook is a means to the end, the end in this case being the Internet. Its competition, for better or worse, is the iPhone, and it competes based on an interface that can accommodate 10 fingers and a PC screen’s aspect ratio.
All of which means that the most important sale for a Netbook owner will be an automated “sync” service, one which assures any files you create or improve on the device are updated to a Web site that becomes your data’s real home.
Cheapskates may want to just use a stick memory and wait until they get home to sync up, so don’t go writing big business plans — even this service is going to be low-priced and low-margin.
My point is that, with a Netbook on the road joining your laptop back at home and the desktop at your office, not to mention the phone in your pocket, we are creating data in a lot of places, some of which we may want to save.
Which brings me to the picture above. Mise en place may be the big opportunity Netbooks make obvious.
What do you think?
March 30th, 2009
Cloudgate shows IBM being treated like IBM again
The brouhaha over IBM’s Open Cloud Manifesto appears entirely political and that’s a good thing. (Picture by John Blankenhorn.)
IBM got together with some smaller cloud vendors to put out a document saying, in effect, that “open clouds are happy clouds” but the four biggest vendors of cloud-based services — Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Salesforce.com — all responded “now just a goldarn goldarn.”
What’s happening? Distrust of IBM is what’s happening.
While today’s big four are selling cloud services, IBM is going into the business of building actual clouds. Open standards would benefit IBM, giving its customers assurances they are future-proof.
The service revenues of Big Four don’t get that help. Amazon, for instance, is getting monthly checks from their customers, customers who trust them,, and having to meet some IBM “standard” in the market is cost without benefit.
All this moved both Google and the Cloud Computing Interoperability Forum to pull out of IBM’s manifesto at the last moment. They are not yet ready to make nice.
Why is this good news? Partly because IBM is being treated seriously again, suspiciously again. IBM has been using open source for years to re-enter the mainstream of competition, and it’s now mission accomplished.
Hopefully, this will also flush out the technical discussions necessary to create a real consensus going forward, an open and transparent standards process in which users are genuinely engaged and reporters get to bring popcorn.
In the end open cloud standards are in the best interests of the user community, just as open standards are good everywhere. But the market is still too new for anyone to dictate what the standards will actually be.
We don’t know whether the market will want one cloud, several clouds, or whether clouds will become, as in IBM’s vision, just another mainframe alternative. The market just has not yet sorted it out yet.
So relax and enjoy the show.
Dana Blankenhorn has been a business journalist for 30 years, a tech freelancer since 1983. You can follow Dana on Twitter. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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