April 30th, 2008

SugarCRM 5.1 sails into beta with mobile phone support, monitoring, advanced reports

Posted by Paula Rooney @ 9:08 am

Categories: Applications, Distributions, FOSS, GPL, General, Linux, OSBC, Software as a Service, middleware, mobile

Tags: Phone, Mobile, Monitoring, Cell Phone, Beta, SugarCRM, Advertising & Promotion, Marketing, Paula Rooney

Open source CRM star SugarCRM has released into beta testing an upgrade of its platform that offers new wireless support and vastly enhanced reporting capabilities. SugarCRM 5.1, which is available for testing now, supports mobile phones including the Blackberry and iPhone as well as advanced reporting and analytics, data import capabilities, customization and tracking features.

On a recent Catamaran sail during OSBC with the SugarCRM crew on San Francisco Bay, SugarCRM CEO John Roberts (shown below, third from right, with drink in hand) hinted to this blogger that the upcoming release was a lot more substantial than the 5.1 version number indicated.   SugarCRM 5.1 is planned to be generally available in June.

I think he was right on, considering the laundry list of new features in version 5.1 that add value to the company’s significant version 5 platform upgrade of last year.

Version 5.1 gives users a substantial web based implementation of SugarCRM on mobile phones. New wireless features include an improved user interface for mobile users, a rich HTML client for web based delivery of data, new search features and device independence.

On the reporting and analytics front, the upgrade offers a new user interface and wizard for report creation, the ability to create more complex reports across multiple modules and combined data sets, enhanced integration with Micrsoft Excel and matrix reporting and run-time filters with pivot features like those of Microsoft Excel.It also allows better features for importing data into SugarCRM from Excel, Act!, Microsoft outlook and salesforce.com and easy import of data from other CRM applications into SugarCRM.

The update also offers new features of interest to developers and administrators, including a more robust Module Builder that allows users to more easly create objects and custom modules from scratch or by combining data sets across multiple modules. Improvements incude the ability to create new relationships among modules, an auditing function that keeps track of creation, modification and customization of modules, new templates and a dashlet that provide summary views of custom data within SugarCRM.

On the admin side, version 5.1 features a new tracking system that allows users to create tracker reports that offers snapshot into system usage and system monitoring capabilities.

SugarCRM posted the beta to its web site on wednesday.

April 24th, 2008

Ubuntu's corporate ready 8.04 is released but is three a crowd in Linux server market?

Posted by Paula Rooney @ 7:13 am

Categories: Applications, Distributions, FOSS, GPL, Linux, Linux Desktop OS, Linux Server OS, Microsoft, OSBC, Red Hat, Software as a Service, Strategy, Sun Microsystems, business models

Tags: Ubuntu, Linux, Open Source, UNIX, Operating Systems, Servers, Software, Hardware, Paula Rooney

Ubuntu 8.04 LTS was released on April 24 as planned and will be supported until 2011-2013. But is extended support enough to convince ISVs and businesses to support three Linux distributions?

Despite the hoopla around its release Wednesday, Ubuntu’s ambitions in the corporate server space will be frustrated because developers and customers don’t want to support more than two Linux distributions, said one Linux kernel developer and a prominent industry analyst.

“Ubuntu did a very valuable service for the community when it proved you could make a very usable Linux deskop. They went down that path and forced other distributors to do this stuff, “ said Ted Ts’o, a top Linux kernel developer and fellow at the Linux Foundation. “But they’re not in a significant role today in the server markets and that’s because ISVs like Oracle and SAP aren’t interested in supporting multiple Linux distributions.”

George Weiss, an open source analyst at the Gartner Group, acknowledges that the Ubuntu ecosystem is growing. But he agrees that it will be tough for Ubuntu to replicate on the server side what it has accomplished on the desktop side.

And that could make it a hard sell to the corporate crowd.

“As long as Canonical can extend its reach, which is geographically limited in feet on the street, it would mostly be working through partners. Butserver partnerships are still limited (no server ties with HP and IBM),” Weiss said. “Their bottom up desktop to basic server infrastructure could gain them foothold but more will be needed as influence in the CIO’s office. CIOs [will ask], ‘What, another Linux?!

As part of the rollout this week, Canonical announced that Ubuntu 8.04 LTS Server Edition is certified on several Sun x64 server platforms, including the Sun Fire X2100 M2, X2200 M2 and Sun Fire X4150 servers.

HP also committed to testing and ensuring compatibility of Ubuntu 8.04 LTS Server Edition on select Proliant servers – but failed short of offering certification or support beyond that.

In recent interviews, Ubuntu creator Mark Shuttleworth hinted that Canonical is in active discussions with “multinational” OEMs on the desktop and server side. But there was little progress to report on launch day.

That’s not to say Ubuntu won’t grow in use on servers. Ubuntu has been cropping up in very large deployments for single process file servers or DNS servers and at SMB sites and will continue to do so, Canonical executives say.

Gartner’s Weiss Ubuntu’s business approach is similar to the model Microsoft successfully employed against Unix server vendors in the 90s.

“They do represent the prospects of new high volume, low price-structure commodity presence as undercutting the traditional up-the-stack approaches of Novell and Red Hat,” he noted. “If we characterize the market as expansionary, then Ubuntu’s threat to Red Hat and Novell is in the form of lost opportunity rather than direct competitive replacement. A good example might be in massively scalable infrastructures and emerging internet-based businesses that want maximum flexibility at minimal license costs. On the other hand, I wouldn’t look for Ubuntu in many complex, mission critical enterprise workloads and therefore as a benign presence.”

At a recent OSBC panel, Shuttleworth opined that “we’re at a tipping point” in which IT administrators are being questioned by CIOs about why they want to use proprietary software, not open source software, and that’s a big turnaround in five years time.

True enough. Still, Ubuntu’s maturing in the client/server OS market comes at an awkward time in which customers are evaluating a switch to a software-as-service model — even as they move to open source. This could pose additional problems for Ubuntu.

And its big corporate pitch comes shortly after Microsoft released its Windows Server 2008, Windows XP SP3 and has begun banging the FUD drum about the next generation Windows 9.

One open source consultant said for now, Ubuntu likely has a better shot on the desktop and should focus its attentions on that side of the equation.

“I think especially Red Hat should be worried about Ubuntu. Red Hat abandoned the desktop and has been trying to regain it lately, but found that Ubuntu got there first,” said Chris Maresca, founding partner of Olliance Consulting, Palo Alto, Calif. “A common Linux desktop is probably a long road, but the EeePC and the new Atom chipset from Intel are pushing it forward at the low end. Windows does not run on Atom because of no PCI so Intel is pushing Linux hard.”

In spite of the success of open source, Linux on the desktop has a long way to go. Although many had predicted that HP would match Dell’s commitment of last year and prebundle Ubuntu Linux on its PCs, it’s out of the question at the moment, a company spokeswoman said.

“While HP continued to closely monitor demand for pre-loaded Linux PC offerings all of our regions around world, we are not seeing significant customer demand for expansion of our Linux plans to include Ubuntu,” said Tiffany Smith, a spokeswoman for HP Personal Systems Group.

April 14th, 2008

Iona exec: open source unit not for sale, Mule is "not ESB"

Posted by Paula Rooney @ 12:34 pm

Categories: Applications, Enterprise Policy, FOSS, GPL, General, Linux Server OS, OSBC, Software Licensing, Software as a Service, Sun Microsystems, mergers & acquisitions, middleware

Tags: Iona Technologies, Apache Software Foundation, Mule, Open Source, Paula Rooney

Iona may be on the block but it is not looking to spin off and sell off its nine-month-old open source business unit, said one key exec.

Larry Alston, vice president and general manager of open source at Iona, acknowledged that the company is exploring strategic options after receiving an unsolicited bid earlier this year but he insists that selling off its open source unit is not an option.

“We’ll try to keep these rumors to a dull roar,” said Alston, intimidating that such gossip, which spread before the Open Source Business Conference in San Francisco last month, likely emanated from an unnamed competitor. “Neither Iona nor anyone retained by Iona has been shopping the open source division separately.  It’s not true.”

The Dublin, Ireland and Waltham, Mass. based company, which acquired open source SOA vendor LogicBlaze last April and officially launched its Fuse open source business suite and open source division last July, has captured more new customers in the last six months than Iona has in three years, including several large enterprise deals, Alston said.

At JavaOne, Iona will “make a big deal” out of its upgrade of Fuse based on the Apache’s upcoming OSGi-based ServiceMix 4.0, being shown in preview by the Apache Software Foundation this week, the iona exec added.  The Fuse upgrade will ship later this quarter.

And later this year, the 17-year-old company will release another major upgrade of its Artix suite of enterprise SOA-ESB suite.

Iona’s open source business is growing nicely and there are no plans to dump it, he reiterated.

In fact, Iona releases its open source software under the Apache 2.0 license and recently became a financial sponsor of the Apache Software Foundation, he said. Its revenue model is based on support, consulting and training for the Apache ActiveMQ project and Apache ServiceMix project , which was pioneered at LogicBlaze.

Alston had some fightin’ words  for open source rival MuleSource, which has gained notorietary as one of the next big open source companies in 2008.

“We don’t think of MuleSource as a competitor. Mule is not ESB. It is intelligent routing and mediation engine, much like [Apache] Camel project,” Alston said. “Mule at its base does not have its own container; it is Spring-based. And they don’t provide service enablement or messaging. Most of Muleforce [customers] use the Fuse message broker. Mule doesn’t have a reliable messaging bus.”

He said the MuleForce engine is nice but “it is a little piece of the whole puzzle. It is positioned as ESB but technically it is not because it doesn’t have its own container and most versions of the connectors are done by third party vendors,” Alston added. “Camel will overtake Mule in the next couple of years, easily.”

Alston also said that MuleForce will have a tough time competing against Iona, which now has more than 350 employees, a full ESB integration and middleware suite and a support staff capable of dealing with its Fortune 20 customers such as AT&T, Southwest Airlines and Lehmann Brothers, which are all moving to open source.

“When we acquired LogicBlaze, they were in the same position as Mulesource is today … a 30 person company,” he added.

MuleSource, a Java-based integration platform company, identifies itself as the “world’s most used open source Enterprise Service Bus” and earlier this year launched its Mule 1.5 Enterprise Edition with support for Apache CXF web services framework. Later this year, Mule  plans to launch  an enterprise, commercial version of its recently launched Mule Community Edition 2.0.   

Iona also competes on the open source front against Sun’s OpenESB and Progress Software’s Sonic ESB.

Open source still represents a fraction of Iona’s revenues relative to its proprietary software business but the unit beat its 2007 estimates in its first six months of operation and “we’re seeing a tremendous uptake since we launched last July,” Alston said. “In the transition, there’s been some confusion because we have Ardix ESB and Fuse ESB but by the end of the year the confusion will be gone.”

But that all depends on whether Iona is scooped up by another vendor. Alston would not comment on potential bidders or a timeframe for a buy. “We’re in a process here and its soemthing yet to be determined,” Alston said. “This management team has not been managing Iona to be sold.”

(By the way, did you know that the name IONA is not an acronym but rather an island in the Irish sea where the Book of Kells was written).

March 27th, 2008

Hot new open source ISVs, projects make the grade at OSBC

Posted by Paula Rooney @ 10:56 am

Categories: Applications, Blogroll, Development, Events, FOSS, General, Linux, OSBC, Software Licensing, Software as a Service, business models, mass market, politics

Tags: OSBC, Open Source, Paula Rooney

Six hot open source startups and projects got notice at the Open Source Business Conference this week.

Not surprisingly, many of them are in software categories deemed most vulnerable to open source disruption, including collaboration and conferencing, social publishing, sales automation, application deployment and developer tools.

Alfresco CMS business development chief and OSBC founder Matt Asay said open source keeps moving higher up the stack, and into niche areas.
“Open source has moved beyond CRM into new territories,” Asay said during his opening remarks at the San Francisco conference. “It’s been an even better year for enterprise open source.”

At the show, executives from SugarCRM, Zenoss and the Olliance group were asked to weigh in on what they thought were the most promising open source commercial offerings and open source projects.

SugarCRM CEO John Roberts’ pick is the open source collaboration project and company DimDim whose web conferencing and meeting service — now in private beta testing and soon to move to public beta — will rival WebEX and Citrix Go-To-Meeting. The Web 2.0 service company employs former Apple executive Steve Chazin and offers free, professional and enterprise editions of Dimdim.

Several observers at OSBC expressed high hopes for Acquia, an Andover, Mass. company founded in 2007 that plans to ship its first commercial product based on the Drupal open source social web publishing platform this fall. The software, code-named Carbon, was highlighted in several sessions at OSBC.

LoopFuse, BitRock and MindTouch, all exhibitors or panel participants at OSBC, got the high sign from Mark Hinkle, a well known opne source advocate and vice president of business and community development at Zenoss.

LoopFuse, of Atlanta, provides an open source sales automation platform that is offered on demand as a hosted web service, on premise and in open source. The company’s platform is based on JBoss and Apache. LoopFuse OneView 3.0 upgrade was recently launched.

BitRock, which was founded in Spain and has offices in San Francisco, has developed a multiplatform installer for open source stacks such as the LAMP stack. Products include BitRock Installer and BitRock Custom, Web, Rubu and Mono Stacks. “It’s a point and click installer for LAMP,” said Hinkle about the solution, which helps reduce the complexity of deploying open source stacks.

At the OSBC, the company launched a new product called the BitRock Network Service that works in conjunction with the BitRock Customer Stack and enables full open source application deployment services for customers.

MindTouch is another OSBC exhibitor whose open source Wiki and application platform got a lot of attention on the show floor. The San Diego, calif company’s recently released its Deki Wiki “Itasca” version offers not only sophisticated wiki services for authoring, aggregating, organizing, and sharing content among development groups but also support for Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud.

Enomaly, an open source consulting firm based in Toronto, Canada, offers an open source virtual server manager called the Enomalism Virtualized Management Dashboard.

The open source software is a virtual machine manager for the Xen open source hypervisor and caught the attention of Andrew Aiken, founder and managing partner at Olliance Group, of Palo Alto, Calif., (pictured below) who led a panel at the OSBC on open source mergers and acquisitions on Wednesday. Enomaly also offers the ElasticDrive web-based virtual storage system and ElasticLive utility hosting platform.

March 27th, 2008

ProtoTest readying open source commercial alternative to IBM Rational, HP's Mercury tools

Posted by Paula Rooney @ 8:47 am

Categories: Applications, Development, FOSS, General, OSBC

Tags: Hewlett-Packard Co., Tool, IBM Corp., ProtoTest, Selenium, Selenium IDE, Productivity, Open Source, Paula Rooney

One startup I bumped into at OSBC is quietly carving out a solid if not sexy open source niche — in automated test tools.

ProtoTest, a services provider in Centennial, Colo., plans to launch later this year its first commercial software product based on the open source Watir project, said CEO Pete Dignan.

Watir (Web Application Testing on Ruby) is an open-source library for automating web browsers, allowing developers to write tests that are “easy to read and easy to maintain.”
The software uses the source Ruby scripting engine and supports IE on Windows; support for Firefox and Safari is planned.
Many large companies and service organizations including Google Maps, Yahoo, Honeywell, Epam Systems and ProtoTest.

Watir and Selenium are open source projects that have developed testing and automation tools. Selenium is a test tool for web applications in a web browser. Selenium IDE is available as a Firefox plug in. Selenium also offers a Watir recorder is also available and records actions in a browser, the Selenium site says.

ProtoTest’s Dignan said there are few –if any — commercial open source tools that compete against high profile proprietary tools such as IBM Rational and HP’s Mercury Interactive.

But they will later this year.

“It’s a ripe niche,” Dignan told ZDNet at OSBC, noting that he hired one of the key committers to the Watir project in preparation for the product launch. “It’s a mature market and no one’s putting commercial resources behind it.”

March 26th, 2008

Web publishing, CMS, BI most hot for open source disruption, but ESB and security are not?

Posted by Paula Rooney @ 4:44 pm

Categories: 2008 Preview, Applications, Development, FOSS, GPL, Linux, Network Standards/Protocols, OSBC, Software Licensing, Software as a Service, business models, content, middleware, publishing

Tags: Business Intelligence, Security, JasperSoft, Web-publishing, Content Management System, KnowledgeTree, MuleSource, MuleSource 2.0 Community Edition, Open Source Security, 3D System

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.

March 26th, 2008

Is open source anti-American?

Posted by Dana Blankenhorn @ 5:34 am

Categories: GPL, General, Legal, OSBC, Software Licensing, marketing, politics, ~Events~

Tags: Open Source, Dana Blankenhorn

While Matt Asay and Paula Rooney chose the meat in Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst’s remarks at OSBC, others chose to play the political game of gotcha.

So, is open source anti-American?

Whitehurst admitted that open source advocates in the developing world benefit from an anti-American, and anti-Western bias where it exists.

Open source is a way of avoiding “intellectual property taxes.”

Whitehurst drew an immediate challenge on this point, with an audience member saying even GPL violations are common in other countries. Whitehurst took the diplomatic way out, calling open source licensing a new issue the company is watching closely.

I suppose that if you can turn Roger Clemens’ alleged steroid use into a partisan issue, you can twist open source’s performance in other markets into a foreign policy issue.

But should you?

Personally I think we have a split here between the elites and the folks on the street. Whitehurst talks to the former, and his questioner — the one who said they don’t care about any license terms — may be more in touch with the latter.

But if ordinary users in other countries are fairly ignorant of a license’s fine print does that make them any different from Americans?

March 25th, 2008

Microsoft partners with open source JasperSoft, Sourcesense

Posted by Paula Rooney @ 3:40 pm

Categories: General, OSBC

Tags: JasperSoft, Partnership, ISV, Apache Software Foundation, Microsoft Corp., Open Source, Microsoft Windows Server 2008, Operating Systems, Microsoft Windows, Software

Microsoft and JasperSoft are working together to ensure that Jasper’s business intelligence software suite runs well on the latest editions of Windows and SQL Server.

At the Open Source Business Conference at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco, Microsoft told ZDNet that the open source BI software will be optimized for Microsoft’s Windows Server 2008 and SQL Server 2008, which were announced last month.

Apache, Xen and Zend are some of the open source companies that are optimizing for Microsoft’s latest operating system server and database.

Open souce ISVs were a core part of the Windows Server 2008 launch, said Sam Ramji, Microsoft’s director of open source and Linux strategy, at an OSBC panel.

Ramji told ZDNet on Monday that the announcement with JasperSoft is new but that the two companies have been working together for some time.

Microsoft also announced at OSBC a pact with Milan, Italy-based open source integrator Sourcesense to develop a new version of the Apache POI open source file format reader to edit and create Microsoft Office formats used in Word, Excel and powerpoint.

Apache POI support for Open XML is currently in development within the Apache Software Foundation. Microsoft said its first release is expected during the second quarter of 2008

Ramji said Microsoft has been stepping up efforts to attract open source ISVs to the Windows Server 2008 platform and on monday held an ISV day here. 10 month ago, in the same location, Microsoft held its first open source ISV program. ”

The redmond, Wash.-based executive said the reception this year at OSBC has been a lot warmer than last year. “It was a challenging press climate” at that time,” Ramji noted.

March 25th, 2008

Ubuntu's Shuttleworth: Linux server, client will be big in the cloud and mobile sectors

Posted by Paula Rooney @ 12:39 pm

Categories: Applications, FOSS, GPL, General, Google, Internet, Linux, Linux Desktop OS, Linux Handheld, Linux Server OS, OSBC, business models

Tags: Desktop, Ubuntu, Mark Shuttleworth, Linux Server, Mobile, Server, Linux, Open Source, UNIX, Operating Systems

Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth sees Linux playing a big role in the cloud and in mobile computing – especially his own server and client software.

In a brief interview with ZDNet after his OSBC panel, Shuttleworth said the Ubuntu Linux server will be a significant platform for hosting thousands of web services and the desktop client will evolve as the best platform for software-as-a-service.

No, he is not worried that Google apps will displace traditional operating system desktops and applications.

“On the [Linux] server side, the cloud is the big thing. It needs connectivity, mobility, and ability to scale up virtual instances,” he said. “The desktop has key value here. By having a desktop that is network aware, you get the best of both worlds.”

Shuttleworth said the desktop and web will meld as one in time. The vision is that the Ubuntu client will become a web browser. “On the client side, we may move to the web as the standard UI.. and Linux is a compelling solution for that,” he said referring to Linux’s support for standards.

During the panel, which explored future business opportunities for open source and Linux, Shuttleworth said open source companies must add value beyond service in order to grow their revenues streams. And supporting SaaS is a good way to do it, he said.

“I’m not convinced that service and support will create Google-like, Facebook-like or YouTube-like value. Open source companies have to go well beyond supporting their code. Companies that create the most value will deliver open source based services on the cloud.”

“Linux will be at the heart of the cloud and mobile devices,” he told the packed audience that gathered to hear several top open source execs from Ubuntu, MySQL, SugarCRM, Ingres and Acquia discuss future opportunities.

March 25th, 2008

OSBC: Acquia to launch this fall "Carbon" social web publishing system based on Drupal

Posted by Paula Rooney @ 10:08 am

Categories: Applications, OSBC, business models

Tags: Web Content Management, Drupal, Web-publishing, Acquia, Content Management, Enterprise Software, Software, Paula Rooney

Acquia is on track to launch its first commercial product this fall based on the open source social web publishing Drupal project.

On the exhibit floor at the Open Source Business Conference in San Francisco, Drupal community guide Kieran Lai said all systems are go for the Andover, Mass. startup to ship the product, code named “Carbon,” as scheduled. The product, first announced on March 3, will include the Drupal 6 core release and extensions.

Key competition?
‘HTML,” said Lai, maintaining that Carbon runs on and complements web content management systems such as Alresco’s platform.

Acquia was founded in 2007 and received $7 million in Series A funding from North Bridge Venture Partners and others.
Acquia’s founders are Dries Buytaert, the creator and project lead of the Drupal open source web content management system, and Jay Batson, previously founder and CEO of Pingtel.

As part of the first round of subscription offerings, Acquia will launch an enhanced electronic update notification service code-named “Spokes” that will automatically provide users of the Acquia distribution with information to maintain system performance, security, and stability.