CollabNet Comes Out of the Shadows

CollabNet has a fascinating history that goes back to 1999, when Collab.Net launched SourceXchange:

a site where companies can post proposals for programming work and solicit bids from open source coders. It is intended to form the first of a series of projects exploring new business models based on open source, and which collectively make up Collab.Net. A list of those involved reads like a roll call of the leading players in the open source industry. Employees include Frank Hecker, who played a major role in convincing Netscape to take its browser open source, and James Barry, who helped convert IBM to Apache. Alongside [co-founder Brian] Behlendorf, Tim O'Reilly and Marc Andreessen are board members, and investors in a $35 million round of funding closed in June 2000 included Dell, HP, Intel, Novell, Oracle, Sun and TurboLinux....

On Open Enterprise blog.

Open Solutions Alliance

Another day, another open source organisation:

The Open Solutions Alliance consists of leading companies dedicated to making enterprise-class open source software solutions work together. We help customers put open source solutions to work by enabling application integration, certifying quality solutions, and promoting cooperation among open source developers. Membership is open to organizations that provide high-quality, business-ready open source solutions.

More specifically, it consists of companies like CentricCRM (customer relations management), Hyperic (systems management), JasperSoft (business intelligence) and OpenBravo (enterprise resource management), as well as more general open source players like CollabNet and SpikeSource.

What's striking about these is that together they form pretty much a complete open source enterprise stack of the kind I wrote about half a year ago. This is something we're going to see much more of, as individual open source companies start banding together to present a common front in order to satisfy the demands of large companies who want integrated, working solutions, not a ragtag bunch of codebases.