Less Dosh for OSS...And So?

On Open Enterprise blog.

Open Source Demand Generation

Is there nothing that free software can't do?:

LoopFuse is the enterprise-grade open source alternative to demand generation, offering marketing and sales organizations the ability to generate leads from their website, lead nurturing capabilities, and full CRM integration with most major vendors. LoopFuse also offers the capability to measure ROI within marketing and sales department initiatives.

Because LoopFuse is built on best-of-breed open source technologies, scalability and reliability are assured. Leveraging the open source community also allows us to have much lower costs than our competitors and faster-paced innovation, which our customers and partners ultimately benefit from.

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.