Showing posts with label jaspersoft. Show all posts
Showing posts with label jaspersoft. Show all posts

18 September 2008

Enterprise Open Source 2.0

Yesterday I met up with Brian Gentile, the CEO of JasperSoft. He's relatively new to the job, although not new to the company, since he was already on its board for some time. It was striking that much of our conversation was about marketing and management, and that's probably a fair reflection of why Gentile's there: he's been brought in essentially to take that little old open source startup to the next level – and that means worrying about all that tiresome adult stuff like articulating corporate strategies, conversion rates, and generally getting a good operational handle on things....

On Open Enterprise blog.

28 June 2007

Plugging in to Asay Power

I met up with Matt Asay (pronounced "ay-see") recently. I learned from this that he's had what amounts to the perfect career in open source business: training as a lawyer (including some work with Larry Lessig), then stints with Lineo (a pioneering embedded Linux company) and Novell (during which time he founded the Open Source Business Conference) before joining Alfresco, an enterprise content management company that is one of a whole new generation of businesses that collectively make up the open source enterprise stack.

My meeting also confirmed something that I had suspected for a while: that he is the most astute commentator on the open source business scene, bar none.

He has a new outlet for these insights in the form of the blog "The Open Road" on C|net (which means, unfortunately, that the URLs are totally opaque), where he is churning out posts at a rate that puts mere professional writers such as myself to shame. To make matters worse, he's come up with a blindingly obvious and brilliant wheeze for both generating lots of interesting copy and also providing what amounts to a grand conspectus of the entire open source business scene: an emailed survey of top CEOs there. Now, why couldn't I have thought of that?

The results are required reading for anyone who wants to understand the state of free software in the world of business today - and where it's going tomorrow. Here's the list of interviews:

Dave Rosenberg, MuleSource

Javier Soltero, Hyperic

Marten Mickos, MySQL

John Powell, Alfresco

Fabrizio Capobianco, Funambol

Boris Kraft, Magnolia

Kelly Herrell, Vyatta

Satish Dharmaraj, Zimbra

Ranga Rangachari, Groundwork

Dries Buytaert, Drupal

John Roberts, SugarCRM

Toby Oliver, Path Intelligence

Danny Windham, Digium


Bill Karpovich, Zenoss

Mark Brewer, Covalent


Gianugo Rabellini, Sourcesense

Bob Walter, Untangle

Paul Doscher, JasperSoft

Pete Childers, Zmanda

Rod Johnson, Interface 21

Harold Goldberg, Zend Technologies

Eero Teerikorpi, Continuent

14 February 2007

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.

29 July 2006

Open Source Evo-Devo

In the early days of free software in business - say ten years ago - there was a natural tendency to think of it as a monolithic entity. But rather as chromatography can be used to separate out the constituent parts of an apparently uniform blob, so time gradually teases out the different elements that go to make up the rich and complex world of open source.

Thus we have projects like Apache and GNU/Linux, which are so much a part the mainstream now that it probably hard for most people to imagine that they were never part of it. Then there are the projects like MySQL and JBoss that are fast establishing themselves as second-generation leaders. Finally there is the new wave - the SugarCRMs, the JasperSofts and Alfrescos - that are coming through fast.

I found a nice representation of this evo-devo in a post on Matt Asay's blog, where it is attributed to Robin Vasan. I'm afraid I've never heard of him (I obviously lead a sheltered life), but I see from his bio that he's involved with Alfresco, as Matt is, so this is obviously the connection.

Aside from the graphic - which diverges in detail from my view of things, but is broadly the same - Matt's post contains several other interesting slides (and ideas) from his recent presentation at OSCON 2006. It's well worth taking a look at.