What a year, how many surprises!

I wish all the Readers a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

2008 was an important year for Open Source and a successful one in addition. We have seen more adoption, more commercial success, more innovation, more collaboration and more options for the IT buyer. And it’s not the end, more success is still to come. The following paragraphs are summarizing what we have seen in the last 12 months.

Accelerated Adoption of Open Source
Open Source has clearly become mainstream for enterprises. Everybody from Gartner to IDC and to CIO.com published about the continuous adoption of Open Source by the Enterprises.
The financial crisis and the threatening recession helped to promote Open Source even more and position it as a recipe to deal with lower IT budgets.
Open Source adoption continued to be strong in Europe specifically. Germany, France and Spain alone can compete with the US in terms of adoption rates.
Security remained a major concern with commercial software and has driving adoption of Open Source alternatives such as Firefox on the cost of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer.
Finally forced the consolidation in the commercial IT world - e.g. Oracle buying BEA, acquisitions by IBM or OpenText in the ECM space, the consolidation in the business intelligence domain in general - many decision maker to rethink his technology choices and to look at Open Source alternatives.

Successful commercial Open Source
The leading open source vendors continued to prosper. Alfresco, SugarCRM, RedHat/JBoss, etc. all announced good progress and seemed to be continuously beating their business plans.
A quite large number of Open Source vendors have received additional funding, including OpenBravo, Alfresco, Optaros, DotNetNuke, SugarCRM, EnterpriseDB, GreenPlum, JasperSoft, Open-Xchange, Nuxeo, besides many others. The big question of course is for how long the cash injections need to last, given the difficult times in the economy.
For faster growth and more impact in the market, Open Source providers have acquired other companies and technology providers. Examples here are SpringSource buying Covalent or RedHat buying Qumranet.
Foundations continue to be a key driver for sustainable open source development. Outside of the well known established foundations such as Mozilla or Apache, the Django Software Foundation was established to foster the development of Python based web framework Django.

Open Source Enterprise Content Management of high interest
Even more than in the years before Open Source Content Management Solutions have been pushing back their commercial alternatives.
Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 initiatives in large companies more and more involved evaluations of open source stacks (i.e. Alfresco, Liferay, Drupal, etc.)
The interest of IT decision makers can also be interpreted from the fact, that the top 3 technologies researched on EOS Directory in 2008 are all Open Source ECM solutions.

Innovation and pushing the envelope by Open Source
In 2008 we have seen a number of influential new releases of top ranked open source projects: Firefox 3.0 (8.3 million downloads in 24 hours), Open Office 3.0 (almost 18 million times downloaded in less than two months) to name just two.
Exciting new open source projects were launched, such as Google Chrome (browser) or DimDim (web conferencing).
The rise in interest in mobile business application can be clearly attributed to the success of Google Android and its proprietary alternative iPhone, that for whatever reasons is also loved by many Open Source geeks.
With the success of cloud computing a number of relevant open source technologies surfaced, such as Eucalyptus, Globus Nimbus, RESERVOIR, OpenNebula, etc.
It was a productive year with no doubt. More than 80% of all projects tracked on EOS Directory published new releases, many of them multiple times.
Open Source communities have continued to produce and invest, as a matter of fact twenty-three percent of all downloadable Open Source code was released or renewed in 2008 according to some research of Blackduck

Open Source and Open Standards
Open Standards have again received strong attention, are still rising in importance and are heavily supported by Open Source. At the same time Open Standards are driving interest for Open Source technologies: CMIS and the fast adoption by open source players such as Alfresco, Magnolia or Joomla is one example. OpenID was adopted by large players such as Google, IBM, Microsoft, VeriSign and Yahoo!. Microsoft finally decided to support OpenDocument format. New standards such as openAuth, DiSo, OpenSocial are generating more and more interest.

Traditional commercial vendors adopting Open Source
If you can’t fight them, join them. We have seen a number of acquisitions of open source companies by traditional IT vendors. Sun acquired MySQL and bought VirtualBox (Innothek), Novell acquired SiteScape, etc.
Many commercial vendors tried a hybrid strategy, among them Iona or Nokia who acquired Symbian/Trolltech), Microsoft putting more emphasis on Open Source with CodePlex and the (osi certified) Microsoft Public License, Adobe (opensource.adobe.com), BT (acquiring Osmosoft, striking a large deal with SugarCRM).
Some vendors were opening their software for enlarged market reach, i.e. Oxid eSales following the example of Ingres and many others before.

Solving the Support “problem”
Support, seen as one of the barriers for Open Source adoption in the past, has become less of an issue over time. With self support offerings, as promoted by Sourcelabs for example, new options for the IT buyer increase the already well established choices. New companies focusing on services around specific technologies receive both funding and customer interest, such as the company Acquia offering software bundles, extensions, support and professional services around the Open Source technology Drupal.

Hopes that remained unheard
Not all wishes were fulfilled in 2008. There is still no modular mainstream java based CRM platform, we still see no clear winner in the Content Management domain, actually there have been more options added during the last twelve months than removed. There’s no single leading technology visible to develop Ajax applications or to implement portals. And there are still too many choices for web programming frameworks the confused enterprise developer is confronted with. And, did we really need yet another internet browser? But choice is always better than monopolies, so let’s continue to be “open”.

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

Doing some analysis of the EOS Directory listed projects and user feedback in terms of implicit popularity feedback (project page views) we came up with the following interesting correlation between Popularity and Excellence:

There clearly seems to be some correlation between the excellence/quality of Open Source projects and the popularity on EOS Directory.
So “being better” pays off in Open Source. Well, this is what you expect anyway, right. Interesting though is the category “business applications”. As analyzed in an earlier blog entry, business applications are clearly the most popular on EOS Directory, despite their partially less excellent ratings. However the need for alternatives to the incumbent proprietary technologies is so big, that enterprises more and more look for Open Source options here, pushing up the popularity of this category.

On the EOS home page the most popular five projects are listed, but this is basically the ranking since the creation of EOS Directory. But what are the most popular 20 projects of the last 12 months?

# Project
1 Nuxeo EP 5
2 KnowledgeTree
3 Alfresco
4 Pentaho
5 vtiger CRM
6 Darwin Kernel
7 Nagios
8 phpBB
9 Apache
10 Tomcat (Apache)
11 MySQL
12 PostgreSQL
13 SugarCRM
14 Drupal
15 Python
16 Trac
17 Lucene (Apache)
18 Java
19 Zimbra
20 Django

This list actually tells a lot. Not only represent these 20 projects almost one third of all the “project page views”, the popularity also shows the interest in specific categories and subcategories in EOS Directory. Clearly, business applications and in particular Enterprise Content Management and CRM are very popular. The fact that 40% of the projects are business applications clearly shows the interest of enterprises in deploying these in their business. This is clearly a change compared to 2006 or 2007. And of course the financial crisis and the recession “help” here. The three most popular projects are all ECM technologies, this is telling as well.

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

Over the last week EOS Directory has been updated by adding the most recent learnings from projects and research. Never before an Open Source Directory for Enterprise usage has been more relevant and needed! EOS is THE resource to help enterprises make more of their IT budgets during the expected downturn.

EOS Directory has been around now for quite some time, exactly 16 months actually. In the last 12 months, over  249′000  projects have been investigated on EOS directory and there’s quite a bit of anectodal evidence that people find EOS Directory valuable as a research resource.

Today EOS lists over 350 projects (up 52 since a year ago), for example 8 application servers, 30 frameworks, 11 programming languages, 7 rules engines, 17 systems management tools, 24 CRM/ERP/eCommerce solutions, 28 ECM solutions, 7 ETL toolsets, 4 search engines and 6 business process and workflow management platforms. The category application development and infrastructure seems with 151 projects and an average enterprise readiness rating of 2.4 to be the most mature, 31 infrastructure solutions with an average enterprise readiness of 2.0 and 98 business solutions with an enterprise readiness of 1.9 document that here’s room to catch up. Interestingly the “business solution” category seems to be the most interesting one for the visitors, with more than 1′300 project detail views per solution since the beginning of EOS Directory.

To add some statistics: During the last 12 months 64 new projects were added, 11 were removed (Celtix M2A, Centric CRM, ERP5, Ferret, jEDit, JFreeReport, Majordomo, OpenFTS, OpenRico, PostNuke, Xfire). 288 are still the same as 12 months before and 254 of these (88%) developed further (changed release number). 61 projects have a higher overall rating than before, 52 a lower one, 14 improved their “trend rating”, while 31 received a more negative trend rating than before. We list 19 4-Enterprise-Readiness-Stars, that’s 5% of all projects and includes Apache webserver, Tomcat, MySQL, Python, Java, PHP, Hibernate, Jboss AS, Spring, RedHat and Suse Linux, Firefox and jQuery.

So, let me end this message, saying THANK YOU to all who helped making EOS Directory a valuable resource and keeping it updated! And this includes both the consultants at Optaros, industry experts with valuable input and feedback, as well as the visitors and users of EOS Directory.

Bookmark It

Hide Sites