Even as the global economy tanks, open-source companies continue to soar. A range of open-source companies reported sales and community growth this past week, including:
- Funambol: As announced on its Web site, Funambol's mobile open-source community has grown 2,000 percent, downloads are up 34 percent, and the number of active Funambol servers is up 42 percent in the past three months alone.
- Actuate: While business intelligence vendor Actuate's overall license revenues grew 15 percent last quarter, its BIRT (i.e., open source) revenue grew 32 percent.
- Linux Desktop: While there's no one company behind Linux for personal computers, it's significant that Linux just broke through to 1.02 percent market share for personal computers, the first time it has ever risen that high, according to data compiled by Net Applications. (Meanwhile, even in beta, Windows 7 continues its march, now hitting .25 percent market share.)
- Red Hat: Despite a bruising economy, Red Hat has been on a hiring binge, adding 600 employees to its now 2,800-strong workforce. The company isn't stopping there, noting in SEC filings that it plans to continue to add to its headcount in 2009.
- Sourcefire: Albeit quiet for the past year, Sourcefire has been keeping busy, increasing year-over-year first-quarter revenues to $18.6 million, a 36 percent gain.
- Firefox: According to Net Applications data, Firefox continues to gain market share at the expense of Microsoft's Internet Explorer, rising to 22.48 percent market share in April. Google's open-source Chrome browser also grew to 1.42 percent, while IE tumbled to 66.10 percent, a drop of more than 1.5 percent in the first quarter of 2009.
In other words, it's a great time to be in the open-source market. I advise more than 10 open-source companies, and I'm not aware of a single one that is seeing anything other than growth through the downturn.
This is the right time for open source: a time when enterprises care more about the right functionality at a compelling price than clinging to 20th-century brand names whose idea of CIO value seems to be the software audit.
Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.
In a week that saw open-source ERP vendor Openbravo pull in its millionth download and SugarCRM taking it to Salesforce at its DreamForce Conference, it seems that momentum is growing for open-source applications.
Highlighting this apparent trend, Actuate, an open-source Business Intelligence vendor, has announced version 10 of its product, as well as significant momentum to go with it, as the Actuate team discussed with me by phone:
- Over five million downloads in the past three years;
- $8 million in revenue last year and $10.5 million in the first nine months of 2008. Despite the slowing economy, Actuate has maintained its forecast that it will double its open source-related revenue to $16 million in 2008;
- Actuate is doing particularly well with OEMs, with S1 and Cisco;
- Actuate's BIRT Exchange community site now averages roughly 30,000 visits per month, with just under 10,000 registered users in just under a year.
- Actuate closes deals with roughly one percent of its overall developer community. But its success rate with opportunities coming from the BIRT Exchange process is 50 percent, with these commercial downloads/trials increasing roughly 50 percent per quarter.
It's this last data point that perhaps points to the most important trend for Actuate. Eclipse.org is the open-source site for the Eclipse BIRT project, but Actuate is already seeing its more enterprise-focused BIRT site (BIRT Exchange) surpass the Eclipse side, indicating strong commercial interest in Actuate's open-source BIRT product.
Actuate 10 makes BIRT ready for any type of deployment, in terms of security, scale, etc. This means that Actuate is ready to go head-to-head against the big proprietary offerings like Crystal. Now that it has a model for reaching developers and prospective commercial buyers, Actuate appears to be well-positioned to accelerate monetization of its products through an economic downturn.
Disclosure: I am an advisor to JasperSoft, an open-source competitor to Actuate. I am also an advisor to Openbravo and SugarCRM.
Who influences adoption of open source?
(Credit: Actuate)Actuate's 2007 survey of enterprise adoption of open source is out, and the results point to a massive groundswell of open-source adoption. Actuate surveyed 602 senior IT executives and discovered a widespread interest in and use of open-source software.
This survey is particularly useful because it tracks attitudes and adoption patterns of open source across three different vertical markets: financial services, public sector, and telco. It's particularly focused on the United States, but also reveals data for the United Kingdom and Germany. (As with other surveys on the U.K., the Actuate survey shows the U.K. trailing other mature markets in open-source adoption.)
Here are some of the most interesting data from the research:
- Only one-fifth of respondents (20.9 percent) describe their organization's level of familiarity with open-source software as 'high,' with a further 43.8 percent rating it as 'moderate.' More than a quarter of respondents (29.1 percent) think their organization's level of familiarity with open source software is 'low.' To me, this says that the market for open source is wide open and can only grow as understanding of open source grows. (Interestingly, this level of familiarity is roughly the same across financial services, the public sector, and telco respondents.) (6)
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One of open source's Achilles' heels is its lack of true outreach to end users. I'm not a developer. As such, I have very little influence over how OpenOffice, Linux and MySQL develop. I suppose I could request features, but how? And, more to the point, how do I derive maximum business value from the open-source projects that I use?
Actuate may have an answer to this quandary. Actuate just announced the rollout of an innovative open-source community, called BIRT Exchange, focused on open-source business intelligence. I talked with the team today and was impressed by this new community model.
Released in 2004 as a project on Eclipse, BIRT has steadily grown in importance and adoption with Eclipse. Actuate hopes that the BIRT Exchange will focus this adoption even further by improving the end-user community experience:
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