Market Dynamics

Benchmarking-software industry remains profitable

Despite the fact the economy remains teetered on the edge of oblivion, software companies have increased their profitability dramatically over the last year, according to a recently concluded annual benchmarking study of the small and mid-sized software industry conducted by information services provider OPEXEngine.

Benchmarking is an important part of the software industry these days as companies look to ensure that they are providing what customers want and that your company meets the performance needs.

The 2010 benchmarks were developed in concert with SIIA and were based on the confidential data provided by approximately 50 small and mid-size software vendors … Read more

'Anti-Facebook' project nears launch

The open-source social networking project Diaspora reported on its blog this week that the code for its much-hyped "anti-Facebook" software will be released September 15.

Hatched by a team of New York University programming students, Diaspora raised $200,000 through a microfinancing strategy--nabbing small chunks of money from a lot of individuals.

The project has received a huge amount of press despite being little more than a vaporware reaction to Facebook's privacy snafus. That said, if the team is half as good at building software as it is at building hype, there might be something interesting … Read more

Red Hat adds to its cloud appeal

Red Hat made several announcements Wednesday related to the development of public and private clouds, including updates to its Cloud Foundation portfolio, the effort to make its Deltacloud a standard API, a flagship cloud customer, and a new platform-as-a-service (PaaS) offering.

The company is working to create a comprehensive cloud offering--at least in theory--with new products that address the various layers of what can be considered cloud infrastructure.

This is all interesting, especially because Red Hat CTO Brian Stevens recently stated that cloud services are at least a decade away. Apparently, the company is taking the long-term view that the … Read more

Nimbula raises $15 million more for private cloud

Nimbula, a provider of cloud infrastructure software and founded by former Amazon executives Chris Pinkham and Willem van Biljon, on Monday announced that it has secured $15 million in its second round of venture capital funding led by Accel Partners. That brings total funding to more than $20 million. Current investor Sequoia Capital, which led Nimbula's first round of venture financing, also participated in this round.

Nimbula emerged from stealth mode in June and in fact has remained somewhat stealthy. The basic premise of the software is to provide private-cloud infrastructure similar to Amazon Web Services EC2 platform--an approach … Read more

Google revs AppEngine for multitenancy

Google updated its AppEngine cloud platform earlier this week with new features and functions that help to address some of the services initial shortcomings.

According to a blog post from the AppEngine development team, new features include multitenancy support (to run multiple instances of an application), high-performance image serving, and increased data storage quotas.

Multitenancy is accomplished via the new Namespaces API, which allows multiple organizations to run the same application, segregating data using a unique namespace for each client. This allows developers to serve the same app to multiple different customers, with each customer seeing their own unique copy … Read more

Lunascape iPad browser is tab-happy

Lunascape, the Japanese Web browser company that boasts the world's only "triple engine browser," recently released a version for the iPad.

Considering that the iPad is as much of a browsing device as it is an application platform, you'd think there would be many alternatives to Apple's Safari, but thus far no other full-featured browser has shown much of a presence.

Opera Mini can be used on the iPad but was really developed for the iPhone. Firefox has a history and bookmarks app on the iPad, not a browser. But neither offers much in the … Read more

Taking the 'blind spot' out of cloud-based testing

Some of the most highly trafficked interactive systems today are accessed through the Web: Amazon.com, Facebook, Google, Zynga just to name a few. These apps have to work flawlessly across any browser or risk losing eyeballs and audience consistency.

The browser wars after all, are still alive and well, and any serious Web application needs to work on the most popular browsers , such as Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Chrome but don't forget others like Safari and Opera.

But for most companies, it is difficult and costly to maintain and update a test infrastructure on premise that keeps up … Read more

Survey: 98 percent of enterprises using open source

Not only is open-source software thriving in systems management but across businesses as a whole, according to a new survey released Tuesday. A nearly 4-year-long survey of open-source systems management usage compiled by open-source software developer Zenoss showed that 98 percent of the respondents said they used open-source software in their enterprises.

These latest statistics, along with survey results from consulting firm Accenture, are further testament to the inevitability of the pervasiveness of open-source software.

What's important to note about the survey results is how both the perception and reality of open-source software has changed--users believe the software is … Read more

From feature to product the free-mium way

One of the struggles in developing software is figuring out which features are part of a bigger product and which ones may be products in and of themselves.

A case in point is Zurb, which makes the Notable application for Web site feedback. In June, Zurb launched a simplified version of Notable called Bounce, which it viewed as a demonstration of just one of Notable's features. Little did Zurb's team know that Bounce was not just a feature, but a new product that intrigued a broad user base.

Bounce saw these results:

The Bounce site went from zero to more than 30,000 links pointing to it in first seven days after launch. Bounce went from zero to about 150 countries using the tool in first seven days after launch. In its first month, Bounce made it to the No. 4 spot in Google search results for "bounce."

While these statistics will surely change over time, they are impressive. So what made this launch successful? … Read more

Open-source 'R' gets Hadoop integration

Lately, you can't talk about business without talking about "big data," which, incidentally, is the focus of the latest package from Revolution Analytics. Revolution Analytics, which commercialized the open-source R statistics language, emphasizes expanding the use of R beyond its academic roots to business.

On Tuesday, Revolution is expected to release a new addition of big data analysis to its Revolution R Enterprise software. This is an add-on package called RevoScaleR that provides a framework for fast and efficient multicore processing of large data sets.

According to the company, the new package will allow users to process, … Read more