Marketing

French start-up bringing open-source BPM to U.S.

A relatively new French open-source start-up is set to soon make landfall in the U.S.--BonitaSoft, a maker of open-source business process management (BPM) software. BonitaSoft aims to provide an open-source alternative to proprietary suites from the likes of IBM, Oracle, and SAP that dominate the BPM market. (Other French open-source start-ups in the U.S. market include Talend and eXo.)

The company is built around the open-source Bonita project, first developed in 2001 at the French National Institute for Research in Computer Science and Control (INRIA). The development team was then hired by French software giant Bull … Read more

What's next for OpenStack's cloud efforts

Last month's launch of the open-source OpenStack project garnered a great deal of attention from the media and cloud followers, as it promised a new option for building and launching their own internal and hosted clouds.

This week, Chief Stacker Jim Curry posted an update on the OpenStack blog, outlining what new updates and features will be released in the new version, expected to land on October 21.

The official version of the OpenStack API. In addition to the functionality available in the Rackspace Cloud API, OpenStack will be add functionality related to role-based access controls and networking actions. … Read more

How GE uses Hadoop to analyze big data

One of the most talked about open-source projects is having its second annual Hadoop World Conference next month in New York. On the heels of a successful inaugural event , 2010 promises more than 25 presentations from the likes of Bank of America, eBay, HP, Orbitz, Twitter, Facebook, and Yahoo (full agenda here). Also, for the second year running, here is a code for my readers to get a 20 percent registration discount: CNETHW2010.

To provide a small taste of what the event will offer, I corresponded with Hadoop World speaker Linden Hillenbrand, product manager of Hadoop Technologies at General Electric, … Read more

Venture capitalists tire of Twitter-y start-ups

New data from research firm CB Insights shows that venture capital firms have tired of pure-play Twitter start-ups as investment financing has dropped by half over the last year.

From June 2008 to May 2009, $21.6 million was invested by venture capitalists and angel investors into pure-play Twitter start-ups. In the June 2009 to May 2010, time frame, the investment funding dropped more than 50 percent to $10.4 million. The average amount invested also dropped dramatically from a nearly $2 million average round last year to just over $1 million more recently.

According to CB Insight's Anand … Read more

Survey: Few companies virtualizing critical apps

The results of a new survey from application performance management provider AppDynamics shows that despite all the hype around virtualization, most companies haven't yet virtualized their mission-critical applications.

Despite widely acknowledging the benefits of virtualization, most companies noted that they need more evidence that mission-critical applications will succeed in virtual environments. Roughly 80 percent had already deployed or planned to deploy virtualization for nonmission critical applications so there's no need to worry for the state of the market.

This does however bring up a few questions, namely, why is virtualization not being used for mission-critical applications?

According to the survey, there are three main areas of concern:

Internal versus external facing--Comfort with internal applications running virtualized but a perceived risk in running customer-facing systems in virtual environments People, performance and design questions--A lack of skills, questions about performance, and overall application architecture insert a level of risk Lack of confidence--Despite all of the obvious benefits, many are concerned their applications won't run as well in virtual environments

In a Q&A with CNET, AppDynamics CEO Jyoti Bansal further explained the survey results: … 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

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

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