Market Dynamics

JasperSoft makes moves with Microsoft

I sat down with Brian Gentile, CEO of JasperSoft, to discuss what his open-source business intelligence software company announced Tuesday with regards to the evil empire. Here's what I found out:

JasperSoft BI Suite has achieved "Works with Windows" certification, which means that Jasper has passed the Windows Server 2008 test suite. This is an important step because a meaningful percentage of Jasper users are running Windows server.

JasperSoft ODBO Connect, which connects Microsoft Excel with Jasper Analysis multidimensional data sources, is immediately available. Connect is available for no extra charge with Jasper Analysis subscriptions. … Read more

The Great Open Source Debate (Dave R vs. Sarah Lacy on Yahoo Tech Ticker)

I was lucky enough to hang out with Sarah Lacy and shoot a segment on Yahoo Tech Ticker and discuss how big the market for open source is, and how big it can get. We talk about MySQL, Zimbra, JBoss, Oracle and others.

In the interview process she hits me with some good questions about open source but fails to mention that I killed it on "Spanish Castle Magic" on Guitar Hero minutes before. She went with the predictable "Higher Ground" but managed to rock out really hard.

Can you build a billion-dollar business by selling … Read more

OSBC Event preview: Open source roundtable interview

With OSBC coming up tomorrow and Wednesday, InfoWorld gathered up several open source folk (including me and Matt Asay included) to lend perspective on the lay of the land.

Since its emergence, open source has embodied this spirit. Part defiant, part self-reliant, and often outspoken and opinionated, those immersed in the community have worked both in tandem and at odds, all with the intention of pushing the movement in as many worthwhile directions at once.

So worthwhile that the drumbeat of business can now be heard in nearly every corner of community, drawing the attention of vendors and capitalists alike. … Read more

Starbucks wants you to help them charge you more

Starbucks pioneered the notion that coffee should be $3 a cup, and its been a great business model. However, the company has been late to the party on 2 areas: lower cost options and better tasting coffee, the confluence of which has caused the stock price to sag as the repeat visitors dipped.

Now the company is now trying crowdsourcing as its way to the future. (Note to self: get Starbucks to put my blog excerpts on its coffee cups)

The new MyStarbucksIdea site reminds me of Dell's Ideastorm, which was in part the impetus for Dell to start offering laptops preloaded with Ubuntu. … Read more

My overview of SOA (service oriented architecture) governance

Feeling technical today? I did an exhaustive Q&A with ITBusinessEdge about SOA Governance and the role it plays in their enterprise. For those who don't already know, "SOA governance" is the set of policies and activities that help to manage an SOA environment.

A snippet of genius:

Typically, rules are not effective until there is a baseline established. This is the same for a kindergarten class or a loosely coupled IT environment. Consider, for example, what happens if you try to build a house without knowing what materials are available -- sure walls made of … Read more

Platform-as-a-service is coming sooner than you think

Following on from ZDNet's Larry Dignan's post regarding a recent CNET News.com interview with Mark Benioff I got to thinking that Salesforce.com must be hedging that platform-as-a-service (PaaS) will take 10 years. I think it will happen much sooner.

As hard as it is to create a "platform" of the scale and flexibility necessary to actually be a platform, Salesforce is not starting from scratch and has the horsepower and market share to pull it off much quicker. I wonder what Mark Benioff thinks is missing? Salesforce.com already has the database, some of … Read more

Event on 3/20/2008: How to Pick Your Investors (breakfast, anyone?)

I am on a breakfast panel this Thursday in Menlo Park as part of Orrick's complimentary TOTAL ACCESS program focused on the needs of the start-up and venture capital communities.

Topics Include: What Matters? Plan Ahead Get References Understand the Relative Role Your Investor Has in the Partnership

Panelists include: Bijan Marashi, CEO, Xoopit Dave Rosenberg, CEO, MuleSource Farbood Nivi, CEO, Grockit Carl Showalter, General Partner, Opus Capital

Date: Thursday, March 20 Time: 7:15 - 8:15 a.m. Light Breakfast & Networking 8:15 - 10:15 a.m. Panel Discussion

Location: Orrick 1100 Marsh Road Menlo … Read more

Lessons of SOA Excellence

Wondering how to do good SOA? Check out these 10 lessons learned as presented by Ian Koenig, Thomson Financial's senior vice president and chief architect.

My two key takeaways: -You will be forced to do integration, regardless if it fits into the analyst dream world of immaculate SOA conception -If Thomson has already achieved an SOA environment and are so focused on governance, than its clearly more important than most people realize

Koenig's Top Ten: 1. SOA requires governance. The only way to control the complexity of an IT infrastructure built out of services is with a governance … Read more

JBoss + iWay PR disappearing act--whither Open Source SOA at Red Hat?

A month or so ago I saw a press release that discussed how JBoss was working with iWay to "bring a full range of information management capabilities to global organizations" and didn't think much of it. In fact, I thought so little that I just ignored it until today someone mentioned that they couldn't find that release on the RedHat website. After a bit of digging we figured out that it must have been an iWay release and that RH decided to lump it into a bigger press release about their SOA (service oriented architecture) platform.

In the Red Hat release there are a number of new JBoss partners, only one of whom has any open source products. The real IT world has both open source and proprietary products and they all need to work together. And lots of companies use the JBoss app server very successfully with all kinds of applications.

But the SOA products have been a bit slow out of the gate and so it's the iWay partnership that I find interesting as it begs a few important questions. … Read more

Viral growth models for social media and open source

Metrics tend to play a middling role after a social-media company is established. With a few notable exceptions, most sites hit a peak then flatten out. The same can be said for open-source projects. There are peaks, but really what you want is consistency in the numbers. Hyper-growth is not sustainable and you will eventually saturate the addressable market.

One of the things open-source projects tout is their number of downloads. Download metrics are often very flawed but can help tell the story of how big the market potential is. Social-media companies talk about their number of registered users. Neither talks much about retained users unless the metrics are very impressive.

As I was reading Jeremy Liew's blog today, I realized the models of adoption of open source and social media are very similar: