intalio

InfoWorld's two minds on open source's value

Each year InfoWorld sets out to rate the "best open source products" with its Bossie awards. Too bad it has decided to cloud the voting with open-source politics, as well.

The politics reveal themselves when InfoWorld tries to settle on a winner between Zenoss and OpenNMS. (Why Hyperic isn't also in that mix, or Reductive Labs' Puppet, I can't fathom, but...)

The editors write (note: the emphasis is mine):

Although Zenoss clearly has the more developed feature set, our Bossie goes to OpenNMS. The reason boils down to business models. OpenNMS is a purely open source … Read more

Intalio seeks to become the next JBoss

A week ago I was somewhat dismissive of Intalio's aggressive acquisition strategy, having been part of a company (Lineo) that tried and failed to significantly scale through acquisition. Intalio has already acquired two companies and is in talks with "five or six others," according to Intalio CEO Ismael Ghalimi, with whom I had the opportunity to talk last Friday.

After talking with Ghalimi, I'm a bit more optimistic on Intalio's chances with this strategy, for a few reasons.

First, while growing through acquisition is both art and science, it helps if a company is already … Read more

Intalio planning '8 to 10' open-source acquisitions

When I commented on The 451 Group's report on open-source mergers and acquisitions in 2009, this is not what I was thinking:

Open-source BPM (business process management) vendor Intalio turns 10 this year and is looking to celebrate by raising the funds necessary to finance a spending spree to acquire 8 to 10 open source vendors.

Intalio buying open-source companies? Well, they'd have to be really small, as Intalio is itself still somewhat small, earning less than $50 million in revenue (likely much less, but I'm not privy to its revenue data).

"Small," however, is part of the plan. … Read more