Most lists of "companies to watch" are put together by the PR firms that shout loudest to the writer. "Ten open-source companies to watch" by John Fontana over at NetworkWorld, however, strikes me as pretty interesting, on balance.
It's also a great testament to how far we've come in open source, because many of the companies listed are doing interesting, cutting-edge work.
Take Marketcetera, which is building a next-generation platform for hedge fund managers. Or Kickfire, which has built a super-charged MySQL appliance. And so on.
No, he doesn't profile Zimbra, Red Hat, Alfresco, MySQL, SugarCRM, MuleSource, etc. He doesn't have to: the market is already gelling around these companies. Fontana is identifying rising stars. While I would quibble with a few of his choices, overall it's a great list.
Open source is growing up without growing old. Fontana does a good job of capturing some great examples of this. Have a look.
Kickfire is one of the coolest open-source (based) companies to launch within the last few years. Today, it announced that it has raised $20 million in series B funding to tell the world about what it's doing.
What does Kickfire do? From a business angle, it has figured out a clever way to monetize MySQL's excellent software. From a technical angle:
Based on a patented SQL chip that packs the power of tens of CPUs into an exceptionally small, low-power form factor Kickfire delivers a quantum leap in performance efficiency--avoiding the hardware build out, power, and space costs of today's data warehouse and database offerings. By delivering astoundingly fast query performance out of the box, Kickfire enables organizations to use MySQL for demanding business intelligence, reporting, and analysis rather than migrating to costly, non-open source alternatives.
One question arising from this: Why doesn't Sun do this? Sun knows semiconductors as well as anyone, and it now knows MySQL better than anyone. Kickfire has a leap on the competition, but could Sun prove to be a spoiler?
For now, Kickfire is the best game in town when it comes to easy-to-deploy supercharged MySQL performance. Very cool.
For those proprietary database vendors who have been hoping and praying that their myths about MySQL would persist ("For low-end applications, "Not high performance," etc.) , Kickfire just announced a MySQL-based database appliance that should wipe the smirks off Oracle and IBM.
If you get nothing else from this post, remember this: Big performance. Little price.
Kickfire, Inc. today announced the first MySQL database appliance that brings the high-performance capabilities of large commercial database systems to the MySQL market. The company...has built its appliance by developing an ultra-modern database kernel and a revolutionary SQL chip that packs the power of 10s of high-end CPUs. The result is a small form-factor MySQL appliance that delivers the high performance of large systems but with dramatically lower hardware, power, and cooling costs. Separately today, Kickfire and Sun Microsystems announced record-breaking TPC-H price/performance benchmark results that demonstrate the performance efficiency and price/performance leadership of Kickfire's design.
How high of performance?
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