Installing an open-source enterprise application has never been easier. No hardware? No sophisticated IT department? No problem. At least, not if you use one of 38 JumpBox-enabled open-source applications, as it announced recently.
A rising number of companies offer virtualized instances of popular open-source applications, but JumpBox takes it a step further, deploying to the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) service, almost completely obviating hardware and setup quandaries.
JumpBox offers small to midsize organizations a library of open-source applications packaged as pre-built, pre-configured virtual appliances through JumpBox Open, its annual subscription service. Public Amazon Machine Images (AMI) for 12 JumpBox applications, including Ruby on Rails, (Alfresco, Movable Type, Magento), Drupal, SugarCRM and more have been made available for free. AMIs for the full suite of 38 applications are available to plus and premium subscribers to JumpBox Open.
Pricing of JumpBox Open starts at $299 per year (for one persistently running JumpBox instance of each application), rising to $999 per year to run up to 15 simultaneous production instances of any JumpBox-enabled application. In other words, it's dirt-cheap.
Powerful software, low price, and no fuss. What's not to like? If you're an SMB customer, probably not much.
But if you're an open-source application vendor, I suppose it's still an open question how JumpBox will work with you to share revenue. In my conversations with the JumpBox founders, this potential conflict has come up, and I know the JumpBox team is working on it. How well it gets resolved may well determine how much emphasis open-source vendors will put on the JumpBox sales channel which, in turn, could decide the fate of JumpBox.
With or without the vendors, however, this is a great service and suggests a bright future for enterprise software.
Disclosure: I work for Alfresco and advise several of the companies whose open-source applications JumpBox distributes.
Six Apart announced this week that it is partnering with virtual-appliance vendor JumpBox to deliver a virtualized instance of Movable Type, its open-source blogging platform. No more configuration problems as your organization strives to get up and blogging.
Ed Anuff, executive vice president and general manager of the Movable Type division of Six Apart, declared:
You can get up and running immediately, while reducing the cost of configuration and maintenance. And it's a snap for anyone who wants to evaluate the platform to get started, whether that's on a desktop, running VMWare or Parallels, a large-scale deployment on Amazon's EC2, or anything in between.
What does it cost? If you're a developer or blogger, it's free. If you're a corporate type, Virtual Movable Type Pro can be had for $449.95 for five users and $1,549.95 for 20 users. Not bad, especially when you remove the cost of futzing around with configuration files, often a significant cost in any enterprise software acquisition.
As a backstory to the announcement, I'm willing to bet that the open-source nature of Movable Type made it much easier on the JumpBox folks to get the appliance right. Just one of the many benefits that open source affords.
Six Apart announced some time ago that it would be open sourcing its excellent blogging platform, MovableType. However, it has moved dates around a few times, and originally intended to do a semiproprietary model with the software.
No more. As noted here, MovableType will be 100 percent open source, and will be released in December:
This is really good for open source community, but it raises questions for commercial users--what will be the benefit of purchased commercial version (apart from professional support)? Now it looks like new idea is not to remove anything from open source, but instead add something to commercial version!.
Exactly. That is the open-source model: to give more, rather than to remove more. It's all about finding and delivering additional "analog" value to add to an easily reproduced good (software). Give the digital away and charge for the analog.
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