Alfresco has been on a roll lately. Word on the street is that Alfresco just nailed another quarter (That's eight straight quarters of growth and hitting its plan). This week Alfresco came out with some other cool news that I was forced pry out of of Matt Asay, as we both try to not shill for our own companies.
First, Alfresco and Adobe announced an extension of their previously announced partnership around Adobe Livecycle, with Alfresco now at the heart of Adobe's Acrobat.com document service. Acrobat.com combines the ability to create PDFs, share documents, host files, integrate web conferencing, and work with Adobe's web-based word processing system, Buzzword. It's a pretty cool service, and great that Alfresco is the core repository for it all.
Alfresco is ahead of the ECM pack with its SharePoint integration, says Kathleen Reidy, senior analyst at research firm The 451 Group. The most compelling short-term news is that they have that Office-level integration, Reidy says. That makes it a lot more viable for IT management to say, 'We're going to pull out the SharePoint Server or complement the SharePoint Server with Alfresco.'
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As the cloud continues to emerge as a serious option, many people are starting to catch on that there are limits to what can be done outside that particular platform.
Right now there only a few options if you are a cloud or PaaS provider:
1. Cordon off virtual machines and use VM images (like Amazon.com or Joyent)
2. Allow development on some programming language (like Google App Engine)
3. Force users onto your platform (like Salesforce.com)
The applications that are built on top of a particular vendor's infrastructure are locked into that provider's way of doing things. I always expect the cloud to be about freedom from vendor control--much like how open source gives control to the users.
Where is the "write once, run anywhere" ideal of Java? Sun should be the next big Cloud vendor--it's got hardware, virtualization, and Java all under one roof and yet it remains late to the game.
Over at GigaOm I read about Dreamfactory which provides some cloud-agnostic/opportunistic offerings to integrate its own applications with other SaaS vendors.
But rather than being tied to a particular cloud, DreamFactory works with many of them. Relying on a rich client that runs as a browser plug-in, DreamFactory's application only needs the cloud for storage. It can use Salesforce, Webex Connect and Amazon EC2. Quickbase support is just around the corner, with Google BigTable hot on its heels. It will even run on your hard drive.
The fact that the Dreamfactory plug-in runs locally solves a major issue--what happens when you are not connected. It also means you can move from platform-to-platform.
But this approach is merely the tip of the iceberg. When you consider the domination of the Flash plug-in, you can certainly imagine Adobe making strides very quickly. For that matter, this approach could be Microsoft's first step into being cloud-relevant.
The next stage of the cloud is the maneuverability of data regardless of its location or destination.
When Gartner analyst Robert Desisto wrote this week on the idea that SaaS companies are going to adopt tons of open source I was thrilled. And yet some of the blogosphere seemed to think that meant they wouldn't pay for support and services offered by open source vendors.
Nine out of ten software-as-a-service providers will rely on open source software by 2010 to save money, but the cost savings likely won't be passed onto customers, Gartner says in a new research note.
From an open source vendor perspective, I can tell you that the interest we are seeing from SaaS companies is tremendous. In my case Mule offers the integration/abstraction layer for SaaS to bridge internal applications and data structures (and really if a SaaS architecture is not service-oriented the vendors are going to have serious problems) and Galaxy provides the governance and lifecycle to manage the services. (Disclosure: I am CEO of MuleSource)
But that's just one example--If you consider that Adobe is using Alfresco as part of its online PDF product or that MySQL powers a great many SaaS applications and that both of these companies make money as open source providers I think it shows there is a great opportunity.
... Read moreThe newly revamped Adobe Share (beta) 1.3.5 is out today and is based on Alfresco, everyone's favorite open source ECM (enterprise content management) platform.
The latest version of Share offers PDF creation, updated Flash previews (supports full screen mode) and improved performance. The various rendition generations are based on Adobe LiveCycle, Creative Suite and other core technologies. Share also offers Web Services that developers could use to create desktop or online applications.
Why is this interesting?
- The fact that a bigCo like Adobe is publicly stating that they are using open source at the core of their products is fantastic (and we need alot more companies to step up publicly)
- Alfresco is proving that they (like other open source products) can go beyond an enterprise sale by doing embedded deals
I was reading Cote's write-up on the Adobe Engage conference and I just can't get excited about Adobe. Maybe it's because for me, the company still equates to Photoshop?
All of this AIR stuff looks like things people were doing with Macromedia Director back in the late 90's. And while I completely understand that this is easier to use, blah, blah, blah, I just can't get excited.
Anyway, at least Adobe is moving toward open source.
On the other hand, a fantastic technological breakthrough is Specialtys' CookieAlert where you can login and see who has hot cookies for you. Now that's a good time--and it's a Google map mashup thingy! Web 2.0 rules!
Disclosure: I love baked goods.
I spent all of last week working on Mule product announcements (please to enjoy the world's first open source SOA Governance Platform) and the new MuleSource website which left nary little time for blogging.
However, we did manage to find time to record the latest episode of Open Season. This time we touched on Adobe's OSS works, Red Hat's new CEO and the realm of the Mule.
And yes, I do want a new MacBook Air.
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