Cisco Systems has always been a highly aggressive acquisition machine, and today's announcement that the company has acquired Jabber makes sense in light of the push toward enterprise collaboration that started with the acquisition of WebEx.
While Cisco made no mention of the fact that Jabber was largely open source, I would assume that's because open source is "accepted" at Cisco. A number of products contain open-source components, and despite some GPL issues in the past, Cisco has contributed to open-source projects.
So, is Cisco the company to consolidate open source, or to just consolidate software in general? I would be willing to wager yes, provided it can generate even slightly more revenue from the assets it acquires.
Typically, Cisco looks for acquisitions that would bring in $300 million or more of revenue (anything less isn't very material to the bottom line) and open-source companies are nowhere near that. However, with Cisco's massive brand power and ability to put pretty much anything into a box, they could easily monetize all kinds of open-source projects.
Several of the leading open-source companies fit right into the Cisco business: Hyperic (systems management, including virtualization), Funambol (mobile) and don't forget the world of SOA and system infrastructure, including XML acceleration.
Minus a few product like databases and CRM there are few open-source products that Cisco couldn't make money from. At the moment there isn't much appetite for open-source acquisitions at the obvious places (Sun, Red Hat, IBM, Oracle). Maybe Cisco will jump ahead of the traditional software players and consolidate the open-source ecosystem.
When Hyperic launched CloudStatus.com, I think most people took a look and figured they would never need such a service. Then all of the sudden we saw multiple outages from Google and Amazon and CloudStatus.com became the best resource to figure out what was going on.
I asked Javier Soltero, CEO of Hyperic to provide some insight as to why the Cloud is as much of an operations as it is a deployment battle.
Guest post by Javier Soltero, CEO of Hyperic
Operations is one of the key open issues that will define Cloud computing's future.
The separation of Cloud offerings around consumption of resources versus consumption of applications makes a lot of sense. Regardless of the use case, the idea that a business might choose the Cloud as a platform to build and consume applications because it inherently reduces or removes the operational burden is ridiculous.
The simple reason is that software, regardless of who is developing it, always fails. Those who refute that point haven't been around technology long enough or haven't paid attention to the fact that every single 'Cloud' has had outages recently.
Enterprise software consumers (the folks whose money most Cloud providers are looking to get) know better than to assume that any new platform (whether it's "the Cloud" or Linux or Java) is inherently management free. Because of this, I'm confident that until management technology (including everything from provisioning to monitoring) matures, the enterprise will still regard the Cloud as a place to do science experiments.
... Read more
More downtime for Amazon S3 doesn't make the Cloud any more appealing for enterprises.
One of the main reasons enterprises won't be quick to embrace the Cloud for meaningful applications is due to the lack of visibility associated with downtime. Most companies are too paranoid (rightly so) to have no idea what caused system downtime or to have a clear mean-time to resolution.
As an S3 customer we should definitely be able to get notifications and have the ability to ask for refunds. I couldn't figure out how to do either one.
For basic monitoring you can get free updates on a number of Cloud services from Hyperic's Cloudstatus.com and Amazon's Service Health Dashboard .
I'm sure these geniuses at PacketTrap posted this manifesto about why commercial open source is no good as part a misguided marketing attempt, but I feel it necessary to comment on just how stupid this is and why this kind of thing leads to a company's failure.
The CEO's argument essentially says commercial open source isn't fair because he can't take all the code (he highlights GPL products) and recast it as his own.
PacketTrap believes that the commercialization of open source by the POSS vendors such as Hyperic and GroundWork Open, however, skillfully undermines the original goal of open source projects to develop strong software solutions without the negative effects of commercial vendor profit motive.
It's interesting that he thinks that these companies are undermining the spirit of OSS when his company takes a bunch of OSS components, aggregates them and pretends like they did something new and exciting.
He also notes how his company is part of the community, yet doesn't state what projects the staff contributes to, nor could I find anything that they had open-sourced themselves.
After looking at the blog's header image of a guy with a plunger, an anonymous friend noted:
"If Hyperic is the cash register of open source, I guess that makes these guys the toilet."
The PDF "Integrating Open Source in Commercial Solutions: Does PacketTrap Have the Right Model?" is a great example of why you need PR help when you are a young company. Most people aren't smart enough to edit their own stupidity.
Novell got a nice influx of cash when they made their deal with the devil (er, Microsoft) and BusinessWeek says that the company is now ready to start spending some of that cash on acquisitions.
The problem is that there aren't a whole lot of companies that are complementary in a meaningful way.
Raven Zachary at 451 Group suggests that Novell might be interested in one of the open source system management vendors like Hyperic and Zenoss. This makes sense but won't bring meaningful revenue--and both of those companies will be worth a lot more down the road (especially considering Hyperic's recent customer wins.)
So, then who or what does Novell buy? They missed on virtualization with Xensource and they have no apparent SOA or app server strategy.
My suggestion? Buy up all the .NET open source companies and become the center of the open source Microsoft universe. There isn't a whole lot else that will be meaningful and since Novell already went to the dark side they should be happy as the Darth Vader of open source.
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