Open Source Weblog: May 2008 Archives

Novell "gaining momentum" thanks to Linux?
May 30, 2008

"Our business continues to gain momentum," said Novell president and CEO Ron Hovsepian, on the announcement of the firm's second quarter results today. But is he being truthful?

As one of the largest firms that have pinned their colours to the Linux mast, it's worth taking a closer look at Novell's progress as it offers some insight into the strength of the commercial Linux market per se.

Linux, and indeed open source, is a far larger market than any individual company can hope to encompass; but in the commercial software business, Novell is a better bellwether than most, with the exception perhaps of Red Hat... [for more on this entry click Continue Reading below]....

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Posted by Jason Stamper on 05:48 PM | Comments (3)

Nuxeo claims it’s flying in open source ECM
May 27, 2008

I'm often amused when US or UK-based privately held companies announce their ‘results’. Because they don’t have to, they rarely tell you the sales or profits as absolute numbers, but they always tell you they are growing like billy-o.

Not so straight-forward in France, it turns out, because there, even privately held companies must post their results at the end of their financial year, if you know where to look.

Nuxeo hasn't reached its financial year-end yet so we must go with what they can tell us so far.

Nuxeo, the open source enterprise content management (ECM) platform vendor, says its first semester results saw sales up 50%, plus a 30% increase in new customers and a 300% increase in software downloads. From what to what, we are left to ponder...

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Posted by Jason Stamper on 04:35 PM | Comments (0)

100 most influential tech vendors: you have to be kidding
May 13, 2008

Today the analyst firm Aberdeen Group announced its list of the 100 most influential technology vendors for 2008. It’s bizarre. The full list, courtesy of Aberdeen, is below. And maybe you can’t blame the analyst firm for what respondents told them, but it certainly seems to me that respondents lost sight of the “business influence” element, and just picked their favourite or most familiar brands.

So here are a few ‘bizarrelights’:

+ Check Point, one of the most profitable security players (latest quarterly revenue $191.6m), is only in at number 100, below companies I have hardly heard of.

+ Apple is at number 16 – remember Aberdeen looked for “the Top 100 organizations that excelled at providing value to the business community”. How many enterprises have Apple investments that put Apple’s influence above the next 84 companies in the list?

+ Skype is at number 55 – how many companies see the influence of Skype in their enterprise? Skype is more influential in the enterprise than Symantec? NetApp? Informatica? Do me a favour.

+ Vonage is at 68. See Skype above.

+ Google is only at number 11, behind salesforce.com [salesforce.com latest quarterly revenue $217m, Google latest quarterly revenue $5.2bn. And don’t even start on the fact Google is less relevant in the enterprise, because not only do they have numerous enterprise offerings these days but their influence on consumers has affected the IT expectations of nearly every employee in any company.]

+ Ariba is at number 38 (revenue in latest quarter $80.5m), above people like CA (latest quarterly results $1.1bn), Tata, Novell, BMC, Progress and many more.

Now while I understand that people’s perception of influence is not the same as these companies’ actual success or lack of it, the size of the discrepancy between perceived influence and actual results – and the more sales a company has, the more customers they must have and the more investment those companies are making in their products – is pretty astonishing, in my view.

But that’s the fun thing about this kind of list: it is enlightening, surprising and infuriating in equal measure. Hit continue reading to see the full list of the Top 100 and more...

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Posted by Jason Stamper on 04:31 PM | Comments (0)

Virtualisation CEO says virtualisation is becoming commodity
May 12, 2008

I caught up with the CEO of virtualisation and data centre automation player, Parallels, recently. What an interview it was.

The Russian-born co-founder of SWsoft, which changed its name to Parallels in December last year, is not one to stick to the marketing script, which is always refreshing in a CEO. But what Serguei Beloussov had to say about virtualisation, which still accounts for over 50% of the firm’s revenue, surprised even me.

“I don’t believe that the product category of virtualization will survive longer term,” he told me. “Users don’t want infrastructure, they want applications.”

Beloussov: mad as a hatter or just ridiculously honest?

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Posted by Jason Stamper on 04:02 PM | Comments (1)