mindtouch

Most influential open-source gurus? Votes are in

Influence in open-source development communities is earned through years of writing and sharing great code. Perhaps not surprisingly, then, influence in the business side of open source is also gained through sharing expertise, and not necessarily from making mountains of cash.

At least, that's the lesson I take away from MindTouch's inaugural survey of 50 open-source business executives. MindTouch, an open-source collaboration company, has spent the last few months surveying executives within the commercial open-source community, asking them to name the most influential people within the commercial open-source ecosystem.

The result is effectively an all-star list of open-source … Read more

SpringSource and MindTouch seek to redefine the application server

There was a time when vendors knew how to color inside the lines. A database vendor sold databases. An operating system vendor peddled operating systems. And application server vendors were in the business of selling application servers.

Customers knew what "application server" meant, which is what paved the way for low-cost, high-value open-source application servers like JBoss, Geronimo, and others to arise. The category was well understood. The only thing the customer had to decide was whether she wished to overspend on a brand-name application server or buy into an open-source upstart.

As the economy continues to pressure … Read more

Open-source companies log impressive growth in Q2 2009

In May, I reported on the rising fortunes of Funambol, Mozilla, and other open-source companies. Signs of "green shoots" notwithstanding, the economy doesn't seem to be getting any better, but open-source companies continue to log impressive growth as open source pervades the enterprise, as Forrester analyst Jeffrey Hammond (@jhammond) recently noted.

Importantly, according to Hammond, while open source starts as a cost-saving exercise, it often morphs into something far more strategic:

[O]rganizations tend to start [with the goal of saving money with open source]. And then what tends to happen is the more that they become … Read more

Do I look ugly in this open-source license?

A bad economy is good for open source, goes the increasingly conventional wisdom. However, while it's undoubtedly a good time to be in the market with a low-cost, high-value alternative to proprietary software, there are tell-tale signs that the recession isn't blessing all open-source companies equally.

For example, at the Enterprise 2.0 conference on Tuesday Socialtext founder Ross Mayfield declared, in the words of a conference attendee via Twitter, that Socialtext's first quarter "sucked" and that its "pipeline collapsed." Socialtext, once described as a highflier in a "sizzling market," has … Read more

Joomla! turns 10,000,000 and other news

I thought of just Tweeting a few of these news bits, but some deserve to be blogged. Alas! I lack the time today but....

Joomla has surpassed 10,000,000 downloads. It's hard to describe just how impressive this is, and particularly given the fact that these have come in the past four years, and after a fractious fork from Mambo. The University of Southern Mississippi and the Department of Homeland Security's Science and Technology Directorate have launched the Homeland Open Security Technology (HOST) program, along with Open Source Software Institute (OSSI) and the U.S. Navy, … Read more

MindTouch and SnapLogic partner to juice up your CRM application

When I first saw the headline "MindTouch and SnapLogic Announce Deki for CRM to Enhance the Value of Leading CRM Solutions," I didn't think much of it. Despite being an adviser to MindTouch and watching SnapLogic for the past few years, I couldn't get excited. How sexy can it be to "enhance the value" of SugarCRM and Salesforce.com?

Reading through the press release, it became much more interesting. My company uses SugarCRM, and the idea of connecting SugarCRM with our accounts payable system (through SnapLogic) and integrating the ability to take free-form wiki … Read more

MindTouch Deki's new release integrates...just about everything

Disclosure: I am on the advisory board for MindTouch.

Double disclosure: I really, really like the latest release of MindTouch Deki (formerly "Deki Wiki").

MindTouch has always thought that a wiki should be about more than simply creating basic web pages. With its new "Kilen Woods" release, the company has significantly bent the rules as to what constitutes a wiki, and just which data sources can feed into a wiki.

LinkedIn? Yep. Salesforce.com? Sure. SugarCRM. Uh-huh.

MindTouch Deki enables businesses to connect and mashup the growing number of application and data silos that exist across an enterprise - including legacy systems, CRM and ERP applications, databases, and Web 2.0 applications....For example, MindTouch Deki can visualize content from a Microsoft SQL Server or Microsoft Access databases and mash it up with other services, such as Microsoft Live Earth or Google maps, LinkedIn and a CRM system - offering a common wiki and web-service interface for content and behavior from multiple sources.

eWeek and others have some good reviews. Me? I just like that I don't have to learn any wiki language to use it. Take a look for yourself:… Read more

MindTouch closes a banner year

While it's true that open-source companies, in general, are starting from a small base of revenue and adoption, it's equally true that the real measure of any company is growth. If it's good, it will grow.

Hence, it's great to see MindTouch, a commercial open-source collaboration company, booming:

Over 200,000 active installs - 100 percent increase Installs on all major Linux distributions - 600 percent increase More than 3,000 registered members at the developer community - 30 percent increase Translated into 16 languages - 500 percent increase… Read more

What's driving Microsoft SharePoint adoption?

Microsoft's SharePoint has now topped $1 billion in licenses and is perhaps the fastest-growing product in Microsoft's history. What is driving that growth? The same thing that has driven all of Microsoft's most successful products: Microsoft removes complexity (and cost) from existing markets, as Craig Roth notes:

To a certain extent, the excitement about SharePoint has really been a reflection of disillusionment with existing collaboration, content management, and portal products. The people that are interested in SharePoint - despite already having incumbent alternatives - see at first glance a product that may finally provide easy-to-use, inexpensive, web-based collaborative solutions.

Love them or hate them, Microsoft does lower the bar to computing. Its products can be shoddy (SharePoint is no winner in that department - just try scaling it) but that's a trade-off many are willing to make in order to have something, anything that works reasonably well at a reasonable price.… Read more

Google goes after Microsoft SharePoint

Google Sites was just launched and its target is clear: Microsoft SharePoint. While it has an uphill battle--security and a lack of the complex features that SharePoint has, for example--its biggest problem is that it doesn't connect with the content production tools that most people spend their (enterprise) content-producing lives in:

Microsoft Outlook and Microsoft Office.

Of course, Google Sites is free, which will cover a multitude of other problems, especially since Microsoft SharePoint turns out to be amazingly overpriced for a Microsoft product. Microsoft has, according to CMS Wire's analysis, completely priced the SME market out of SharePoint.… Read more