Latest News from Open Source Magazine

Ingres to Be in Novell Appliance

Sat, 20 Mar 2010 05:45:00 EDT

Preternaturally quiet since a hedge fund offered to buy it two weeks ago and take it private, Novell stated on Wednesday that the open source Ingres database is available in the free SUSE Studio as part of the SUSE Appliance Program. Novell and Ingres are supposed to jointly support and market the SUSE Studio Appliance Template for Ingres Database to ISVs. The widgetry creates an on-ramp for developers to integrate their applications and get to market with a software appliance quickly. According to IDC, software appliance adoption is growing and has perhaps doubled in the last two years.

Latest Open-Xchange Groupware Offers Integrated VoIP

Thu, 18 Mar 2010 15:48:33 EDT

Open-Xchange, a provider of business-class open source collaboration software, today announced enhancements that give users telephone and fax integrated with e-mail, contacts, calendar and task information. By combining Open-Xchange (hosted and on-premise editions) with Unified Communications and Virtual PBX solutions, businesses can replace their traditional phone lines -- saving on phone bills. Presence and instant messaging services will be added in the coming software releases enabling users to communicate in real-time anytime, anywhere.

Novell Expands SUSE Appliance Program with Ingres

Wed, 17 Mar 2010 08:30:00 EDT

Novell and Ingres Corporation on Wednesday announced the Ingres database is available within SUSE Studio as part of the SUSE Appliance Program. Both companies have entered into a cooperative agreement to make it easier and more cost-effective for independent software vendors (ISVs) and system integrators (SIs) to build appliances that deliver business critical software applications which require an enterprise-class database. As part of the agreement, Novell and Ingres will jointly support and market the SUSE Studio Appliance Template for Ingres Database to a large ecosystem of ISVs who are seeking a simplified appliance infrastructure. The SUSE Studio Appliance Template for Ingres Database creates a single, seamless on-ramp for ISVs to integrate their applications and quickly get to market with a software appliance. This template enables ISVs to focus on their core businesses by eliminating the burden of managing the life-cycle of the operating system or the middleware database component within their appliances. A collaborative support model ensures certified appliances are supported by both companies with no additional work required by the ISV. The result of these efforts is that an ISV or SI can reduce appliance setup and build times by as much as 80 percent and more cost-effectively sell appliances with a fully-supported, enterprise-class database and operating system.

NorthScale Addresses Exploding Cost of Web Application Data Management

Tue, 16 Mar 2010 07:00:00 EDT

NorthScale, Inc., a Silicon Valley software startup, on Tuesday introduced a new generation of elastic data infrastructure software, optimized for the data management requirements of modern web applications and cloud computing environments. The company was founded by leaders of the memcached open source project - a data infrastructure technology at the core of 18 of the top 20 most heavily trafficked websites, and thousands of others. Building on this foundation, the NorthScale Server family of products represents a new class of data management technology offering substantial cost, performance and scalability advantages over relational database technology, for the vast majority of data associated with web applications. "Zynga's FarmVille, Cafe World, Mafia Wars and other games have over 235 million active users per month. We rely on technology from NorthScale to make that possible," said Cadir Lee, Chief Technology Officer at Zynga. "As long-time users and members of the memcached community, we have tremendous respect for the team at NorthScale. Our internal development work to extend memcached clearly matched with their vision and we've worked closely with the team through the development of NorthScale Membase Server. We expect to improve the performance and availability of our games while reducing hardware and administration costs as we continue to transition data from relational databases to NorthScale Membase technology."

Memcached Goes Commercial

Tue, 16 Mar 2010 04:45:00 EDT

Described as optimized for web applications and cloud computing, NorthScale's solution is already being leveraged by web properties such as Zynga’s FarmVille, Café World, Mafia Wars and other games that have over 235 million active users a month as well as Korea’s number one search portal, Naver.com, a $1.2 billion operation.

Cloud Expo Sponsor SOASTA Makes WSJ's Hottest VC-Backed Firms List

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 16:30:00 EST

SOASTA, a Bronze Sponsor of 5th International Cloud Expo cloud computing conference, upcoming next month in New York (April 19-21, 2010), has been named by the Wall Street Journal as one of the fifty "hottest" VC-backed firms in the US - the only Cloud player among the seventeen IT companies listed. The WSJ rankings were calculated based on how each company scored in the following components: the track record of success for the venture-capital investors who sit on the company's board (Board Ranking); the amount of capital raised by the company over the last three years, in comparison to its peers (Total Equity Ranking); the track record of success for the company's founders and chief executive (Executive Ranking); and the recent growth in the value of the company (Valuation Ranking).

SaaS Metrics – Measuring and Improving What Matters

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 14:00:00 EST

This article looks at the high level goals of a SaaS business and drills down layer by layer to expose the key metrics that will help drive success. Metrics for metric’s sake are not very useful. Instead the goal is to provide a detailed look at what management must focus on to drive a successful SaaS business. For each metric, we will also look at what is actionable. Before going any further, I would like to thank the management team at HubSpot, and Gail Goodman of Constant Contact, who sits on the HubSpot board. A huge part of the material that I write about below comes my experiences working with them. In particular HubSpot’s management team is comprised of a group of very bright individuals that are all very metrics driven, and they have been clear thought leaders in developing the appropriate tools to drive their business. I’d also like to thank John Clancy, who until recently was President of Iron Mountain Digital, a $230m SaaS business, and Alastair Mitchell, CEO and founder of Huddle.

Do You Mean We Import Chalk?

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 11:27:00 EST

Something as simple as chalk, a tool used by nearly everybody n the country, was not being produced in the domestic business sector. Dr. Bukenya changed that. The chalk problem was quickly rectified, and a new program of “can we make it in Uganda” started. The basic idea is if the product is capable of being made in-country, then Uganda should not pay another country for the product.

John Wilbanks on Making Science Generative

Tue, 09 Mar 2010 14:02:00 EST

John Wilbanks of Creative Commons (and head of Science Commons) is giving a Berkman lunchtime talk about the threats to science’s generativity. He takes Jonathan Zittrain’s definition of generativity: “a system’s capacity to produced unanticipated change through unfiltered contributions from broad and varied audiences.” NOTE: Live-blogging. Getting things wrong. Missing points. Omitting key information. Introducing artificial [...]

Open Source Start-Up Dedupes Primary Storage

Sat, 06 Mar 2010 05:15:00 EST

Nexenta Systems, the five-year-old open storage player, has come up with in-line deduplication for primary or production storage including virtualized storage, calling it a first. It means more data can be stored on a server by reducing duplicate data, a winnowing process usually reversed for backup and replication, and should cut pricey high-speed proprietary storage needs. The widgetry’s in the NexentaStor 3.0 upgrade of the start-up’s enterprise-class storage solution, which is based on Sun’s open source Zettabyte File System (ZFS), and Nexenta’s own Virtual Machine Datacenter (VMDC) 3.0, a new release of its virtualization management platform. NexentaStor 3.0 also includes support for Microsoft Hyper-V, making it the only storage solution to support all the major virtualization environments and it does it from a unified VMDC environment. VMDC can also be used to clone a virtual desktop for hundreds of users.

Xen Hypervisor Monitoring with Open Source Zenoss Core

Thu, 04 Mar 2010 23:41:00 EST

This week I am very excited because we released Zenoss Core 2.5.2 with a cool new feature, Xen hypervisor monitoring. I am very happy to see Zenoss put this out as open source software, because it’s the beginning of what could be a great piece of software. Now that this is out there for anyone to [...]

$2 Billion Offered for Novell

Wed, 03 Mar 2010 12:00:00 EST

After Wall Street closed yesterday, Elliott Associates LP, a hedge fund with $16 billion under management, made a reportedly unsolicited bid to buy Novell, the Linux operating system’s lackluster number two champion, for what looks like about $2 billion and take it private. It’s offering $5.75 a share cash, a 20% premium over Novell’s $4.75 closing price Tuesday.

Veracode Finds Most Apps Lacking in Security Effectiveness

Mon, 01 Mar 2010 17:45:00 EST

Veracode has found that 58 percent of software applications possess vulnerabilities similar to those exploited in the recent cyber attacks on Google and the U.S. Department of Defense. The "State of Software Security" report that has taken into consideration 1,600 Internally Developed, Open Source, Outsourced, and Commercial applications is based on multiple testing methodologies on the full spectrum of application types (components, shared libraries, web and non-web applications) and programming. After examining billions of lines of code submitted to Veracode for independent verification of software security, the study dispels the popular belief that Open source software is riskier to enterprises. It found that though both open source and proprietary software contain the same level of security vulnerabilities, Open source takes less time to remedy the issues. Commercial software suffers from "Numerous political and organizational complexities" causing delays in risk management procedures.

CEP & RuleBots & OnRamps – Oh My!

Sun, 28 Feb 2010 18:03:00 EST

I like Streambase’s announcement regarding their open source repository for CEP related stuff. And imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, so I thought I’d follow suit. In my glossary of terms, I deal with RuleBots and OnRamps. RuleBots are pieces of code that subscribe to streams, do something of interest, and then put a result back on a stream. We’re releasing RuleBots with logic pertaining to Regulation NMS surveillance rules in the areas of. Like the Twitter OnRamp we’ve been using in our Twityourl project, OnRamps take data from various sources and inject that data into the stream processing system. We’re releasing OnRamps for both listed and otc quotes and trades. We’ll be publishing the details of the Git repository shortly. You can check our progress at Gitorious by following this link.

Europe Finally Discovers Cloud Computing

Thu, 25 Feb 2010 18:45:00 EST

A survey conducted by data management and storage vendor NetApp has revealed that overwhelmingly virtualisation (70%) is the top priority for IT investment in 2010, and that awareness of cloud computing is on the rise. The majority of IT professionals (74%) now claim to have partial understanding of cloud storage, placing the technology firmly on the IT and business agenda. The survey of more than 100 professionals revealed cost savings (22%) and a pay-as-you-go model (23%) as the most appealing benefits of cloud storage, as well as perceived security (29%) and integration (22%) issues as the biggest barriers to adoption.

Developing a Master-Detail View

Thu, 25 Feb 2010 05:30:00 EST

This tutorial provides step-by-step instructions for creating a Web application that uses the Java Persistence API (JPA) version 2.0 with Oracle WebLogic Server 11g Release 1, Spring, EclipseLink, JavaServer Faces (JSF), and Oracle Database, Express Edition. You will develop this application using Oracle Enterprise Pack for Eclipse 11g Release 1, Patchset 1 (11.1.1.3). During the process of creating this application, you’ll also get a sneak peek at planned enhancements to the Eclipse Web Tools Platform. Application Description The Web application you will develop in this tutorial is designed for a company that sells a variety of products. The application will maintain a list of products for sale as well as a list of customers who placed orders (see Figure 1)

Open-Xchange Partners with Eleven to Integrate Anti-Spam Security

Mon, 22 Feb 2010 16:30:00 EST

Open-Xchange, a provider of business-class open source collaboration software, and eleven, Germany's leading e-mail security provider, have agreed on comprehensive technical cooperation to easily add e-mail security to all Open-Xchange products. Web hosters, ISPs and telcos can combine Open-Xchange Hosting Edition -- with more than 10 million users -- with eleven's e-mail security solution eXpurgate. eXpurgate is scalable, easy to integrate, and offers a spam detection rate of more than 99 percent. In addition, eXpurgate will be integrated as a premium option in the Open-Xchange products aimed at companies that want to operate their e-mail server in-house. "With Open-Xchange and eleven, web hosts can offer their customers not only a cost-effective and professional package, but also an optimally protected e-mail solution," said Robert Rothe, founder and CEO of eleven.

SCO’s Prospects Brighten

Sat, 20 Feb 2010 05:45:00 EST

District Court Judge Ted Stewart, the guy who’s going to preside over the SCO v Novell case next month, didn’t waiting for a hearing. He just tossed out Novell’s motion to exclude SCO’s slander-of-title claims on its ear Thursday. That means he’s left the window on the damages SCO is claiming wide open for the jury to decide in addition to who owns Unix. On top of which, SCO’s ex-chairman Ralph Yarro has offered to lend the company up to $2 million and the trustee wants the bankruptcy court in Delaware to accept his offer. It looks like a backstop move in case the decision actually goes to the jury – absent any courthouse-steps settlements – and SCO wins and Novell appeals and drags the litigation out for another five years. It’s a message that SCO will still be viable.

Canonical Does About-Face on OpenOffice

Sat, 20 Feb 2010 04:00:00 EST

Canonical has changed its mind about dropping OpenOffice as the default from its Netbook distro of Ubuntu in favor of Google Docs. After a Peasant Revolt, it decided that “it seems that users and community members would really prefer that we ship OOo for the editing suite.” Oh, by the way, according to PriceGrabber.com, an online comparison shopping service, 55% of consumers don’t see a netbook as a feasible replace for a laptop and 63% see them as an additional device.

Ex-BusinessObjects CEO Quits SAP

Sun, 14 Feb 2010 23:45:00 EST

SAP hasn’t just abruptly lost its CEO Leo Apotheke. It’s also just abruptly lost the former CEO of BusinessObjects, SAP’s biggest acquisition, John Schwarz, the guy still responsible for the unit as well as the company’s ecosystem and corporate development. He tendered his resignation Thursday with no explanation. Plattner admitted he didn't want to explain why Apotheke was really dumped but said the press was barking up the wrong tree in thinking Leo was jettisoned because SAP screwed up its mid-market SaaS Business ByDesign product - which is being rehabilitated for re-release - or that he and Leo had had a difference of opinion, or that it was because SAP flubbed trying to jack up its maintenance prices, a mistake the rest of management shares in - although that contributed significantly to the trust gap Plattner said SAP is currently suffering from.

WaveMaker's Community Grows and Grows

Sat, 13 Feb 2010 14:25:00 EST

Open source companies live or die by the health of their communities. WaveMaker's proudest achievement last year was creating a passionate and rapidly growing community.

Thinking back, probably our most important decision affecting community health was made early in the year, when we decided to dump our AGPL license in favor of Apache.

Although we had never gotten direct feedback that the community didn't like AGPL, we had more forum posts than we thought was healthy that asked pointed questions about our licensing. This let us know that people were confused, and if there was any doubt in our minds, the licensing debacle at Ext js convinced us that Keep-It-Simple-Stupid is the only way to go here.

Once community developers felt confident that they could do what they wanted to do with our Community edition without somehow triggering a commercial fee down the road, the community literally exploded. Together, here is what we accomplished in 2009:

Stunning community growth: 18 months after our product launch, the number of registered developers for WaveMaker (15,00) is about one third the size of the Spring community (49,000)!
Profitability: WaveMaker closed 2009 as a profitable company and saw revenue growth of 53% in our last 3 months!
Gartner recognition: WaveMaker was featured in 9 different Gartner reports last year, including one which identified WaveMaker as the only open source platform for cloud development!

Why the tidal wave of support for WaveMaker? That's easy - WaveMaker makes it ridiculously easy to build great-looking, standards-based Java applications.

Web 2.0 enabler: at companies like Macy's, National City Bank and Pioneer Energy, WaveMaker enables non-Java developers to create Java apps with minimal training.
Productivity multipier: at ISVs and systems integrators, WaveMaker reduces development costs for Java and Web 2.0 applications by over 75%.

Canonical Gets Itself a New COO

Sat, 13 Feb 2010 05:15:00 EST

Canonical has hired Alfresco’s bizdev VP Matt Asay as its COO, making him responsible for aligning strategic goals and operations, optimizing day-to-day operations and handling marketing and back-office functions. He will replace Jane Silber, when she, in turn, replaces founder Mark Shuttleworth as CEO. Asay, an emeritus board member of the Open Source Initiative (OSI), started in open source at Lineo, an embedded Linux software start-up; was a founding member of Novell’s Linux Business Office in 2002; started the Open Source Business Conference; and served as an entrepreneur-in-residence at Thomas Weisel Venture Partners, focusing on open source investment opportunities. Trained as a lawyer, Asay studied software licensing, specifically the GNU, under Stanford Law School Professor Larry Lessig.

Terracotta and Eucalyptus to Drive Scaling in Private Cloud Environments

Tue, 09 Feb 2010 21:30:00 EST

Terracotta and Eucalyptus Systems have together come up with an integrated open source solution for private cloud that they say will maximize data scalability and application performance. The companies claim that their partnership is aimed at helping enterprises get a better handle on challenges related to the elastic provisioning of compute clouds on existing data center infrastructure. The joint solution specifically targets the problem that companies face due to the inability of the data layer to scale at the same rate as the compute layer. The combo stack is intended for large-scale businesses to provision private clouds on the Eucalyptus cloud platform .

Online Music and Open Source Business Models

Tue, 09 Feb 2010 20:35:00 EST

In this part of our series on An Open Source Business, let’s take a look at our friends in the online music space and see what we can learn from them. The Deal recently had an article about online music startups which should strike a chord with anybody who’s thinking about or trying to make a [...]

Retail Industry and Open Source ERP

Thu, 04 Feb 2010 12:44:00 EST

A group of graduate students from the Lancaster University in Lancaster, UK contacted me last year regarding a research project they were doing. They wanted to compare open source and commercial ERP systems for the retail industry and evaluated opentaps Open Source ERP + CRM, openbravo, and Microsoft Dynamics NAV (Navision). They were kind enough to [...]

Quick Comparison of eCommerce Platforms

Wed, 03 Feb 2010 12:30:00 EST

We’ve been working on an integration of the Magento e-commerce platform for opentaps Open Source ERP + CRM, and some of our long-time users have also talked about integrating opentaps with Spree. I took a quick look at both and make some notes about them. Since we’re not developers of or service providers for either [...]

rPath Eliminates the “Pain of Change” for Linux Shops

Tue, 02 Feb 2010 19:00:00 EST

Today's enterprise IT organizations are intimately familiar with the pain of change. Under pressure to do more with less while accelerating velocity and responsiveness, IT is finding software systems harder than ever to provision and maintain. Similarly, most IT organizations lack consistent and repeatable processes for the handoff between phases in the release lifecycle. This leads to system configuration “drift” between dev, test, staging and production phases, which often leads to failed deployments and outages.

ActiveState Launches Business Edition

Tue, 02 Feb 2010 07:10:00 EST

ActiveState, the dynamic languages experts, today launched ActiveState Business Edition, commercial-grade language distributions for Perl, Python and Tcl, providing organizations open source compliance, commercial support, and cross-platform access.

Talend Tries Going Mainstream

Fri, 29 Jan 2010 14:00:00 EST

Talend Tuesday open sourced a Master Data Management (MDM) solution in the name of democratizing the market and fighting off proprietary systems from TIBCO, Oracle and IBM. The widgetry hails from Talend’s Amalto acquisition – mixed with some of its own technology – and is advertised as the first comprehensive solution for data integration, data quality, master data and data stewardship built on a single platform – presuming Sun’s open source Mural project dies at the hand of Oracle.

Oracle’s Acquisition of Sun: Could They Damage Open Source?

Fri, 29 Jan 2010 13:30:00 EST

Open source software, in brief, is software that is distributed under a specific type of license. Open source licenses attempt to ensure the code is freely distributed. The vision is of large communities of developers and users who both give and get software code freely. Note that this does not mean the code can't be "owned" per se, it just means that it has to be distributed without cost.

McNealy Writes the E-Mail He Never Wanted To Write

Wed, 27 Jan 2010 02:00:00 EST

Sun chairman Scott McNealy sent out his farewell to the troops Tuesday, the day before Oracle is supposed to explain what it's going to do with Sun and maybe indicate how many of Sun folks it's going to fire. Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz told Sun employees last week that "Upon change in control, every employee needs to emotionally resign from Sun. Go home, light a candle, and let go of the expectations and assumptions that defined Sun as a workplace. Honor and remember them, but let then go."

SYS-CON White Paper: Tabor Research - Subduing the Complex Software Monster

Fri, 22 Jan 2010 14:06:00 EST

In this Research White Paper, Tabor reviews Univa UD's product strategy, and opportunities and challenges in the market place of HPC software. To download this Research White Paper now, click here

SYS-CON White Paper: Univa UD - Putting the Green in Green IT

Fri, 22 Jan 2010 13:40:00 EST

In this White Paper, Univa UD discusses how distributed computing delivers dramatic cost savings, as well as Green IT benefits, by leveraging existing resources and curbing data center growth. Click here to download the White Paper now!

The American Dream Is Alive with Cloud Computing

Thu, 21 Jan 2010 12:45:00 EST

The principles and freedoms of the American dream are finding themselves resurrected again with cloud computing. The following blog will outline background, details and living proof that cloud computing is one of the catalysts of the future that will bring the American dream back! As an immigrant and soon to be citizen of the United States of America, I have experienced first hand and continue to experience the greatness of this country and rewards of the American dream.

Green Storage: MAID to Do More Than Just Spin Down

Wed, 20 Jan 2010 12:30:00 EST

The fundamental Green problem of all data centers is that they cost a fortune to power up, which in turn produces heat which then costs a fortune to cool down. Within this vicious circle a bastion was set up to counter this, namely ‘Green Storage’, which has mostly taken shape in the form of virtualized storage, data deduplication, compression, thin provisioning, DC power and SSDs. Add to the circle power conservation techniques such as server virtualization and archiving onto nearline storage, and you have most companies claiming they are successfully moving towards being ‘Green’. Hence bring forth the proposition of MAID storage and many users would not see the need for it. Further reluctance towards the technology would also come from the fact that MAID has now somewhat tragically become synonymous with being merely a disk spin down technique, despite having the potential to be far more and concurrently bringing greater cost savings.

Integrating Versatility and Speed Into Applications

Tue, 19 Jan 2010 20:45:00 EST

With over a decade of PDF experience, Amyuni Technologies has produced reputable PDF tools designed with the developer in mind. One such tool is the Amyuni PDF Suite—composed of the Amyuni PDF Converter and the Amyuni PDF Creator.

Black Duck Software Names Open Source Rookies of 2009

Tue, 19 Jan 2010 09:32:00 EST

From a Twitter client for World of Warcraft to a natural language processing system for the clinical health care community, open source projects have the answer to an increasing range of development challenges, according to Black Duck Software, which today announced its 2009 open source 'Rookies of the Year' list. Working from a list of over 19,000 new projects launched in 2009, Black Duck evaluated project popularity using a scoring system that awards points for the number of releases within a project, the number of developers involved, and the number of web sites linked to the project. After auditing its findings and normalizing scores, Black Duck determined the top 10 Rookie projects.

IBM Lotus Notes Apps Now on the iPhone

Tue, 19 Jan 2010 04:30:00 EST

With Mobile Edge, iPhone users can now access and update their Lotus Notes business applications such as CRM software, helpdesk and salesforce automation right from their iPhones. Mobile Edge works with Lotus Domino 6.0 or higher including Domino 8.5.1, taking advantage of Web services and open standards by Lotus Domino. By connecting their existing Lotus Notes applications to their iPhone, users can get the most out of their Domino server, and benefit from a user-friendly and familiar Lotus Notes environment. There's no need to learn new programs, and no additional coding or in-house development is required.

Demystifying Open Source

Mon, 18 Jan 2010 13:30:00 EST

In 2008, the open source community saw the year end with a headline-catching lawsuit, the Free Software Foundation files suit against Cisco for General Public License (GPL) violations. Not to be outdone, 2009 also ended with a bang. Best Buy, Samsung, JVC and 11 other consumer electronics companies were named in a copyright infringement lawsuit filed on December 14, 2009, by the Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC) on behalf of the Software Freedom Conservancy. The scope of this lawsuit is unprecedented as it includes 14 defendants.

Google: The Cause Of and Solution To All Life’s Problems

Mon, 18 Jan 2010 11:00:00 EST

Rebecca MacKinnon has a great post of wild-eyed common sense about Google, China, and the Net as a new global player. Summary: She's glad to have Google on the side of an OPEN Internet, but she doesn't want the world to be run by even a benevolent corporation. ...

metaLogic to Showcase Lotus Notes Migration Tool

Mon, 18 Jan 2010 07:30:00 EST

Nuxeo on Monday announced that Galaxy partner metaLogic Consulting will showcase for the first time a Lotus Notes integration and migration software to the Nuxeo open source ECM platform. The metaLogic product will be available this spring. metaLogic brings deep content management expertise to its customer base and has more than 12 years experience as an IBM partner.

Jaspersoft Aims To Woo Large Enterprises With New Release

Wed, 13 Jan 2010 17:30:00 EST

Adoption of open-source business intelligence software is doubling every year because the products are viewed as "good enough" for routine applications, according to a recent report by Gartner Inc. analyst Andreas Bitterer. Commercial BI software vendors still have superior BI technology, he wrote, but "open-source is slowly becoming just another sourcing option for everyday BI requirements." No longer just an option for cash-strapped organizations, open-source BI tools are going mainstream, Bitterer said.The report cited five successful open-source BI organizations one of which is Jaspersoft.

Microsoft Introduces Migration Tool to Assist MySQL Quitters

Wed, 13 Jan 2010 12:22:11 EST

Microsoft has introduced a new tool called SQL Server Migration Assistant (SSMA) that assists MySQL users in migrating to Microsoft's SQL Server database. The SSMA is available as a Community Technology Preview and according to a recent blog post on Data Platform Insider from the Microsoft team, "customers and partners reduce the manual effort; as a result the time, cost and risks associated with migrating are significantly reduced."

A Flexible and Interoperable Cloud Operating System

Wed, 13 Jan 2010 11:30:00 EST

Future enterprise data centers will look like private clouds supporting a flexible and agile execution of virtualized services, and combining local with public cloud-based infrastructure to enable highly scalable hosting environments. The key component in these cloud architectures will the cloud management system, also called cloud operating system (OS), being responsible for the secure, efficient and scalable management of the cloud resources. Cloud OS are displacing "traditional" OS, which will be part of the application stack.

Alfresco Brings Lotus Users Open Source Content Management Platform

Wed, 13 Jan 2010 05:02:00 EST

Alfresco Software on Wednesday announced the availability of Alfresco Content Services for Lotus social collaboration products, an integration between the Alfresco open source enterprise content management (ECM) system and IBM Lotus Quickr, Lotus Notes, Lotus Connections and WebSphere Portal. This integration brings together a combination of the Lotus social collaboration capabilities and Alfresco’s lightweight, scalable, full-featured ECM, which is simple and low cost to use, deploy, maintain and support.

Run WFE Open Source BPMS System

Sun, 10 Jan 2010 00:00:00 EST

Nice to see some initiative on a open source BPMS. Runa WFE is an OpenSource BPMS system, based on JBoss jBPM core. It is a cross-platform end user solution for business process development and execution. More information at – http://sourceforge.net/projects/runawfe

Using Custom Type Marshallers in BlazeDS

Sat, 09 Jan 2010 15:00:00 EST

In my previous post I pointed to the BlazeDS classes that need to be replaced in order to prevent ActionScript Number.NaN from turning into Long or Integer zeroes on the MessageBroker side. The recommendation boiled down to re-jaring flex-messaging-core.jar or placing the modified classes somewhere earlier in the application server’s classpath. If neither option is allowed, you may configure your endpoint with the custom type marshaller.

Feds Broaden AMD Insider Trading Case Against Rajaratnam

Fri, 08 Jan 2010 13:30:00 EST

Anil Kumar, the former McKinsey & Co director accused of trading insider information about AMD, one of his clients, with Galleon hedge fund CEO Raj Rajaratnam, pleaded guilty Thursday to one count of securities fraud and one count of conspiracy to commit securities fraud as part of a deal with government prosecutors.

Adobe to Discusses Social Media and Government

Thu, 07 Jan 2010 16:00:00 EST

Loni Stark, group manager for Government Solutions at Adobe Systems Incorporated, recently interviewed with Focus Washington TechView to discuss the emergence of social media in government and how agencies are leveraging newer technologies, such as Twitter and Facebook, with positive returns. Social media has illustrated government agencies can interact with citizens in a more engaging manner versus the traditional perception of "cold," impersonal processes, Stark explained.

A New Plug for Mon.itor.Us

Wed, 06 Jan 2010 04:15:00 EST

This time it comes from prolific plug-in makers collectd – a daemon that collects system performance statistics periodically and provides mechanisms to store the values in a variety of ways, for example in RRD files. collectd also has over 90 plugins which range from standard cases to very specialized and advanced topics. Well, it seems that collectd has just released version 4.9 of their open source tool for collecting, transferring and storing system performance statistics, and within that new version they’ve created a special Perl-based, plug-in for our free, fully hosted and cloud-based web monitoring service, Mon.itor.us – called, aptly so, MonitorUs.