So it's kicking off an 'Enterprise Acceleration' initiative. It means to add products to its middleware portfolio, sponsor new open source projects, grow its partner ecosystem, and offer new enterprise-class performance and interoperability resources. It also means to buck up sales and marketing. It said it would set up facilities for performance tuning. testing applications, live certification and migration. JBoss, which cost Red Hat around $325 million a couple of years ago, runs on Red Hat, Windows and other Linuxes.

Active Endpoints announced the availability of Milestone 1 of ActiveBPEL Community Edition 5.0 Server. ActiveBPEL 5.0 represents the release of an open-source implementation of both BPEL4People and WS-Human Task. These specifications allow human interactions to be included in services-based applications. By incorporating human tasks in composite applications, WS-Human Task and BPEL4People expand project teams' flexibility and efficiency in delivering standards-based solutions.

Specsavers has completed a three-month project to scale its OpenLDAP directory services across six countries, as it gears up for further global expansion. Specsavers wanted a global solution for user lookup, authentication and access control with distributed administration capabilities. The existing proprietary LDAP-based solution was not deemed sufficiently scalable. It was decided that Open Source alternatives were mature enough to provide a more cost-effective and stable long term platform. With support from Sirius Corporation, the European Open Source service group, Specsaver's IT department made the transition to an Open Source network architecture.

Palamida announced that it has joined the McAfee Security Innovation Alliance as an inaugural member. Through the program, Palamida will integrate their vulnerability reporting capabilities with McAfee's ePolicy Orchestrator (ePO), enabling customers to extend the scope of their application security strategy to include open source components while mitigating risk. According to IDC, 86% of open source software projects are in some form of production deployment and usage while 70% are of critical or high importance to the organization.

'It's a continuation of the work that I've been doing the past 20 years,' affirmed Larry Augustin, one of the most respected figures in open source and the creator of SourceForge.net, the world's largest open source software development community, as it was announced this week that he had joined JBoss Founder and former CEO Marc Fleury on the advisory board of Appcelerator.

'We're dedicated to building the largest open-source community dedicated to RIAs, breaking down the barriers between traditional preferred languages, programming models and solutions,' says the co-founder & CEO of Appcelerator, Jeff Haynie. To date Appcelerator has seen the strongest amount of interest from Java and PHP developers, he notes, but the company has continued to see steady growth across Ruby, Python, Perl and .NET programmers as well.

Vyatta announced that Liquid Computing has joined the Vyatta Ready Partner Program. Liquid Computing's LiquidIQ has passed interoperability testing with Vyatta software and is now approved as Vyatta Ready. The combination of technologies provides data center customers with a high-performance networking and computing infrastructure with better manageability and lower costs than other legacy solutions.

Talend announced the availability of Talend Open Studio version 2.3, the company's flagship open source data integration solution. The updated software, including over 30 new components, now connects to more databases and business applications, and enables real-time support by allowing users to trigger the execution of jobs based upon data conditions. In addition, Talend Open Studio, which has been downloaded over 150,000 times since its release in late 2006, now supports the generation of PNG graphs, execution of groovy scripts and includes the ability to seamlessly load Java classes and use them.

OpenSpan announced that five of the top 100 largest banking and diversified financial providers in the Forbes Global 2000 have chosen the OpenSpan Platform to rapidly integrate, automate and extend applications across the enterprise desktop. The banks and other financial services organizations are turning to OpenSpan to improve customer service, reduce risk and achieve measurable impact to their bottom lines - all with a technology that complements their current IT strategies.

WSO2 announced the debut of the WSO2 Registry, the industry's first registry to combine service-oriented architecture (SOA) governance with Web 2.0 collaboration. The open source WSO2 Registry features a structured registry and repository; Web-based interface; and Web 2.0 community features such as tags, rating and comments. Together, these capabilities enable users to store, catalog, index and manage enterprise metadata in a simple, scalable and easy-to-use wiki-style model-making the WSO2 Registry equally accessible for business users, developers and administrators.

Some of the most scared people inside Yahoo right now have got to be the open source Zimbra crowd that Yahoo acquired last September for $350 million for its Microsoft-opposing enterprise-directed e-mail and calendaring, folks who just released their webby AJAX-based Collaboration Suite (ZCS) 5.0 this week - and intend to give it a browser-based document-creating and -sharing Zimbra Desktop, called the 'world's first offline-capable Web 2.0 collaborative experience.' Somehow we suspect Microsoft may not think e-mail is 'broken' like Zimbra, a partner of Red Hat, does, but if Microsoft does acquires Yahoo and you hear a crunch, you can imagine Zimbra's back breaking.

Unicon Systems, developers and manufacturers of CCOTS mobile devices and scalable Systems-on-Display (SoD) technology for mobile and wireless applications, announced that embedded industry veteran Bill Weinberg would be joining their advisory board.

Is 2008 going to be the Year of the Acquisition? Activity in 2007 was on the rise but now things seem to be at full speed. I remember when Alta Vista and Excite! were the hot search engines, my how the world has changed. It looks like it's narrowing down to a two horse race with Microsoft putting the moves on Yahoo! for about $44.6 billion. I guess it's really on now, Google versus Microsoft in a search engine death match.

MySQL's Mårten Mickos has been speaking out on the deep background to his company's decision, instead of pursuing an IPO, to allowing Sun to acquire it. 'We feel like we have joined a giant startup,' Mickos gushes, before singling out Jonathan Schwartz's 'brilliant' CEO charisma as one of the chief tipping-points: 'Who wouldn't want to work for him?'

SugarCRM announced SugarCRM stack installers that provide simplified, wizard-based installation for Sugar Community Edition, the latest version of SugarCRM's popular commercial open source CRM application for both the Solaris and OpenSolaris platforms. SugarCRM stack installers provide maximum ease of use and convenience by installing all the necessary components to run SugarCRM properly in a Solaris and OpenSolaris environment. The stack installer provides an intuitive, easy to deploy interface that installs Apache, MySQL, PHP as well as Sugar Community Edition quickly and easily.

KnowledgeTree and Sybase SBS Software announced that they have signed a master distributor agreement to strengthen the relationship between the companies for actively promoting open source document management software solutions in Spain and Portugal. The agreement calls for Sybase SBS Software to jointly develop a network of new reseller partners, and to help expand sales of KnowledgeTree products on the Iberian Peninsula.

Carahsoft and Pentaho announced an exclusive distribution agreement. The companies will work together to address the large and growing demand for Pentaho's open source business intelligence (BI) software in federal government organizations. Under the terms of the agreement, Carahsoft will be the exclusive General Services Administration (GSA) Schedule distributor for U.S. Government organizations that choose Pentaho's Open BI Suite or its individual components for business intelligence.

SYSOPENDIGIA today announced that it will contribute to open-source the software created and modified for the 3G Linux smartphone. The SYSOPENDIGIA 3G Linux smartphone has been created using Linux operating system and other open-source software components, as well as commercially licensed Qtopia application platform and user interface from Trolltech.

Key opinion-formers in the field of infrastructure and pioneers of virtualization technologies of all types have already begun submitting speaking proposals to Virtualization Conference & Expo 2008 East, being held in New York City, 23-24 June, 2008. Topics covered will range from Server Virtualization, Application Virtualization, Desktop Virtualization, Network Virtualization, I/O Virtualization and Storage Virtualization, to Virtual Machine Automation, Physical to Virtual (P2V) Migration, Management Applications, Tools and Utilities, and Virtualization Scripts and Procedures.

MySQL CEO Mårten Mickos addresses recent criticism directed at him by certain segments of the open-source community in an exclusive interview with Enterprise Open Source Magazine. Mickos also discusses his company's upcoming MySQL 5.0 release and what it means to his company and to users.

IBM and Avada Software announced a new original equipment manufacturer (OEM) agreement to join forces to capture a larger piece of the growing open source application server market. Under the agreement, Avada Software will deliver and support WebSphere Application Server Community Edition (WAS CE) as part of its messaging management solutions. IBM is also announcing that Nexxar Group Inc., a money transfer company, is using WAS CE to stay compliant with new money transfers laws and regulations in the U.S. and Europe.

Oracle announced the general availability of Oracle's JD Edwards EnterpriseOne Tools 8.97. This latest release provides an open platform for customers to choose hardware, operating systems and database technologies based on their unique IT strategies and business requirements. Relying on JD Edwards EnterpriseOne Tools 8.97, customers may also adopt current advancements in Oracle Enterprise Linux and many components of Oracle Fusion Middleware.

'It is very important to me that Acquia has a marketing leader who understands the importance of growing and sustaining a community and who is passionate about the principles of open source software,' said Acquia co-founder and CTO Dries Buytaert as Jeff Whatcott joined the company as vice president of marketing, responsible for all marketing activity. Whatcott arrived from Adobe, where he led marketing for LiveCycle and Flex.

The original founder of Covalent Technologies, Randy Terbush, writes in response to last Friday's report that Covalent has been bought by 3-year old SpringSource. 'I've bit my tongue on the many inaccuracies reported about 'Covalent' over the past 5 years,' writes Randy Terbush, 'but your article and the quote 'Besides commercial Apache support, Covalent, whose founders helped develop the hysterically successful Apache HTTP Web Server...' motivates me to correct the misinformation.'

Apatar announced a technology and marketing alliance with EnterpriseDB, the Oracle-compatible database company. Under the alliance, Apatar will support EnterpriseDB's Postgres-based database products as both sources and targets of data integration initiatives.

Under a bit a pressure now that HP has open sourced its own IP identification system as FOSSology, Black Duck says it will roll out a thing called Code Center by the end of the quarter. It's described as a software component selection, approval, and tracking system eyeing reuse and aimed at early in the architecture development cycle before the code is set in stone and possibly subject to lengthy legal review.

One of the most exciting things about the software industry is how fast it moves. Software is constantly optimizing itself around the state-of-the-art. Inherent industry bottlenecks change cyclically every five years or so. Architectures and solutions change too. CPUs too costly? Enter dumb terminals. Network running slow? Build client/servers.

Sun is offering ten grants of US $11,500 - equivalent to several months of pay for developers in some countries - for the best NetBeans projects submitted by open source developers. Conceived as a means of increasing general awareness around the NetBeans project as well as rewarding good work done by the NetBeans Community, the 'Dreams of Reality' contest is described in detail by worldwide NetBeans Community Manager Bruno Souza, the charismatic Brazilian developer, in a special audio webcast currently playing on SYS-CON.TV.

Besides commercial Apache support, Covalent, whose founders helped develop the hysterically successful Apache HTTP Web Server, also sell enterprise subscription to its own Enterprise Ready Server, Hyperic HQ monitoring, Terracotta Java clustering and the WSO2 Web Services Application Server. SpringSource picked up a $10 million A round check from Benchmark Capital last year.

Google, which does not give guidance, missed both Wall Street's top and bottom expectations for its December quarter by a hair and the punters turned vicious pounding it down around 50 bucks after-hours. Consensus demanded non-GAAP earnings of $4.44 on revenues of $3.45 billion. Google came in with $4.43 on revenues $3.39 billion. Those revenues figures are net of what's called TAC, Google's traffic acquisition costs, the money it pays its partners, which it this case amounted $1.44 billion or 30% of its ad revenues.

Microsoft this morning made a $44.6 billion hostile bid for the floundering Yahoo, striking at a point when it has become evident to all and sundry that Yahoo doesn't have a pray of turning things around on its own let alone getting competitive. Yahoo's first official reaction was basically to say it'll think about it. It said it would evaluate the offer 'carefully and promptly in the context of Yahoo's strategic plans.' It did not give a timeframe for a response. Although it looks pretty boxed in, it could of course try for more money.

IBM announced it will establish the first Cloud Computing Center for software companies in China, which will be situated at the new Wuxi Tai Hu New Town Science and Education Industrial Park in Wuxi, China. The center will offer emerging Chinese software companies the ability to tap into a virtual computing environment to support their development activities. It will be established through an agreement signed today between IBM and Wuxi Tai Lake Industry Investment and Development Company Limited.

The WSO2 ESB team announced the release of version 1.6 of the Open Source Enterprise Service Bus (ESB). The WSO2 ESB is an ultra fast, light-weight and versatile Enterprise Service Bus based on the Apache Synapse ESB. It allows you to Connect, Manage and Transform service interactions between Web services, REST/POX services and Legacy systems. This new release has clustered support built-in for the Cache/Throttle Mediators and the ability to pin Proxy services or Tasks to server instances on a cluster.

DataDirect announced the latest release of its DataDirect XQuery engine now supporting the MySQL Enterprise Server database. For the first time, users of the most popular and widely used open-source database can take advantage of the high-performance, scalability and reliability of DataDirect XQuery to access data stored in relational databases as XML. In addition to the MySQL Enterprise Server, DataDirect XQuery can be used with leading relational databases, Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) applications and can handle the processing of large-scale XML documents.

Aras announced that the Aras Innovator suite of advanced service-oriented architecture [SOA] solutions for enterprise Product Lifecycle Management [PLM] is one of the first ten systems worldwide that has Certified for Windows Server 2008. Aras is the first enterprise open source provider to achieve platform certification.

Olocity Corporation is dedicated to delivering open standards based management solutions, products, and services and has acquired the StorageIM open source storage network management platform which will be integrated into its offerings. StorageIM is an open source management console for storage networks designed with the CIM and SMI-S industry standards as its architectural core. As a result StorageIM easily supports HBAs, arrays, switches, and tape libraries across vendors' products with a high degree of interoperability and reliability. Thanks to its standards based design, StorageIM has already successfully integrated with many vendors' storage networking products.

Governance is currently a key topic for many IT functions. Its definition varies, but its key themes are true for all companies: effectiveness, efficiency, and reliability. Business value and risk mitigation are also at its center and represent a significant part of enterprise governance overall.

See, HP is open sourcing widgetry very much like theirs, widgetry that it developed for itself over the last seven years at the cost of 'millions of dollars,' it says, and 60 man-years work that sorts out the various licenses that govern open source software - imagine, there are 1,700 licenses in OpenOffice alone - and lets you know if said licenses have been tinkered with in any way. It calls it FOSSology and has made it available at FOSSology.org under the GPLv2. It's designed, it says, to address the acquisition, tracking and licensing of FOSS. It can detect code reuse and provenance even if the code has been changed.

Our very favorite reaction to the Sun-MySQL acquisition came from industry pundit John Dvorak who calls it 'perhaps the worst single event I have ever witnessed in the history of tech mergers and acquisitions.' He says that given Sun's abominable track record with acquisitions and the fact that Sun can't afford to spend a billion dollars on a company with $60 million in revenue coupled the fact that MySQL is 'the most competitive and biggest threat to Oracle,' he's close to being convinced that Sun is acting as a 'stooge' for Oracle, which wants it dead. The MySQL code can be resuscitated from a fork.

High-performance databases are optimized for transaction processing and used by several industries around the world, notably financial services and health care. They are more commonly available on 32-bit Unix platforms (Solaris, AIX, HP-UX, and Linux). The trend is to 64-bit-enable them and migrate them to the IA-64 architecture.