Open Source Success: Alfresco Software Reports Record Revenues

Alfresco Software reported record revenues today, providing a signal that open-source technologies are a top choice for the enterprise as the economy moves out of the recession and cloud computing becomes more prevalent.

Alfresco reported both record fourth quarter earnings and record revenues for 2009. Growth is up 61% compared to last year. We look at these results with a grain of salt but in Alfresco’s case it increased its staff 29 percent and also added 300 customer, including companies such as Cisco, Merck and the U.S Department of Housing and Urban Development.

In an interview today, Alfresco’s Ian Howell said the growth is coming from companies making the switch from document management platforms. Most of these document management companies have been acquired. And since most of those acquisitions, the market has changed. Open-source content management systems and Sharepoint have disrupted the market, providing a web oriented alternative to document-based, enterprise applications.

The customer is also adapting to an open-source culture. Before, a customer would ask: Do i get source code? Do you support it or do I have to go the forums? Do you scale in an enterprise?

Now, customers ask; How do I roll out? Do you offer 24/7 customer support?

The infrastructure is there. The ISV market and partner networks for open-source companies is growing as are content applications for open-source enterprise technologies. Service organizations are a core part of the open-source ecosytsem.

Further, how can proprietary technology have any role in a cloud environment? It’s the economics that drive open-source adoption in the cloud. That factor alone is drawing the enterprise to open-source.

And that means a bright future for open-source enterprise technologies from companies like Alfresco.

(from readwriteweb)

Drupal Mavens Unveil Open Atrium: An Intranet in a Box

Proprietary intranet vendors, be scared. Be very scared. Today,Development Seed, the open source shop behind DrupalCon in DC and other endeavors, has released the public beta of Open Atrium.

Open Atrium is a free and open source intranet built as a Drupal distribution, with some impressive functionality available out of the box. Not only is this a solid piece of software to begin with, but its makers are evangelizing what they think could be a transformative paradigm for extending Drupal’s capabilities.

Development Seed has been around for about six years, and in that time they’ve built Drupal-based websites and intranets for the likes of the UN and the World Bank, among many others. Eventually they thought to themselves, why not put together this intranet as a separate distribution? Something extensible that could be deployed at lightning speed?

Enter Open Atrium.

In addition to being a well-constructed Drupal distro, the software is neatly packaged with an array of useful features for internal collaboration. There are blogs, wikis, a calendar, to-do lists, a ticketing system, and a microblogging tool called the Shoutbox. To aggregate the activity from these various parts, there’s a group dashboard.

Oh, and did I mention that it is multilingual too? As a team that first met while working together in Peru, internationalism is a big goal for Atrium. To my knowledge, the only mature intranet to seriously support both English and other tongues is ThoughtFarmer. (Canadians and their French, eh?)

In addition to the built-in functionality, developers can create their own features with relative ease. These features are not just new aspects to the software, but are actually a kind of meta-module, as described by Eric Gundersen of Development Seed in a phone conversation with ReadWriteWeb.

Feature can be released on their own basis or served through a dedicated features server. The real goal behind them is to “make niche [use cases] work,” according to Gundersen. With virtually any features addition to Atrium able to be shared with others, Development Seed hopes that a healthy App Store-like ecosystem will develop that can “turn this in to an exciting business model” for themselves and other developers.

Speaking with Gundersen, you can tell Development Seed has a serious expertise and passion for open source development, and it really shows in Open Atrium. It may not integrate with your legacy apps or be offered by a big enterprise vendor, but from where we’re sitting Open Atrium stacks up very well compared to any proprietary intranet software.

Google Wave

Here’s the full video of the Google Wave demo from  Google’s IO conference in San Francisco.

Techcrunch review of Google Wave is here. Exclusive interview with the founders is here, and our video and notes from the press conference is here.

Google Wave looks to be an integrated communications platform that brings together email, chat, photo-sharing, and collaborative editing features. Google describes a ‘wave’ as “equal parts conversation and document” and the Wave team basically sees it as a replacement for email and other collaboration tools.

You will need nearly an hour an a half to watch the full video. Looks like a very promising tool, maybe next step in a fusion for collaboration: email+IM+photosharing+wiki. Could be the next big thing.

laconica or twitter or micro-blogging

Laconica is a Free and Open Source microblogging platform. It helps people in a community, company or group to exchange short (140 character) messages over the Web. Users can choose which people to “follow” and receive only their friends’ or colleagues’ status messages. It provides a similar service to sites like Twitter, Jaiku, and Plurk.

dimdim

Dimdim, the world’s easiest web conference delivers synchronized live presentations, whiteboards and web pages while sharing your voice and video over the Internet – with no download.

It is open source, so I will be trying to install it in my servers ;-)