New update for Magento

E-commerce platform Magento has been updated with several new fixes and integration with Amazon payment systems.

Magento hosting users who download version 1.3.1 of the software can now benefit from integration and support for Amazon Flexible Payment and Checkout by Amazon payment options.

Further information about these services will be provided over the next few days, said Yoav Kutner of Magento.

The newest release also includes an improved flat catalogue module for better performance and fixes for a number of bugs.

Mr Kutner said that as Magento 1.3.1 includes an update to the Magento Connect Manager, those using the Magento Connect Manager should back up their index.php and .htaccess files under their Magento root folder before upgrading and restore them after the process is complete.

An Enterprise Edition of the platform was launched last week. The new product is aimed at large companies looking for more advanced features than those offered by the free open source version of the software.

source:http://www.globalgold.co.uk/web-hosting-news/custom-web-hosting/new-update-for-magento-19128187.html

Microsoft "Not Against" Open Source

The division between proprietary software vendors and open-source providers is not as clear as some industry players perceive it to be. As more enterprises consider adopting open source technologies, even traditional software vendors such as Microsoft have taken steps in responding to such customer needs.

"Open source is not a product but an approach to software development," said Matthew Hardman, platform strategy manager at Microsoft Singapore. "Microsoft does not compete with open source, just as Nike does not compete with running."

Hardman said the software giant seeks to provide the best possible platform' for open source applications to run. "We believe that enterprises and vendors should have a choice of software development methodology, and open source is one such choice."

The platform strategy manager noted however, that Microsoft will compete with open source-based providers, just as it also competes with other proprietary vendors.
Open-source contributions

According to Hardman, Microsoft has contributed to technologies that are deemed open source. "PHP, a technology used to build web pages, ran into multiple issues around performance and scalability on Windows Server 2003," he said. "With the introduction of Windows Server 2008 and host technology such as Fast CGI, we are now able to run PHP up to 200 per cent faster than Linux."

Hardman said the company has contributed code to PHP libraries for database support, making it easier for PHP developers to connect to Microsoft databases.

"Linux is open source, but open source is not Linux," Hardman noted. "PHP was designed to make it easy for people to build web pages, not specifically to run only on Linux."

As part of its open-source strategy, the company hosts a website called CodePlex, where Microsoft employees and the developer community work on some 6,000 open-source projects. "Examples of such projects include the AJAX Control Toolkit, SugarCRM, .Net, and code that can interact with the 'World of Warcraft,'" Hardman said.

CodePlex includes more than just projects that Microsoft has released, according to Hardman. "It's a hosting platform where people can create and share projects, and we have also used it to share some of our technology to encourage further innovation."

Some five million developers worldwide have created various applications using Microsoft platform technologies such as Windows, .Net, Windows Server and Microsoft Xbox, according to the software giant.
Different business models

Unlike Red Hat, Microsoft does not have a subscription-based model for open-source solutions. "When we want to share source code, we will share it for free," Hardman said. "For example, if someone took the AJAX Control Toolkit, embedded it into a project and commercialised it, that's fine with us."

"It's not so much an issue of opening up the source code," Hardman said. "Rather, it's about how to make open-source technology work for the enterprise, without it having to change its existing platform or infrastructure."

In short, interoperability among solutions, whether open source or not, is very important, Hardman noted.
Other open-source issues

Enterprises need to consider several other issues when deciding whether to adopt open-source technologies, according to Hardman. Knowledge about the level of support provided by the service provider, such as ready availability of security patches, is crucial.

"It's not enough to only have technical expertise in building the open-source solution," Hardman said. "Business knowledge is also essential to ensure the solution works for the enterprise."

Additionally, the open-source provider must be confident that the contributing community can ensure adequate information security. "There must be no weak links in security features," Hardman said.
Open source and SaaS

According to Gartner's State of Open Source report for 2008, software-as-a-service (SaaS) will eclipse open source as the preferred enterprise IT cost-cutting method by 2012.

The report stated that both the open source and SaaS business models price by subscription, operate on low profit margins and can reduce enterprise IT costs. Gartner contends however, that SaaS reduces enterprise requirements for IT technical skills, while open source tends to increase such requirements.

Gery Messer, president of Red Hat Asia Pacific, disagreed: "Open source does not increase the requirement for IT technical skills within the enterprise."

Messer said Red Hat's subscription model provides enterprises with a predictable cost structure and allows them to outsource IT development and support requirements.

"Open source is an infrastructure platform on which many enterprise applications run," Messer said. "Its community-based accelerated innovation approach multiplies software development capacity many times over, providing enterprises better, more innovative solutions."

Messer agreed however, that like open-source software (OSS), SaaS can also help enterprises, especially small- and medium-sized businesses, cut IT costs.
Defining open source

"While I agree with Red Hat's general definition of SaaS, I wouldn't agree with their definition of open source," said Brian Prentice, Gartner's research vice president for emerging trends and technologies. "Open source is not just an infrastructure platform, it can be a lot more than that and is."

According to Prentice, Gartner's definition of open source is software governed under a licence agreement recognised by the Open Source Initiative (OSI). OSI is a non-profit organisation dedicated to promoting open-source software. "It is the licence agreement, and specifically the rights to modify and redistribute the code, which is the most important component of open source."

As a co-author of the Gartner Open Source report, Prentice explained that OSS tends to increase skills requirements because new technologies require new skills in an organisation.

"If, for example, my organisation uses Windows Server, the addition of Linux, regardless of distribution, would require new skills," Prentice said. "If I am currently using a mix of Oracle 11g and SQL Server, and then introduced MySQL, that needs a new set of skills."

Prentice said SaaS tends to avoid this problem because it is "run on someone else's infrastructure".

"I concede there is some nuance in this area particularly as we start looking at platform-as-a-service capabilities like Force.com from salesforce.com," he noted.

Source:- cio.com/

Open source opens doors for small businesses

ActiveState and Bryght have helped Vancouver establish its reputation as an open-source software development centre.

Vancouver’s growing love affair with open source software (OSS) development is being manifested in a growing community of startups, scores of blogs and monthly events.

The city, which has played a prominent role in the OSS movement, is home to ActiveState and Bryght, the former being one of the first commercial OSS developers; the latter being the first company to use Drupal – a popular OSS – as its sole product development platform.

ActiveState was acquired for US$23 million in 2003 by U.K.-based Sophos, which then sold the company in 2006 for US$2.25 million to Vancouver’s Pender Financial Group Corp. (TSX-V: PDF).

Bryght was founded by Boris Mann, a leading OSS advocate who sold the company to Vancouver’s Raincity Studios last November.

OSS is free, and users don’t need to have programming savvy to develop websites, blogs or web applications.

As well, anyone can manipulate and change OSS and then distribute those changes without fear of licence infringement.

That freedom has allowed OSS users to develop software in step with the ever-changing Internet.

“Sharing those changes freely is what makes the whole thing grow,” said Mann who, after selling Bryght, co-founded Vancouver’s Bootup Labs, an incubator to help web startups develop and raise early stage financing.

According to Gartner Research, 90% of commercial software will, by 2012, contain significant amounts of open source code.

“[Drupal] started out as nothing more than a content management system, [and] evolved from there as more people started using it to become a really flexible system,” said Mann.

Mann started a wiki page to compile a list of Drupal-powered websites of B.C.-based organizations, governments, startups, consulting firms, independent consultants and schools.

At press time, the list had reached 50 websites, including citizen journalism site NowPublic.com, Vancity’s changeeverything.ca and the websites of the Asia Pacific Foundation of Canada and the Georgia Straight.

Mann doesn’t use Microsoft Corp.’s SharePoint or EMC Corp.’s Documentum – two of the leading proprietary, pay-for-use content management platforms.

“With a lot of content management systems, people used to pay millions of dollars for [them],” said Mann, “and in some cases [people] still get suckered into paying that.”

Along with Drupal, the most widely used OSS platforms are Joomla and WordPress, each with its own strengths and weaknesses.

According to OSS users, the three platforms combined have enough power to compete – if not outperform – proprietary platforms offered by Microsoft and the other big web developers.

“The reality is that if you have Drupal, Joomla and WordPress, you can solve most problems nowadays,” said Rastin Mehr, founder of Rastin Mehr Design Studio Inc. & Associates, a Yaletown-based web application development firm.

“An average small business can now afford to use more advanced technology than some corporations.”

His company was founded on the Joomla platform and is developing a custom OSS platform for content management and for building web-based social media.

“The Internet is becoming social,” said Mehr.

“Social anything goes hand in hand with open source.”

Mehr was an organizer of last June’s Vancouver Joomla! Day – one of many OSS user events that are held in Vancouver each year.

“For any healthy open-sourced project, you want to invest in growing the community around it,” said Mehr.

Mehr calls OOS events “unconferences,” because there’s no corporate involvement in organizing them.

“Open source is really the model of the village versus the pyramid – the pyramid being the corporation.”

Drupal and Joomla have developed the largest worldwide communities and, as a result, users debate which platform is superior.

Mehr said Drupal is ideal for publishers, webmasters and web designers with mid-level programming expertise, whereas Joomla serves inexperienced bloggers and software architects located at opposing ends of the expertise spectrum.

ActiveState released a report last July to debunk many of the “myths” surrounding OSS.

Source:- bivinteractive.com/

3 Great Apps to Help You Get Your Open Source Groove On

If the state of the economy has got you down and you're ready to stop throwing money at commercial software vendors, you might be overwhelmed at the amount of open source options that exist. Buck up, IT soldier, here are three applications that let you dip your toes in the pool without jumping in all the way.

Mindtouch - I've written before about this dead-simple way to implement a collaborative environment in the workplace. Sure, you can always fall back on sharing files via Google Docs or keep employes connected through an in-house blog, but I don't recommend putting together a piecemeal system and hoping everything works well together.

Mindtouch is the Swiss Army Knife of collaboration platforms: it neatly blends your email system, customer account databases, and other enterprise apps with Web services like search and social networking -- and it's all open source, which means it can be customized to your companies unique needs. If Mindtouch works for big businesses like e-commerce company Bill Me Later and Baxter Healthcare, it's worth finding out what it can do for you.

SugarCRM - There's no shortage of customer relationship management (CRM) software, but even the most robust proprietary vendor offering will have a hard time measuring up to the open source alternative from SugarCRM. It's amazingly customizable, and scales well for both small and large businesses. As DaniWeb's Edward Correia points out, there's even a plugin available to integrate SugarCRM with a Gmail account.

The Oregon Department of Human Services used to manage its community outreach and education communication with sticky notes. CIO Bill Crowell says once the decision was made to try SugarCRM, his tech team had it downloaded and deployed within 24 hours.

Hyperic HQ - All the open source software in the world won't help your company's bottom line if you're company is offline. Hyperic HQ is a great tool for managing and monitoring your infrastructure. Use it to track metrics for more than 65 technologies across Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, and Unix systems.

There are various versions of Hyperic HQ available, each with its own set of bells and whistles. If you're having trouble envisioning how the app would fit into your workflow, have a look at this terrific post by Redmonk analyst Michael Coté.

Of course, there are loads more apps you can try, but these three make a great starting point if you don't have a lot of experience with open source software. What apps would you recommend to someone just starting to dabble in enterprise open source apps? Let me know in the comments.

Source:- daniweb.com/

Microsoft 'not against' open source

The division between proprietary software vendors and open-source providers is not as clear as some industry players perceive it to be. As more enterprises consider adopting open source technologies, even traditional software vendors such as Microsoft have taken steps in responding to such customer needs.

"Open source is not a product but an approach to software development," said Matthew Hardman, platform strategy manager at Microsoft Singapore. "Microsoft does not compete with open source, just as Nike does not compete with running."

Hardman said the software giant seeks to provide the 'best possible platform' for open source applications to run. "We believe that enterprises and vendors should have a choice of software development methodology, and open source is one such choice."

The platform strategy manager noted however, that Microsoft will compete with open source-based providers, just as it also competes with other proprietary vendors.

Open-source contributions

According to Hardman, Microsoft has contributed to technologies that are deemed open source. "PHP, a technology used to build web pages, ran into multiple issues around performance and scalability on Windows Server 2003," he said. "With the introduction of Windows Server 2008 and host technology such as Fast CGI, we are now able to run PHP up to 200 per cent faster than Linux."

Hardman said the company has contributed code to PHP libraries for database support, making it easier for PHP developers to connect to Microsoft databases.

"Linux is open source, but open source is not Linux," Hardman noted. "PHP was designed to make it easy for people to build web pages, not specifically to run only on Linux."

As part of its open-source strategy, the company hosts a website called CodePlex, where Microsoft employees and the developer community work on some 6,000 open-source projects. "Examples of such projects include the AJAX Control Toolkit, SugarCRM, .Net, and code that can interact with the 'World of Warcraft'," Hardman said.

CodePlex includes more than just projects that Microsoft has released, according to Hardman. "It's a hosting platform where people can create and share projects, and we have also used it to share some of our technology to encourage further innovation."

Some five million developers worldwide have created various applications using Microsoft platform technologies such as Windows, .Net, Windows Server and Microsoft Xbox, according to the software giant.

Different business models

Unlike Red Hat, Microsoft does not have a subscription-based model for open-source solutions. "When we want to share source code, we will share it for free," Hardman said. "For example, if someone took the AJAX Control Toolkit, embedded it into a project and commercialised it, that's fine with us."

"It's not so much an issue of opening up the source code," Hardman said. "Rather, it's about how to make open-source technology work for the enterprise, without it having to change its existing platform or infrastructure."

In short, interoperability among solutions, whether open source or not, is very important, Hardman noted.

Other open-source issues

Enterprises need to consider several other issues when deciding whether to adopt open-source technologies, according to Hardman. Knowledge about the level of support provided by the service provider, such as ready availability of security patches, is crucial.

"It's not enough to only have technical expertise in building the open-source solution," Hardman said. "Business knowledge is also essential to ensure the solution works for the enterprise."

Additionally, the open-source provider must be confident that the contributing community can ensure adequate information security. "There must be no weak links in security features," Hardman said.

Open source and SaaS

According to Gartner's State of Open Source report for 2008, software-as-a-service (SaaS) will eclipse open source as the preferred enterprise IT cost-cutting method by 2012.

The report stated that both the open source and SaaS business models price by subscription, operate on low profit margins and can reduce enterprise IT costs. Gartner contends however, that SaaS reduces enterprise requirements for IT technical skills, while open source tends to increase such requirements.

Gery Messer, president of Red Hat Asia Pacific, disagreed: "Open source does not increase the requirement for IT technical skills within the enterprise."

Messer said Red Hat's subscription model provides enterprises with a predictable cost structure and allows them to outsource IT development and support requirements.

"Open source is an infrastructure platform on which many enterprise applications run," Messer said. "Its community-based accelerated innovation approach multiplies software development capacity many times over, providing enterprises better, more innovative solutions."

Messer agreed however, that like open-source software (OSS), SaaS can also help enterprises, especially small- and medium-sized businesses, cut IT costs.

Defining open source

"While I agree with Red Hat's general definition of SaaS, I wouldn't agree with their definition of open source," said Brian Prentice, Gartner's research vice president for emerging trends and technologies. "Open source is not just an infrastructure platform, it can be a lot more than that and is."

According to Prentice, Gartner's definition of open source is software governed under a licence agreement recognised by the Open Source Initiative (OSI). OSI is a non-profit organisation dedicated to promoting open-source software. "It is the licence agreement, and specifically the rights to modify and redistribute the code, which is the most important component of open source."

As a co-author of the Gartner Open Source report, Prentice explained that OSS tends to increase skills requirements because new technologies require new skills in an organisation.

"If, for example, my organisation uses Windows Server, the addition of Linux, regardless of distribution, would require new skills," Prentice said. "If I am currently using a mix of Oracle 11g and SQL Server, and then introduced MySQL, that needs a new set of skills."

Prentice said SaaS tends to avoid this problem because it is "run on someone else's infrastructure".

"I concede there is some nuance in this area particularly as we start looking at platform-as-a-service capabilities like Force.com from salesforce.com," he noted.

Source:- computerworld.co.ke/

Taking Open Source to the Limit: Geeks On The Way Case Study

The Company:
Geeks On The Way provides computer services and technical support to customers across western Canada, and it was named as one of the fastest growing companies in Canada by Profit magazine.

The Challenge:
Geeks On The Way handles hundreds of client calls per day. So, when the company looked to meet its growing demand for its services with a CRM system, not just any system would do. With such strong technology expertise, the company knew it wanted a system that it could customize to fit its unique business process as well as grow with the system.

Additionally, the CRM system would need to fully automate its existing business process from end-to-end.
"We had already outgrown two previous customer management systems," says Geeks On The Way CEO John Leishman. "So, we needed a flexible system that could grow with our business and really scale."

The Solution:
Geeks On The Way was attracted to SugarCRM for various reasons. Since the company had already built out a telephony system on top of an open source phone system, called Asterisk, Geeks On The Way figured that it should look toward open source CRM for its client management needs. "SugarCRM simply had the largest following, the most downloads and provided the most security from a longevity of product development standpoint," Leishman notes, adding that his company felt that the standards-based design and open architecture of SugarCRM would complement the Asterisk implementation well.

The first task for Geeks On The Way after deploying SugarCRM was to integrate it with its Asterisk system, the popular open source telephony package.

Geeks On The Way also integrated Sugar with some back end databases to create efficiencies inside its service delivery model and customized the Meetings module to integrate a system that analyzes the service calls slated for the day.

The Results:
SugarCRM allowed Geeks On The Way to perform deep integrations at the data and application level, according to Leishman. With the integrated system, callers are recognized by their phone number or other identifiers. If a new client is calling, a "new contact screen" pops up to the agent and a tight integration with an external database of address and postal information populates most of the new contact record. This allows agents to process existing customers quickly, and also spend less time adding new customers in to the system. And since customers are well tracked using unique identification numbers, there is less duplication of customer records.

A deep integration to the accounting system also provided strong returns for Geeks On The Way. Since so much activity and data is tracked and captured in Sugar, Geeks On The Way can simply run that data into its accounting system and more efficiently compensate its employees, which range from phone agents to contractors to field technicians. "Accounting used to take us a full 24 hours every pay period," Leishman notes, "But now it takes five minutes with our Sugar integration to our accounting system."

Since it deployed Sugar, the company says it has seen lower marketing costs and improved customer support times. "With SugarCRM, we have reduced call handling times from two to three minutes down to as little as 20 seconds," says Leishman. And the company says simply knowing who an agent is talking to through its integrated system fosters closer relationships with customers and increases satisfaction levels.

Source:- salesandmarketing.com/

The spread of Open Source

Technologies based on the open source platform are increasing in adoption today. Acceptance of open source has spread in varied areas such as web server, collaboration, messaging and virtualization to name a few. In India too, open source is growing rapidly and there are many enthusiasts who are coming out and embracing the technology. In an interview with CIOL, Santhosh D'Souza, Chief Technologist, Sun Microsystems, India, gives an insight on the growing trends of open source, Sun's involvement to promote open source and the latest offerings it has to offer based on the open source platform.

Excerpts of the interview.

CIOL: Is the attitude towards open source maturing rapidly? If yes, how is it taking place?

Santhosh D'Souza: The attitude towards open source is changing, maturing if you will in two ways. There is in India a rapidly growing enthusiasm to participate in open source communities and contribute to open source projects. There is a recognition that work done in communities is not entirely without compensation: one's professional and technical credentials can be honed and established through participation in open source projects. 

Besides, there is increasing adoption of technologies based on open source development. Enterprises began with the desktop where proprietary products used for browsing, reading e-mail, sharing file and print services, etc., are replace by open source equivalents. We now have widespread acceptance of open source derived applications in areas like web server, collaboration, messaging, virtualization, etc.

There is also a gradual change in the notion of how software is paid for. Compensation for the value inherent in an application need not happen at the point of distribution - this is why Sun Microsystems makes available almost our entire software portfolio, free to download and to experiment. The policy allows developers and enterprises to try out thesoftware or build solutions on top of it. When the software is actually deployed in an environment that makes/saves money for the deployer, he/she will want the software to be supported, enhanced, fixed when problems crop up and so on. That is when Sun Microsystems will derive revenue from the use of the software.

CIOL: "Sun has made a huge commitment to open source software, contributing billions of dollars in developer time, sponsorships and donations, as well as releasing more code under open source licenses than any other organization in the public or private sector." Can you justify this statement?

D'Souza: In addition to participating in and leveraging many industry-wide open source projects, Sun has, uniquely if I might say so, opened fundamental software, hardware and storage technologies to free and open source communities. We believe this era to be that of the Participation Age, with unprecedented global communities contributing to developments around network computing. Our philosophy is therefore to build products through the preferred means of co-production. We believe that volume drives value, and therefore, growing developer communities around our core technologies as well as encouraging our customers to participate in shaping their directions. We continue to deliver products and services derived from these open source projects.

CIOL: Are we seeing acceleration in the application stage due to open source licensing security and maturity?

D'Souza: The momentum around an application, measured in terms of development enthusiasm and quantum of deployment, is not only determined by it's functionality but also how secure an enterprise and individuals view it to be. Indemnification and Intellectual Property protection are important criteria for enterprises that evaluate open source-based products. The maturity of an OSI approved license can largely be judged by how effectively it protects the rights of the user of products based on that license.

CIOL: What is the trend of the Industry today? 

D'Souza: Industries in general have been far more receptive to Open Source than expected. We have technologies like Java, MySQL, VirtualBox, Grid Engine, Open Office and NetBeans showing up in the most unlikely of IT environments as well as in established enterprises. While academia, government and scientific establishments are natural stomping grounds, several financial services, telecommunication, energy and pharmaceutical giants are showing enormous interest in deploying open source derived infrastructure.

CIOL: Is Linux becoming a dominant super side platform out there along with other platforms such as MS Windows?

D'Souza: While the Linux kernel is one of the most successful open source projects on the planet and a great example of how a community can nurture long term participative development, it is commercial distributions based on the project that are actually installed on systems : most enterprises will never install the Linux kernel on their production systems. The distinction is important because it underlines the continued need for commercial suppliers. A few Linux distributions are certainly viable Operating Systems on x86 platforms for several horizontally scaled and some vertically scaled workloads. These distros compete with Solaris, an OS so feature-rich and cost effective that Marc Andressen (of Netscape and Ning fame) famously described Solaris as a better Linux than Linux itself.

A little known fact is that Sun Microsystems is the largest contributor of source code to common GNU/Linux distributions, and is very active in several communities around GNU/Linux. Most of our software portfolio is also available on popular Linux distros, and we certify our x86 platforms for them too. Even our enormously popular UltraSPARC T1, T2 and T2 plus systems, are certified and work with Canonical's Ubuntu Linux distro.

CIOL: Can you give a little detail on the Sun xVM virtualization portfolio?

D'Souza: Sun xVM folds in various virtualization technologies and virtual/physical instance management into an open source based, integrated family of technologies.

The Sun xVM portfolio, a compelling set of internet scale virtualization solutions, provides a new level of choice for companies looking to simplify their IT infrastructure. Sun has combined a unique set of products and technologies to effectively manage both the physical and virtual infrastructure and enable virtualization of everything from the desktop to large-scale datacenters.

The complete xVM products and technologies include:

xVM Server 1.0: a pre-configured hypervisor for heterogeneous workload consolidation.

xVM Ops Center 2.0: a single console management for both physical and virtual environments.

Sun Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI): the only desktop solution that offers a choice of Windows, Linux and Solaris.

xVM VirtualBox 2.0: VirtualBox is the open and free hypervisor that supports all major operating systems, allowing users a way to run multiple operating systems on the same screen at the same time.

CIOL: What is Sun's role on the Software Freedom Day event?

D'Souza: Sun is one of the sponsors of Software Freedom Day, a celebration of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS). We are hosting around 150 events worldwide, including over 35 in India to raise awareness of FOSS. Sun employees from over 60 countries are expected to participate in events marking the day.

Sun constituted the Open Source Community Innovation Awards. We will be announcing the winners as part of the celebrations. We also announced a student contest promoting the Open Source MySQL and GlassFish projects.

Source:- ciol.com/

Opening new doors with Open Source

From consumer desktop software to enterprise-wide solutions, Open Source presents a significant opportunity for channel players prepared to stake a claim in this new frontier.

If your customers aren’t already asking you about Open Source, they soon will be.

Religious fervour is taking a back seat as Open Source comes of age.

It is also shaking off the “free’’ tag as more people come to appreciate Open Source is free as in ‘’free speech,’’ not as in “free beer’’.

There’s more to Open Source than just the Firefox browser and Linux operating system. There’s now a viable, business-ready Open Source alternative for practically every piece of software available today.

Open Source lets the channel build new business models around enhanced support and services, rather than merely lining the pockets of the proprietary software giants.

It also offers greater control over the underlying stack and allows you to build more tailored solutions to meet clients’ individual needs – thus strengthening the relationship.

The Open Source development model operates mostly under the GNU General Public License (GPL).

Often referred to as “copy-left’’ as opposed to copyright, software covered by the GNU GPL is available free of charge to the general public.

Developers have access to the complete source code, making it easier to build customised solutions.

If a programmer modifies software covered by the GNU GPL, then those modifications must also be made freely available.

While the underlying code may be “free”, the profit for the channel lies in providing integration, training, support and other services.

In an industry where hardware and even software are becoming commodity items, such services are where the decent margins are to be found.

Although some Open Source applications are designed to run on proprietary foundations such as Microsoft’s Windows operating system and SQL Server database, the beauty of using Open Source software is you can build a complete Open Source stack from the bare metal up.

This gives you complete control over your environment, letting you modify any part of the stack to develop a customised solution.

The vast majority of Open Source applications are designed to run on the LAMP stack of Open Source applications – Linux, Apache, MySQL and the PHP scripting language (see breakout).

A wide range of business-grade applications have been developed on top of this Open Source foundation, such as SugarCRM for customer relationship management, Compiere for enterprise resource planning, OrangeHRM for human relations management and Asterisk to replace the traditional PABX.

Middleware also gets a look in, with JBoss offering a Java-based Open Source applications platform.

The stack of Open Source applications allows channel players to expand their offerings whilst weaning themselves and their customers off reliance on the proprietary software giants, said Gartner research vice president Brian Prentice.

“In general, one of the things we see with Open Source is a move away from a software licensing type of structure, towards a service delivery type of structure. This creates opportunities for channel partners to link Open Source into the primary part of their business today, which is service delivery,” Prentice said.

“The question here is what is the value proposition to the end customer? We see that one of the reasons customers like to buy Open Source is it removes critical dependencies that they have on software suppliers.
Most channel partners should be looking to add some form of Open Source to their kit bag.
It’s a combination of being both an opportunity and a risk mitigation.
If I am a channel partner and I can’t accommodate the Open Source requirements of a customer then that may be a problem.
If I am a web developer and I don’t know how to do anything around Ruby or PHP that could be a problem. If I am focused on middleware and I don’t know anything about JBoss, that could be a problem.”

Forewarned is forearmed and, like any technological advancement, channel players need to keep abreast of how Open Source is impacting their market space.

The rise of Open Source is providing the channel with a wide variety of business opportunities, said Red Hat Australia general manager Max McLaren.

Red Hat provides commercial-grade support, service and training for the Red Hat distribution of Linux, as well as JBoss.

“With small to medium businesses, there is a lot of demand for Linux implementation and management,” McLaren said.

“We see lots of opportunities for system integrators and for hosting partners in that space. For the enterprise there is a requirement for organisations to do a reasonable amount of systems integration, especially with third-party applications, and that is where the whole middleware space is providing
a great opportunity for systems integrators.

“In the middleware space with JBoss we are probably a couple of years behind Linux in terms of maturity. The interesting thing is we are not just an application server in the JBoss space, we move right up through the stack into Service Oriented Architecture space so there is a lot of integration opportunity there for business partners.”

Open Source vendors such as Red Hat don’t expect the channel to venture into Open Source territory unassisted.

Red Hat Australia offers a three-tier partnership program.

Red Hat Ready partners gain access to Red Hat’s online portal as well as discounts in areas such as training.

The Advanced Business Partner program features a Red Hat stream and a JBoss stream.

To qualify, channel partners need to commit to a level of business with Red Hat and have a number of skills-certified engineers on staff.

Advanced Business Partners also receive preferential treatment in areas such as sales leads.

Red Hat Australia’s Certified Services Partner program allows channel players to work with Red Hat from a skills transfer perspective in their first engagements, to help them get up and running.

While working with Open Source can offer a range of new business opportunities, it can also be a form of risk mitigation.

Unlike proprietary software foundations, if channel players encounter a bug in the Open Source stack they’re not left at the mercy of one major software vendor, said Shane Owenby, Oracle Asia Pacific’s senior director of Linux and Open Source.

While Oracle’s offerings run on traditional operating systems such as Windows and Solaris, the software giant also offers customers its own Oracle Enterprise Linux distribution – derived from Red Hat Enterprise.

Customers can run Oracle and other applications on Oracle Enterprise Linux, which Oracle supports under its Unbreakable Linux program.

“Traditionally the Oracle channel has not cared about the operating system, but that is starting to change based on the interest my team is seeing all around Asia Pacific. The channel guys see now that we can provide a full stack solution,” Owenby said.

“If you are going to go out there and be the average Joe Blow flogger of software or hardware, you’ve got a thousand people to differentiate yourself from. From what I’ve seen, the partners that have been successful in Open Source have developed an angle. When you’re dealing with the flexibility of Open Source software, you can build on a base such as Oracle Enterprise Linux. You can easily add a special device driver or a special configuration for a file system, whatever it is that your customer needs.”

With Oracle software running on Oracle Enterprise Linux, the channel can now provide, customise and support the entire stack.

They can choose between supporting the software themselves, supporting it with Oracle’s backing or letting Oracle handle the support.

Channel players offering solutions that run on Windows, for example, are reliant on Microsoft’s support to solve the issue, whereas Open Source platforms allows channel players to turn to a number of sources – making them masters of their own destiny.

“While using Unbreakable Linux might broaden support options, one of the other interesting components Oracle offers is something called Premier Back Porting,” Owenby said.

“Imagine you’ve got a six-month project and three months into it you find a bug in the operating system. The normal solution for all Linux distribution is to upgrade to the latest version. Of course, upgrading to the latest version could introduce a whole new set of problems.

“Our Premier Back Porting program says that if you identify a bug, we will back port the fix to the version you’re using – not just to the latest version. It’s a subtle difference but I am talking to customers and they are just champing at the bit for that. It is exactly what they want as they don’t want to take the 30 changes that come with a new version, they just want the one change they know they need.”

Although Open Source projects may offer free access to the underlying code, software license fees generally only account for a small percentage of a major project’s overall costs.

Money not put into a software giants’ pocket can be invested back into the project, said Obol Software CEO Shannon Roy.

Obol Software is the developer of Fivedash, a fully featured, general-purpose Open Source accounting program.

While anyone can download a free copy of Fivedash, Obol Software makes its money through deployment, customisation and support.

“If your customers are not already asking about including an Open Source option in a proposal, then it is going to come in the next six months.

Resellers need to get out there and integrators need to get out there and find out what is available in the Open Source space. They really need to educate themselves because their customers are going to drive it if they don’t,” Roy said.

“In a financial accounting system rollout there are generally two costs.

There is the cost of the software, which is a license fee usually updated yearly. There is big hit at the start and then a yearly hit.

Then there is the set up and customisation, where the software will be modified for your particular usage.

Generally the split of those costs is around about 30/70, with 30 percent for licenses and 70 percent for services.

“Immediately Open Source gives you an advantage because there are no license fees.
Essentially you can take that 30 percent and put it in your back pocket, using it to develop your business in another way.
Spend a bit more money on the customisation part and, at the end of the day, you’ll have a piece of software that is far more attuned to your customer’s particular business model.
Too many businesses change their business to fit in with what their accounting software wants them to do. We feel that is completely wrong-headed.
People should have the freedom to change their accounting software so it does what they need it to do. It is really hard to do that with proprietary software, but that is what Open Source is really about, making the software do what you need it to do.”

Another strength of Open Source technologies is their general adherence to open standards.

Around the world customers are beginning to demand open standards, with government departments in particular mandating open standards as an essential part of any IT project.

Particular attention has been paid to Microsoft’s Office document formats.

While Microsoft’s document formats for Word and Excel have been de facto standards for many years, international concern is growing over such reliance on one vendor.

Many organisations are concerned about data sovereignty, considering it a business risk to lock their intellectual property away in proprietary formats.

Such concerns have seen the rise of OpenOffice, a free Open Source alternative to Microsoft Office comprising of a word processor, spreadsheet and database as well as presentation, vector drawing and mathematical function tools.

OpenOffice has the look and feel of Microsoft Office 2003 and is compatible with its file formats, so staff require little training to make the switch. It is available for Windows, Mac OS, Linux and Solaris.

OpenOffice is a spin-off of StarOffice, a German office suite acquired by Sun Microsystems in 1999.

Sun released most of the StarOffice code base in 2000, dubbing the project OpenOffice.

Today Sun stlll sells StarOffice, a corporate version of OpenOffice based on the same code base, plus it also offers paid support for OpenOffice.

While OpenOffice is compatible with Microsoft document formats, by default it uses Open Document Format – an open XML-based document format which was adopted as an ISO standard in 2006.

The global backlash against Microsoft proprietary formats has seen OpenOffice build a user base as diverse as the French parliament, the Israeli Ministry of Commerce and the Singapore military.

Massachusetts was the first US state to mandate the use of ODF as the standard format for all state agency documents.

The corporate world has been slower in coming to terms with the concept of open source, said OpenOffice’s Australian marketing person Jonathon Coombes.

Coombes is former secretary of the Australian UNIX and Open Systems User Group and he also runs Newcastle-based Cybersite Consulting, specialising in Open Source.

‘’I think OpenOffice is certainly ready for business,’’ Coombes said.

‘’One of the classic arguments against moving to OpenOffice has been the need to retrain staff, but that becomes null and void if you’re considering upgrading to Office 2007. Microsoft has made some fairly substantial changes to the Office 2007 interface, so everyone will need to learn a new interface regardless.’’

To combat the attraction of OpenOffice and the Open Document Format, Microsoft put forward its own Office Open XML as an ISO format.

The format was accepted under controversial circumstances but appeals have been lodged against the decision. Microsoft has announced the next Microsoft Office 2007 Service Pack will offer native ODF support, which is expected in early 2009.

Meanwhile native Office Open XML support isn’t expected until the next major release of Microsoft Office, which is several years away.

The advantage of using open standards extends far beyond document formats, said Marc Englaro, general manager of Open Source vendor Fonality.

Fonality is the developer of the business-grade TrixBox Professsional Range IP PABX solution, based on the Asterisk project, as well as the TrixBox Community Edition.

TrixBox’s adherence to open standards lets users choose from a range of certified handsets, rather than lock them in to one vendor, Englaro said.

“Open Source begets open standards. The community which works around Open Source software is more open to interoperability and I’d say that would be a big difference between ourselves and the likes of Cisco, Avaya and others – where everything is very, very proprietary,” he said.

“The choice that TrixBox and Open Source offer means you can select from a range of handsets from at least two different vendors for the TrixBox Professional Range and a dozen different vendors for the Community Edition. That choice means you can shop around and people recognise that choice means competition, both from a cost perspective and also a quality perspective.”

TrixBox Community Edition incorporates the latest cutting-edge features and can be considered TrixBox’s research and development arm.

The best features of Trixbox Community Edition are eventually incorporated into TrixBox Professsional Range to create a stable, business-grade PABX system.

This is a common development model amongst Open Source software developers. Fonality has four employees dedicated to the development of Trixbox Community Edition, along with the wider Open Source community, and this offers TrixBox Professsional Range users a clear view of the product roadmap.

While Open Source is traditionally associated with software, hardware vendors are also leveraging the flexibility of Open Source under the bonnet.

OpenGear designs and manufactures enterprise-grade infrastructure management equipment, built on embedded Linux firmware.

It counts Australia’s Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade amongst its biggest customers, along with Australian embassies around the world.

The use of Open Source solutions lets OpenGear offer the channel an enhanced level of interoperability and customisation, said CEO Bob Waldie.

“Our catchcry is that we are vendor agnostic and we will connect to anything,” Waldie said.

“We have a Custom Development Kit that we happily give away.

We say to people “here you go, go and extend this and modify this – here are all the tools and utilities you need”.

This then gives channel partners the flexibility to do customisation to meet a client’s needs, rather than just pushing out someone else’s hardware.

“We specialise in managing multi-vendor environments, and we can only do that because we use Open Source tools to bring in a new area of expertise without having to develop it all ourselves. The Open Source community is important because it extends your development team way beyond the scope of your in-house team of geeks.”

Community is the key for channel players looking to explore the world of Open Source, said Gartner’s Brian Prentice.

“To make the most of Open Source you have to get connected into the community,” Prentice said.

“You have to get onto the appropriate discussion boards and blog sites, you have to see what contributions are being made and think about what contributions you are going to make.

“This requires the channel player to reevaluate their position in the greater scheme of things. In the Open Source world they’re becoming a node in a greater network, interconnected with everyone else, whereas in the proprietary world they were a spoke on a wheel and the vendor was the hub. This means in the Open Source world they have to make a commitment to participate in the community. If they are not going to be engaged in the community then their ability to execute effectively and deliver quality service to their customers is going to be hampered.

“Also, any customer who understands the Open Source world is going to question whether a channel player that isn’t participating in the community can really meet their needs. They’re going to ask serious questions about whether they want to engage with somebody who isn’t tapped into the community.”

source:- crn.com.au/

Open Source, Can You Afford Not Considering?

There is a lot of talk recently about alternatives to Microsoft's desktop applications, see my recent posting “Pursuing An Open Desktop, Why Not!” as well as “P&G Flirts with Google Apps and Scares the Bejesus Out of Microsoft” posted by Tom Wailgum on October 1st, “Fighting Government Waste One Google Application At A Time”, and “Cost Savings Found When Microsoft Outlook Ousted for Gmail at British Construction Firm”.

The Open Office desktop and Google Apps are only the beginning of  a  readily growing availability of  software alternatives. Compiere's ERP and CRM applications, SugarCRM's relationship management application, OpenWorkbench from Computer Associates, Mozilla Firefox web browser, Openbravo ERP and many other can be found on Wikipedia.  The point is that many of the most sophisticated enterprise applications are now becoming available through an open source provider.

Why is this important?  Let me share a personal experience.  It was June and the Oregon Department of Human Services was going to implement the new HIPAA compliant codes for our Medicaid application in January of the coming year.  This had a significant impact on our health care partners, since they had to modify their systems in order to be able to submit electronic invoices to the State.  If our partners didn't update their systems before January they would have to file paper invoices, which we estimated would increase the States workload by around 60,000 paper invoices per month.

As we investigated the situation, we discovered that a number of different State employees were coordinating communications with various health care providers, there was no central repository of this information and follow up information was being kept on sticky notes.  There was a clear need for a relation management application, but with only six months to get this job done there was no time to go through the traditional procurement process to procure and implement potential solutions such as Siebold or SalesForce.com. 

One of our top system architects came to our rescue when he discovered SugarCRM's application on the Internet and since it was an open source application he was able to download and install it in a single day.  Our customers loved it and since it was an open source application we were able to make some minor modifications (mostly to screen literals) and have it in production within days.  We were also able to download contact information from our mainframes and create a comprehensive partner database.

The bottom line was that when we went live with the HIPAA compliant transactions and code sets almost every electronic filler was ready and there was almost no increase in paper invoice volumes.  While the cost savings were substantial the speed in which we able to meet everyone's needs was the big payoff.

As a CIO you need to be investigating these open source and other alternative software options.  Next posting will discuss what I see as the biggest payoff from the open source development model and that is collaborative development of none strategic applications.

source:- advice.cio.com/

The sweet logic behind SugarCRM’s Tracker feature

All it took was one new feature to see that SugerCRM has a handle on the future of enterprise business applications.

The company this week launched version 5.1 of its flagship open source customer relationship management system. This includes Tracker, which allows IT managers to review who in a company is actually making use of the product, and what specific features they are using most often. This information can be compiled statistically and presented to senior management so that the strategy, or perhaps the training, surrounding the technology can be fine-tuned.

It’s possible there are many other software platforms which have this kind of capability, but no vendor I know of has really bragged about it. Instead, they invest millions in marketing fancy extras to already-functional products that get ignored. A cynic might suggest this happens on purpose, because by not paying to new features users tend to have difficulty adjusting to system upgrades, which leads to more help desk issues, which leads (in many cases) to additional revenue to the vendor through support services.

If companies really see their employees as “assets,” however, it makes sense to provide the same kind of monitoring that you would to your inventory or the performance of your corporate network. Not only would such information make it easier to evaluate the return on your IT investments, it would possibly provide a useful guide to likely adoption of future applications, whether packaged or custom-built.

Although we’re talking about CRM here, the idea of monitoring usage is really like providing business intelligence about your internal software business. We all have such businesses, whether we are in the banking or grocery sectors. What it may not offer is the necessary analytics. SugerCRM might be able tell you how many salespeople pressed a particular button, but it might be harder to figure out why they bypassed others.

This brings up the question of who should be in charge of looking at this data and acting on it. Although IT would probably be interested, this is an example of where it might make more sense for the business owner of a particular department or process powered by an application – in this case, the director of sales – to take responsibility for studying usage patterns. Of course, in the end, sales people should be spending their time selling, not redesigning software, but only actual users will have the day-to-day understanding of what influences on-the-job behaviours.

We tend to say a software deployment is successful if no one complained about it, and provided it functions as it should. Forgotten features, however, can be as debilitating to achieving business objectives as any bugs. I really hope we’ll start to see more features like SugerCRM Tracker. If you’re not actively tracking, you’re losing track.

source:- blogs.itworldcanada.com/