If you picked up a copy of The Wall Street Journal today, or checked online, you might have come across an article featuring Concursive employee, Chris Pearsall.
Today Concursive is proud to announce that it has become a part of the ZipTie Open Network Alliance
(ZONA). ZONA is an alliance committed to several key areas which we have been continually dedicated to, including interoperability, standardization, best practices and the creation of value-added tools. In November 2006, many of these same reasons fueled our drive to become a founding member of the Open Solutions Alliance, a group dedicated to those very ideals in open source software.
In hindsight, it almost feels inevitable that after countless anti-trust lawsuits and reticence towards third-party developers, Microsoft has opened up its major APIs. Following the likes of Google, a company that strongly encourages community development on its products, Microsoft's move seems a bit overdue but ultimately quite logical.
More and more software focus is turning away from desktop computing towards web applications and services. The SaaS phenomenon is one example, as is the increasingly visible open source movement.
I want to take time today to introduce my colleague, Jeff Hershey, VP of Business Development at Concursive - Business Social Software Platform, who will be posting here regularly beginning next week.
Jeff joined us last fall after a successful run as VP of Business Development for a tech company in Pennsylvania. Jeff has broad experience with both technical and non-technical companies of all sizes. His background will help expand the topic range on this blog; he will be posting some of his views/opinions on the importance of customer relationships, growing your customer base, and other general thoughts on relationship management.
He has already proven to be a great addition to the Concursive team and I am delighted to have him join forces with me on this blog.
Michael
Huge news in the Open Source world today: Sun Microsystems announced that it will spend $1B to acquire the Open Source database MySQL. MySQL is the back-end of the LAMP stack (Linux OS, Apache server, MySQL database, and PHP programming language), on which many web applications are based, not to mention web giants like Facebook and Google. The press release can be read here, which contains the following paragraph:
"This broad penetration coupled with MySQL's strength in Web 2.0, Software as a Service (SaaS), enterprise, telecom and the OEM embedded market make it an important fit for Sun. With MySQL, Sun will have the ability to deepen its existing customer relationships and create new opportunities with companies seeking the flexibility and ease-of-use of open source systems. With MySQL, Sun will have the ability to deepen its existing customer relationships and create new opportunities with companies seeking the flexibility and ease-of-use of open source systems."
On Friday I wrote about the debate going on around Open Source security. Let me restate: bugs in software are not related to the fact that the source code is freely available. In fact, open source software has fewer bugs due to the constant scrutinization and programming skills of its development community.
On the topic of security this article in ZDNet Asia, uses an Open Source adoption study from IDC as its reference point and states that: "Security was the top reason for deploying open source technology". This alternative view just shows how different the press can approach one facet of technology. The article cites an IDC analyst, Prianka Srinivasan, who talks about how Open Source is seen by its advocates as providing more secure software than closed source alternatives.
The article also talks about how companies are taking an interest in open source versions of CRM, and so they should be. The combination of innovation, security and the ability to connect with customers, partners and stakeholders across the extended enterprise is something that any business should at least explore.
There's a buzz around the internet right now regarding an article recently posted on Information Week titled "Open Source Code Contains Security Holes". If you couldn't tell from the title, this is a piece about the potential bugs in open source applications. If you couldn't guess from the title: I'm not exactly supportive of the author's standpoint.
There's nothing like some good press to start the year off. This week Reuters has highlighted the work of the Open Solutions Alliance in its story "Open-Source Chief Executives Make 2008 Predictions". This article picks up a quote from our CEO, David Richards, about international differences in open source, stating that in 2008 Asia will likely see a rapid open source adoption.
Happy New Year!
I returned from the holidays to a number of fun news stories summarizing 2007 IT events (check out #13), the past year in CRM innovations (see #2), and making predictions for 2008. Most notable was the story CIO Insider ran a few days ago: How to Do CRM Online: Three Big Ideas for 2008
I think this article brings up a few key points that align well with a number of our goals at Concursive: know our customers, listen to our customers, and protect our customers. As 2008 develops we will continue to put focus on each.
The end of 2007 is close, an ideal chance to reflect back on the year. It’s been a great year for us, from gaining investment from Intel, launching our new Concourse Suite 5.0, and of course our name change which reflects the growing presence of the company. I’d like to take this opportunity to thank our employees, customers, partners and investors, which have supported us throughout 2007.
I noticed that Mashable, the largest social networking news blog, ran a piece on “Best of 2007: Trends That Shaped the Web”. Three of the trends that Mashable selected: ecommerce, social networking and open source, are all areas that Concursive is directly involved in. In our drive to enable organizations to connect through the simplicity of a single platform solution, we provide the tools that better enable ecommerce, embrace all social networking standards – and all through open source standards.
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