Open Source Local News

[admin]

Thought this could be a thread where we all post local news.

[admin]

Business is booming for open source adopters

19 February 2009 10:00AM

We're in a downturn - we've heard it enough times itmust be true. We've all been asked to do more with less, to ensure our employees survive the coming year.

Lee Curtis business development manager ICE Systems is the guest columnist for CRN issue 262.

For IT teams, it's not a case of having no budget. It is simply that they must get better value for money. They must invest to grow the business or save significant dollars.

To help us out, US-led IT vendors have raised their prices by 20 to 30 percent. They might keep their profits high, but where does that leave us?

As a result, many IT managers are struggling to deliver on their goals and their promises while making their dollars go much, much further.

They are looking for ways to reduce the vice-like grip that IT vendors have over their business agility and costs of ownership.

Many are working around the lock-ins that form the sales strategies of the mega-vendors. IT teams fear that vendors put shareholders before clients, locking away valuable data with proprietary software licenses and file formats.

What's needed is a more agile, cost-effective way to build, deploy and manage "must-have" IT projects. Step up, open source.

In many respects, the college years are over - it's time to get professional. The free loving, laissez faire community of open sourcers have been joined by sharp suits, savvy business cases and proven enterprise credentials.

Moreover, it used to be Linux and Apache that led the field in open source deployments - now it seems there is an open source option for just about everything.

In fact, looking under the hood of the big players, you'll often find open source. Today, many (or is that most?) of the big-ticket security and networking appliances are underpinned by Linux or BSD Unix.

Anyone heard of Apple? The ground-breaking, Vista-mocking OS X is powered by many open source components.

That's the same OS that runs on their servers, desktops and something they call the iPhone. That said, the iPhone itself is not open source, but built upon it.

Google has released the acclaimed Android mobile, while Symbian and Nokia have open sourced their mobile operating systems, too.

Meanwhile, open source vendor Red Hat is no longer alone; Novell has joined in, Oracle, too.

All three offer enterprise Linux support and software. The enterprise titans: Oracle, HP and IBM are developing, supporting, deploying and profiting from open source. It's a great business to be in.

And the software is free. How does that work? It's all about the value of a solution and the services that deliver it.

Even Microsoft's uber-partners Citrix have redesigned their strategy and marketing around "Xen" - the free VMware competitor.

In the field of SOA, business intelligence and workflow automation are disruptive forces bringing competitive advantages, rock-solid reliability, unrivalled flexibility and support assurances at a fraction of the cost.

These enterprise-class solutions are affordable for smaller firms that can now manage their IT with more sophistication than their giant competitors - after all, commercial alternatives run into millions of dollars in licensing, installation and maintenance fees.

How about VoIP? Or Unified Communications? Content management systems? Intranets? Enterprise search? All new, hot technologies, all available as mature open source.

Open source is attracting talent, investors, and perhaps, more importantly, it is winning over integrators and resellers who see it as a cheap way to solve client problems while keeping down their bill of materials.

In other words, it's very profitable to be a value-added integrator.

SugarCRM is free if you want to forgo professional support and a few funky features. Compiere and OpenBravo are maturing fast, and are aimed at the SMB/SME market.

What about Microsoft's Exchange? It is deeply embedded, but check out Yahoo's Zimbra if you want to see what Exchange could be.

You can see why the market leaders are prone to overreact with FUD: Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt about their own future.

Open source firms can go bust, but the software can be changed and supported by any willing party. Compare that with a proprietary firm who takes software, support and maybe critical data if they go under.

The nimble, creative and ambitious are harnessing technology to slash costs, break into new markets and magnify profits using software that they can change, support and adapt. There's nothing new there.

The wisest proponents of open source is that the enterprise ignores how the software was developed and instead focuses passionately on the business benefits.

After all, the open model is a compelling business case with a jaw-dropping ROI. For integrators then combining two or more components with a little customisation shows the business that you can deliver enormous value.

So what about your business? Are you already investing in open solutions and giving your business a fighting chance of thriving during the downturn?

This article appeared in the 16 February, 2009 issue of CRN magazine.

[admin]

The IAPA SIG on Open Source is now alive and living in Sydney!

The first meeting is already in the calendar here.

If you are interested in open source then come along - it's free!

[BI Tragic]

It's not local but I with it was

Ingres benefits from Oracle-related angst

The open-source database company is touting customer wins, including a supermarket chain and a New York investment bank
Chris Kanaracus (IDG News Service) 29 June, 2009 08:29


When the 250-store California supermarket chain Save Mart Supermarket began making plans to roll out a time and attendance tracking application to manage its 20,000 workers, Oracle was not on its list of preferred databases, even though the company has some older versions running in-house.

"They just treat us so poorly, with such disdain and arrogance," said Save Mart CIO James Sims in a recent interview. "I told them directly: 'We'll do everything we can to not do business with you.'"

Instead, Save Mart went with the open-source Ingres database, which competes with the likes of EnterpriseDB and Sun's MySQL.

Like other commercial open-source companies, Ingres makes money by selling support contracts, and presents itself as a more affordable alternative to buying more licenses for Oracle, IBM DB/2 or other proprietary databases. But it is still tiny in comparison to the giants, logging just US$68 million in revenue during 2008, and doesn't yet have the same level of features.

However, its technology was enough for Save Mart's system, which tracks and aggregates workers' in-and-out time-card punches, Sims said. It is crucial for the application to run properly because of state and union penalties Save Mart could incur for making errors in compensating employees, he added.

The system "is not gigantic, but it's working very efficiently," he said. "I would not be concerned about implementing Ingres for a much larger-scale solution."

The New York investment bank Cowen Group is using Ingres as well for a new program trading portal, which its clients will use to access financial data.

The application uses Salesforce.com's customer portal software as a front end, said CIO Daniel Flax. Users will be able to look at prebuilt analytic data sets, "as well as do drill-downs and request new kinds of information," Flax said.

Cowen is using the project as a "proving ground" for Ingres, he said. The bank uses a variety of commercial database products, including "major platform players," but Flax declined to name them.

It considered a range of databases for the portal project, including MySQL, but decided on Ingres due to a combination of cost, maturity and features, Flax said.

The company also had some uncertainty about MySQL's future, since Sun is being acquired by Oracle, according to Flax.

While Cowen and Save Mart have placed bets on Ingres, the database may not be ideal for all customers, according to analyst Curt Monash of Monash Research.

"There is a limited number of open-source DBMSes with significant customer bases," Monash said. "Of those, I would say that for transaction processing up to a certain volume and complexity, Ingres is the most proven."

But others have specific advantages, he said. For example, MySQL has an edge in extreme scalability, and PostgreSQL -- which EnterpriseDB is based on -- has stronger datatype support, Monash said.

"Basically, Ingres is an old-school, general-purpose DBMS that fell behind the state-of-the-art in the 1990s, but for many needs does a perfectly good job," Monash said. "If you have extreme needs in some area or another, it's probably not the product for you."

[Steve Bennett]

But the potential cost savings are a tradeoff for tight integration, one analyst says

Chris Kanaracus (IDG News Service) 09/07/2009 04:43:00

Open-source BI (business intelligence) vendor JasperSoft said Tuesday it is offering an unlimited-use purchase option to customers worldwide.

The announcement revives a similar promotion the vendor ran in 2007. The latest comes in two tiers: $US35,000 for unlimited use of JasperReports, its embeddable reporting engine, and $US50,000 for use of the entire suite.

Under the deal, users receive technical support, advanced documentation and a special training class, according to JasperSoft.

The software can be used by any number of applications, users and systems. But the offer is limited to a single geography, department, division, business unit, or agency, according to JasperSoft's Web site.

With the announcement, JasperSoft is no doubt trying to keep money rolling in as recession-afflicted IT departments clamp down on spending, particularly on potentially expensive projects like BI.

And not every BI company is making it through the harsh economic times. Software as a service BI vendor LucidEra recently announced it was shutting down operations and putting its intellectual property up for sale.

But financial considerations aren't behind JasperSoft's new offer, and the startup is in the process of closing its best quarter ever, according to a spokeswoman.

Meanwhile, the unlimited-use offer clearly has potential value for customers, but they should be aware of certain limitations with JasperSoft's products, said Forrester Research analyst Boris Evelson.

On one hand, the vendor has a comprehensive BI suite, encompassing ETL (extract, transform and load), OLAP (online analytical processing) and other tools, he said.

But since JasperSoft depends on a variety of open-source projects, its components aren't as well integrated as BI products from vendors such as Cognos and SAP's Business Objects division, Evelson added.

"The only real value of open-source BI is that the lower cost of R&D is passed on as a lower cost of the overall product," Evelson said.

[admin]

From PR Newswire:

RightScale Joins Forces With Jaspersoft, Talend and Vertica to Deliver Complete Business Intelligence on the Cloud

Leading cloud and BI vendors offer first end-to-end solution for agile analytics on the cloud
SAN FRANCISCO, Aug. 12 /PRNewswire/ -- CloudWorld Expo -- Leading providers of business and infrastructure software today announced the availability of a joint solution stack that delivers complete Business Intelligence (BI) on the cloud.

RightScale, Jaspersoft, Talend and Vertica today are unveiling an integrated solutions stack that will enable customers to increase agility and lower costs by combining the power of the cloud, a high-performance analytical database, and BI and data integration software.

With the push of a button, users can now easily implement sophisticated BI on the RightScale Cloud Management Platform. Instead of using precious time on the task of integrating a variety of technologies to build a complete BI stack, the solutions from Jaspersoft, Talend and Vertica can be automatically configured. This self-service, pay-as-you-go BI solution gives customers the agility to affordably build and use analytic sandboxes and disposable data marts as well as gain intelligence on a wide range of data, including brief or seasonal projects.

To sign up for a free 30-day trial, please visit: Business Intelligence in the Cloud | Cloud Computing Management Platform by RightScale.

"The beauty of the cloud BI stack is its low cost barrier without having to sacrifice performance or functionality. No huge investments in hardware, staff and other resources are required to get a scalable, end-to-end enterprise BI solution delivering results on the first day of business," said Peter Relan, Executive Chairman and Co-Founder of Sibblingz and CrowdStar.

The stack is being demonstrated this week at CloudWorld Expo in booth #317 (RightScale), booth #318 (Jaspersoft/Talend) and booth #319 (Vertica). In addition, Jaspersoft CEO Brian Gentile and RightScale CEO and Founder Michael Crandell will share more details about the stack during a 30-minute session at the Expo on Wednesday, August 12, 2009 at 1:15 p.m. PT in room #3007 at Moscone West.

Cloud computing introduces a new opportunity for customers who need the ability to rapidly deploy project-based BI, provision new applications on the fly and respond to major market changes. As recently discussed in a webinar hosted by TDWI Research Director Wayne Eckerson, agile analytics can be a reality for any organization when BI is readily accessible on the cloud.

"The work done by RightScale, Jaspersoft, Talend and Vertica demonstrates the power of collaboration among vendors to deliver integrated solutions," said Wayne Eckerson, Research Director at The Data Warehouse Institute. "And by focusing their efforts on delivering BI on the cloud, customers now have tools to help them move quickly with BI projects."

A free webinar that details the new solutions stack and shares use cases will be hosted Tuesday, August 25, 2009 at 11 a.m. PT. To register, please visit: Business Intelligence in the Cloud: Agile Analytics for Powerful, Easy, and Nimble BI.

RightScale is the leader in cloud computing management. RightScale offers a fully automated cloud management platform that enables you to design, deploy, manage, business-critical applications on the cloud.

Jaspersoft is the provider of the world's most widely used business intelligence software and is based in San Francisco, Calif. Jaspersoft Cloud Business Intelligence

Talend is the recognized leader in open source data integration software. Talend Cloud - Welcome

Vertica is the market innovator for high-performance analytic database management systems that run on industry-standard hardware and was co-founded by database pioneer Dr. Michael Stonebraker. Vertica Analytic Database for the Cloud Makes Cloud Computing Easy | Vertica

Media Contacts
For RightScale
Sheeran/Jager Communication
Lisa Sheeran
w: 510-724-2267
m: 510-710-1004
sheeran@earthlink.net

For Jaspersoft
Page One PR
Jennifer Cloer
Jennifer@pageonepr.com
503-746-7577 (o)
503-867-2304 (m)

For Talend
Schwartz Communications
Avi Dines
(781) 684-0770
talend@schwartz-pr.com

For Vertica
Beaupre & Co. Public Relations
Ed Marshall
emarshall@beaupre.com
603-559-5816

[zamir]

Open-source BI vendor Pentaho pushes migration deal

The company offers low-cost report conversions to grab users of Oracle, BusinessObjects and other BI platforms

Chris Kanaracus (IDG News Service) 31/08/2009 13:08:00

Add open-source BI (business intelligence) vendor Pentaho to the list of vendors rolling out financial incentives to lure customers during the global recession.

On Monday, the company will announce a new migration program along with the launch of its 3.5 release.

Under the "Escape" offer, users of Actuate e.Reports, Brio, Cognos Impromptu, Crystal Reports and Oracle Reports can have their BI reports converted to Pentaho for special rates, starting at $US5,000 for 25 reports. For bigger volumes, the cost can go as low as $US100 per report.

Meanwhile, Pentaho BI Suite Version 3.5 features a new designer that speeds up the process of building reports, along with "self-service" functionality that lets business users create content and run queries against data without the need for deep technical knowledge, according to the company.

It remains to be seen how many new customers the Orlando-based vendor lures with its migration plan, but the offer is "a very good deal," in the view of Forrester Research analyst Boris Evelson.

"I'm actually surprised a lot more BI vendors aren't offering this [type of enticement]," he said.

But it should be noted that there is far more to adopting a BI platform than converting reports, Evelson added. "You've also got server setups, backup, disaster recovery, training, change management, et cetera."

Pentaho, which makes money by selling support subscriptions, is often mentioned in the same breath as fellow open-source BI vendor JasperSoft. In terms of functionality, the companies are essentially neck-and-neck, Evelson said.

In turn, JasperSoft and Pentaho's breadth of technology lags behind that of major platforms such as BusinessObjects and Cognos, but this is not surprising given their comparatively small size and shorter time in the market, Evelson added.

Pentaho's platform has worked so far for Boyne Resorts.

The Boyne Falls, Michigan, hospitality chain has been using the software since version 1.2, and plans to upgrade to 3.5 in October, according to Carlos Lopez, business intelligence manager.

"It's just going to save a lot of time on the development side," he said. "Some features that right now have to be hand-coded, they are just there."

Lopez creates a variety of reports with Pentaho, concerning areas like revenue, labor and guest satisfaction surveys, he said.

While many of the capabilities the tools provide are available in common platforms such as Microsoft's SQL Server Reporting Services, "price" was a key reason why the resort company went with Pentaho, he said.

The company's support service has been good as well, he added.

[Steve Bennett]

Peerless Foods Selects Open Source Solutions From Ingres for Mission Critical ERP and Business Intelligence Platforms

Yahoo! Finance Tue Sep 15, 6:08 AM

REDWOOD CITY, Calif. & SYDNEY--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Ingres Corporation, the leading open source database management company and pioneer of the New Economics of IT, announced today that Peerless Foods, Australia’s largest privately owned producer of edible oils, fats and margarines, relies on Ingres as the underlying database for its mission-critical business enterprise resource planning (ERP) and business intelligence (BI) platforms. Ingres Database is the leading independent open source database that helps organizations develop and manage business critical applications at an affordable cost.

With its business growing, Peerless Foods needed a more consistent, flexible platform to modernize its production environment and support future expansion. While companies in similar situations often go straight to proprietary vendors, Peerless made the decision to build its own ERP solution from the ground up.

Ingres was selected as the underlying database for its mission-critical business systems because it offered the best functionality at one-sixth the price. Developers were equipped with the Ingres OpenROAD application development environment to build its ERP system and Adrian Hamilton, CIO, Peerless, now estimates the company has saved between $300,000 to $400,000 a year in licensing fees.

”We needed a number of features specific to our industry, and the off the shelf products just didn't have what we needed,” said Adrian Hamilton, CIO, Peerless Foods. “Developing the system delivered quite a large savings on license fees, but it also delivered more operationally.”

“Peerless Foods is a perfect example of an organization leveraging the benefits of the New Economics of IT,” said Jason Leonidas, vice president of sales and services, Ingres Australia and New Zealand. “More and more customers are embracing an open alternative to proprietary software stacks, understanding that open source provides flexibility and innovation at a significantly lower cost than proprietary solutions like Oracle.”

Hamilton’s team has developed a fully featured business platform that automates every aspect of the company's business processes – from forecasting and ordering, to production, packaging, and distribution – in order to enable a highly optimized just-in-time manufacturing process.

“Ingres is appealing because it is a solid, industrial-strength database that comes at a significant cost reduction to other options,” said Hamilton. “There is nothing that we could do in those applications that we can’t do in Ingres.”

Peerless has also complemented its ERP environment with the Ingres Icebreaker Business Intelligence (BI) Appliance powered by Jaspersoft, a comprehensive business intelligence system that combines the Ingres database with the Jaspersoft Business Intelligence Suite. The result has been a comprehensive analytical suite that is being used by two dozen business managers for a range of production, forecasting, planning and sales analysis that will help the business run even more efficiently.

“The Ingres-based application environment has enriched our developers' job satisfaction. Rather than just figuring out how to get a bundled package to do what we need, they can go from start to finish with a project and put their intellectual property into the business,” said Hamilton. “Having open source at a database level promotes innovation – and we can innovate at a database level as opposed to spending thousands of dollars on individual tools. Whatever we want to do, we can just do it.”

About Peerless Foods

Established in 1984, Peerless Foods has grown to become Australia’s largest privately owned producer of edible oils, fats and margarines. Its brand, which include --- Kremelta, SPD, Olive Gold, Shef, Gold Leaf --- and others, account for close to 50 percent of the Australian market.

About Ingres Corporation

Ingres is the leading open source database management company. We are the world’s second largest open source company and the pioneer of the New Economics of IT, providing open source solutions at dramatically reduced cost than proprietary software vendors. As a leader in the New Economics of IT, Ingres delivers low cost and accelerated innovation to more than 10,000 customers worldwide.

Ingres is a registered trademark of Ingres Corporation. All other trademarks, trade names, service marks, and logos referenced herein belong to their respective companies.

Ingres Corporation
Sherry Lowe, 650-587-5544
Corporate Communications
sherry.lowe@ingres.com
or
GeMM Communications for Ingres
Nicole Gemmell, +61 416 071 900
nicgem@bigpond.net.au

[admin]

New Book "Pentaho Solutions" Available From John Wiley & Sons

Thursday September 10, 8:00 am ET

Comprehensive Guide Offers Complete Resource for Implementing BI and Data Warehousing With Pentaho and MySQL

ORLANDO, FL--(Marketwire - 09/10/09) - Pentaho Corporation, the commercial open source alternative for business intelligence (BI), today announced the availability of the book "Pentaho Solutions: Business Intelligence and Data Warehousing with Pentaho and MySQL" (ISBN: 978-0-470-48432-6, Paperback: 648 pages). This book is a cooperative work by the independent authors Jos van Dongen, a self-employed consultant with over 18 years of experience in BI, and Roland Bouman, BI developer and former certification and training course developer at MySQL AB / Sun Microsystems. "Pentaho Solutions" is published by John Wiley & Sons and available for purchase online at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Borders, Books-A-Million, Indie Bound, and Wiley. Wiley has published many authoritative titles in BI and data warehousing including "The Data Warehouse Toolkit" and "Building the Data Warehouse."

Within minutes, this book gets you up and running with the latest version (3.5) of the Pentaho BI Suite, enabling business users to experience example reports, dashboards, and OLAP pivot tables. A clear sample business case with step-by-step examples goes hand-in-hand with an in-depth exploration of Pentaho's concepts and architecture, helping you learn how to install, use, and maintain Pentaho to build BI and data warehousing solutions at a fraction of the cost of traditional proprietary BI and data warehousing software.

Highlights include:

• Designing, building, populating, and maintaining a data warehouse with Pentaho Data Integration and MySQL
• Designing and deploying reports, charts, OLAP models and metadata, and delivering information on a set schedule or via user subscription
• Creating and using interactive OLAP pivot tables with drill up/drill down using Pentaho Analysis (Mondrian OLAP Server)
• Summarizing and presenting BI content for business users with comprehensive dashboards
• Discovering and exploring patterns in data using Pentaho Data Mining
• Understanding and applying Pentaho and data warehousing concepts including action sequences, the solution repository, dimensional modeling and star schemas, and much more

"With millions of downloads and a huge global community, we knew there would be strong demand for a comprehensive resource that gave people a fast path to success with open source BI and data warehousing," said Jos van Dongen. According to Roland Bouman, "Given their functionality, accessibility, and low total cost of ownership, Pentaho and MySQL are an obvious choice for a large and growing class of users."

"'Pentaho Solutions' is a great resource for users who want to deploy world-class BI and data warehousing solutions without the cost and complexity of traditional offerings," said Lance Walter, senior vice president of marketing at Pentaho Corporation. "It provides a great resource to help people deploy quickly while using best-practices to get the most value out of their applications."

"Pentaho Solutions: Business Intelligence and Data Warehousing with Pentaho and MySQL" at Wiley.com -- Wiley::Buy Pentaho Solutions: Business Intelligence and Data Warehousing with Pentaho and MySQL.

About Pentaho Corporation

Pentaho Corporation is the commercial open source alternative for Business Intelligence (BI). Pentaho BI Suite Enterprise Edition provides comprehensive reporting, OLAP analysis, dashboards, data integration, data mining and a BI platform that have made it the world's leading and most widely deployed commercial open source BI suite. Pentaho provides support, services, and product enhancements via an annual subscription that can lower total cost of ownership by 90% compared to traditional, proprietary BI offerings. Since its 2004 founding as the pioneer in open source BI, Pentaho's products have been downloaded more than five million times, with production deployments at companies ranging from small organizations to The Global 2000. For more information, visit Pentaho BI Suite 3.5 will help you escape proprietary BI!.

About the Authors

Roland Bouman is an application developer focusing on open source Web technology, databases, and Business Intelligence. He is an active member of the MySQL and Pentaho communities, and you can follow his blog at Roland Bouman's blog.

Jos van Dongen is a seasoned Business Intelligence professional and well-known author and presenter. He speaks regularly at conferences and seminars. You can find more information about Jos at Tholis Consulting.

About Wiley

Founded in 1807, John Wiley & Sons, Inc. has been a valued source of information and understanding for 200 years, helping people around the world meet their needs and fulfill their aspirations. Since 1901, Wiley and its acquired companies have published the works of more than 350 Nobel laureates in all categories: Literature, Economics, Physiology or Medicine, Physics, Chemistry and Peace.

Our core businesses publish scientific, technical, medical and scholarly journals, encyclopedias, books, and online products and services; professional/trade books, subscription products, training materials, and online applications and websites; and educational materials for undergraduate and graduate students and lifelong learners. Wiley's global headquarters are located in Hoboken, New Jersey, with operations in the U.S., Europe, Asia, Canada, and Australia. The Company's Web site can be accessed at Wiley::Home. The Company is listed on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbols JWa and JWb.


Contact:

Media Contact:
Samantha Hallock
Eastwick Communications
650.480.4071
Email Contact
Source: Pentaho Corporation

[admin]

By Trevor Clarke, Computerworld Australia, 09/28/09

Asia-Pacific organisations are increasingly turning to open source software to help them cut costs, according to research undertaken by IDC.

The analyst group found CRM applications, database management and virtualisation software were most prominent open source varieties from two reports titled, Asia/Pacific (Excluding Japan) Open Source Software Adoption in 2009 andAsia/Pacific (excluding Japan) Open Source Software Adoptions: Customer Case Study respectively.

Australia's northern neighbour, Indonesia, for example has 34.5 per cent of respondents planning to deploy an open source CRM application over the next 18 months.

"Verticals like distribution services (13.0 per cent), infrastructure services (12.1 per cent) and public sector (11.8 per cent) plan to deploy open source for CRM applications within the next 18 months", IDC Asia/Pacific Enterprise Applications Research market analyst, Ridhi Sawhney, said in a release. "The public sector has started to consider open source not only because of obvious benefits from cost reductions, but also with an aim to build an ecosystem, lower the entry barrier, and promote open source adoption."

The push for open source has also been noted by Google Search Appliance global product manager, Cyrus Mistry,, who said the success of the Google Search Appliance business is dependent on the open source developers and independent software vendors (ISVs) community.

Fellow IDG publication, InfoWorld also recently painstakingly selected its Bossie Award winners - the best open source software for business.

IDC had not returned requests for comment by time of publication and did not provide Australian specific figures.

Do you use open source software? Email Computerworld or follow @computerworldau on Twitter and let us know.