Another buyout. Who's next?

Another big acquisition from shopaholic giant. Finally Oracle bought Sun Microsystems.

Anyways..I'll leave other analysts to comment on hardware/storage/cloud computing and other areas. I am more interested to speculate the future of software products from Sun, example Sun Portal, Access Manager, Directory Server, and other open source projects. Here is my take in that -

Oracle already have five portals under its belt, out of with they have clearly indicated of taking Webcenter, Aqualogic and Weblogic forward.

With this buy out, Oracle might dispose Sun Portal, as this product from Sun is not doing great from last few years, even after Sun made heavy investments and revamped its portal suite during '06-07. Sun failed to generate more ROI and is now supporting only its top 100 customers.

I also fear that it might be a dead end for all open source initiatives from Sun, as Oracle has never shown any interest in the Open Source arena. This might badly affect project Websynergy and Webspace (Liferay-Sun combo Prj), NetBeans IDE, PostgresSQL etc.

I think, Liferay is becoming more vulnerable for acquisition by Oracle as Sun had an interest initially and still have few ongoing projects with Liferay.

On the greener side, Oracle will get benefited with Sun's IDM suite as Access Manager & Directory Server are widely used and now Oracle will have a reply to IBM's Tivoli suite.

Let’s wait and watch what next will come under Oracle's Business Process Management tag.

Let's get SharePoint Integrated

I’m currently seeing a new trend these days, it’s about portals and content management systems going above and beyond their technologies, language and platform to get integration with SharePoint. I have put my views on how Content Management Systems (Fatwire and Immediacy WCMs 6.1) are tending towards integrating with SharePoint. Now, it’s the open source portal which will come up with a similar kind of integration with SharePoint.

Integration with Sharepoint from a non-open source Java based portal is not new. IBM Websphere uses WSRP for communication with Sharepoint, while Sun Portal Server 7.2 integrates with Windows SharePoint Services (WSS) 3.0 which provides a set of portlets to get deployed over Sun portal.

Latest in this area is about open source portal Liferay 5.2 which is about to get release soon is coming up with a feature to integrate with SharePoint. The Implementation of the SharePoint protocol will allow saving documents to Liferay as if it were a SharePoint server.
Except WCM, most of the customers feel that SharePoint has more “admin” friendly document collaboration features, document categorization, roles based document access and defining document types on the fly. Altogether it provides better DMS capabilities.

As neither Fatwire nor Liferay has their own full fledge document management system. Enterprises with existing SharePoint investments and who are looking for a portal or WCM solutions can look for these connectors/portlets.

Anyways, the thought around these integration approaches is to have “seamless access” to SharePoint’s repositories without leaving the actual Interface of either portal or web CMS.
As far as cost is concerned, I am not sure if the “SharePoint integration” will be a part of Liferay Community Release or if there is any additional commercial involved in its Enterprise Edition. On the other hand Fatwire-SharePoint Integrator costs tens of thousands $$$ for each Sharepoint deployment.

I will constantly look in this area of integration and will provide more information as soon as community version of Liferay is released.

Sun-Liferay and Project WebSynergy

After Sun-Liferay partnership early this year, Sun Microsystems has releases a stable version of a new Portal (from common code base) codename Project WebSynergy. A stable build 2 of WebSynergy is also available for download. Here are some of the new features in this release –

1. Portlet container 2.0: Complaint to JSR286 specs. Built on top of Open Portal Portlet container. Supports expiration and validation of cache, eventing and more advanced IPC.
2. JCR Compliance: Liferay Portal uses Mirage API that enables to use JCR compliant content repository, the same is incorporated in the WebSynergy release.
3. WSRP 2.0 Consumer Support : A WSRP consumer support and a new administration application is added that enables managing multiple WSRP consumers
4. Roller Blog Portlet: The Roller Blog portlet provides integration with Roller Weblogger version 4.0. Using this portlet, portal users can create and manage blogs on a Roller 4.0 server.
5. Presence: Presence Infrastructure also known as RUON has been integrated into Liferay Portal. Not really sophisticated as of now but there are plans to include more presence portlets to provide more presence-aware portal to the end user.

Its not far when a commercial release will be in the market. Surely this will be a big move from Sun’s perspective after a long time as there will be no more Sun JES Releases. This does not mean that Sun will stop shipping Access Manager and Directory Server duo. Both Access Manager and Directory Server are well known in the market and Sun will sell these products separately while relying on the Liferay community to concentrate on the portal side.

I think there is a possibility to see a connector/integration of Liferay Portal with Sun IDM stack in the near future.

RedHat to acquire JBoss

The JBoss war has finally take a not so expected turn when Red Hat announced to acquire JBoss. Red Hat and JBoss have been recognized as open source leaders in their respective domains. The large and vibrant communities around Linux and JBoss prove that the open source development model creates innovative, quality software, while providing a flexible and low cost model for customers. This acquisition is expected to accelerate enterprise adoption of open source infrastructure, and broaden the entire market opportunity for existing and new Red Hat and JBoss partners who are building
value-added enterprise solutions.

RedHat have already tried its hands on middle ware front (Jonas as application server),and much of the R&D was on portal and CMS with no success. With this acquisition RedHat will get a powerful web stack and the customer will get a product with more performance ,security and the branded and well respected support with a low –price.

As far as my speculation, I don’t think that RedHat will offer any support for Windows Version, rather it may stop JBoss’s windows version, because that will effect its own Linux distribution.

Anyways “All well that ends Well” --- OpenSource to OpenSource” :)

Enterprising the open source

The cloud thickens on the strategy of the open source vendors….“The enterprise fraternity” are keen on acquiring smaller rival companies with open sourced software and after acquisition, only unveil a part of the software that remained open sourced before, Then doesn’t the whole idea of open source get flouted? Another heating debate could be on the possible reasons for acquiring such firms that are open sourced. Typically, an open sourced company is learnt to be earning from the product’s maintenance, installation and support unlike, their product counterparts that derive from the licensed product copies as well. So, there seems to be a basic clash on the ideals of the two entities. Is this strategy a result of the fear in the biggies that the smaller ones could eventually overtake them as they gather more supporters for open sourced version.

A historical data on some such developments on this front that testify this:-

Oracle acquired Innobase an open source software company and a developer of transactional database technology, the software was distributed under the GNU GPL open-source license and was bundled with MySQL. Currently, it is reportedly in talks to acquire three open-source companies to expand its customer base .In return, it announced a free, low-end version of its database software thus, letting the world know about their commitment to opensource. Oracle also plans to buy Jboss Inc ,another opensource company and a leader in the application server market .

IBM last year bought Gluecode Software,which offers an application server based on apache Geronimo project. The give and take business is not new as IBM bundles with WebSphere, and it contributed an embedded database called Derby to Apache.
Bea Systems open sourced a version of its relational database mapping tool “Kodo” under an Apache license, while continues to offer BEA Kodo under a closed source license.
Sun Microsystems looked at open source community to revive itself , open sourced Solaris and JES.

At some point this may be a good deal for the customer as now they have a quality, open, and a low-priced(a bit more) product which is now backed ie supported by a branded company. So I think the product which was originally “true open source software” turns to have only source open.

My concern is that people who contribute to the open source software (apart from the employees of the open source company) is a vast community of developers, architects, designers who believe in sharing knowledge much to the relief of the smaller firms or developers that cannot afford licensed copies. However, with such moves industry wide, would this give enough leverage & credit to the people who contribute to this wealth of information or who use this information. Wouldn’t then the trend to contribute and share knowledge, then discouraged if this trend of acquiring smaller open sourced cos by the big giants continue?

Open Ajax and Collaboration

..so the big guys finally collaborate to push AJAX in the opensource community. IBM, BEA Systems Inc., Borland International Inc., Novell Inc., Oracle Corp. and Red Hat
Inc., have formed a group to contribute code and work together to promote use of AJAX., they will call it Open Ajax. This group will promote the use of Ajax tools with which developers can build rich Internet applications. The tools essentially eliminate the need to refresh a Web page every time a user enters or receives new data.

IBM is to propose its Ajax Toolkit Framework , that framework supports multiple Ajax runtime tools and can be used to develop and debug applications.

Since in the portal front the world is going collaborative and AJAXed :) ,its good to see that even the top notch vendors are implementing or moving a part of their technology to opensource.

Jetspeed 2.0 Open Source Enterprise Portal

With the release of the Jetspeed 2.0 Open Source Enterprise Portal , I believe that Open Source Portals are in the way of changing their Portal Architecture not just by enhancing their Security components but also a combination of both LDAP and the Database as a Backend.

Now what kind of data Jetspeed 2.0 has put on LDAP and what all info is there in underlying database can only be gathered by rigorous evaluation of the product.
anyways….this release is fully-compliant with the Portlet Specification 1.0 (JSR-168). Jetspeed-2 has passed the TCK (Test Compatibility Kit) suite and is fully certified to the Java Portlet Standard.
Apache Portals Bridges project can be used to 'bridge' portals with existing technologies including Struts, JSF, PHP, Perl. For GUI designers, Jetspeed comes with several built-in templates used to decorate portals and portlets.

Open Sun ( a new era)

Finally… after a long wait and the market evaluations on changing trends and expectations from the developer community for open source versions , the Boss ie, Sun Microsystems Inc. has come up with its open-source offerings for core software products .

This is a very strategic move that could have long-term implications on the company's image and make people accept and enhance Java and its products.
This was a well-thought out concept and the open source Solaris OS was a precursor to the present move of permitting its middleware, management and Java development tools free to use.
The Company's release also points out no variation in pricing for corporate users, who will still have to pay for service and support for these products . Corporate users can use the company’s Java Enterprise System (JES) middleware stack for free, but they w ouldn ’t have free support or service.

Sun will make open-source JES, which includes
*Sun Java System Application Server 8.1.
*Sun Java System Access Manager 7.
*Sun Java System Directory Server 5.
* Sun Java SystemAdministration Server 5.
*Sun Java System Portal Server 6.2.
*Sun Java System Instant messaging 7.
And other proxy ,integration and communication suite. ..what else J

According to my knowledge and experience ,JES (Portal and Access manager ) functionalities are far behind than other competitors .Sun has not leveraged upon the most in-vogue Concept of the Collaborative Portal...…and making JES open source will definitely be a value addition.

Moreover, open sourced product brings its own advantages as it evolves to maturity with everyone pooling in ideas ,suggesting changes and developing features,

Nokia and OpenSource

Nokia launched OpenSource.nokia.com today. It is the first place to look for information concerning Nokia involvement in the Open Source community.
The Projects page lists all Nokia developed downloadable code.

The website also features a list of all projects Nokia contributed to."

open-smiles

Paul Murphy: Whether you prefer Linux, BSD, or Solaris is immaterial when the choice is Unix or Windows. If you work with Red Hat the enemy isn't Sun; and if you work with OS X, the enemy isn't Linux. For any Unix, the enemy is Microsoft.

64 bit Windows, many years from now
With the release of 64-bit Windows, the roadmap for future operating-system upgrades has become more congested. It's taken four years for a reluctant industry to adopt XP; the signs are that 64-bit Windows won't win hearts, minds and desktops much faster.

Sun Microsystems has released Solaris as open-source software, a move that's central to the company's plan to regain lost relevance and fend off rivals Red Hat, IBM and Microsoft.
The company on Tuesday posted more than 5 million lines of source code for the heart of the operating system--its kernel and networking code--at the OpenSolaris Web site. However, some source code components, such as installation and some administration tools, will arrive later.
But competing with Linux is tough. Though Linux is not as mature in many regards, Solaris work is concentrated at one company, whereas Linux has a fully fledged community of open-source programmers. Participants come not just from universities and Linux sellers such as Red Hat and Novell, but also from server sellers IBM and Hewlett-Packard, chipmaker Intel, and database maker Oracle.