JBoss alumni launch open-source startup
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A startup founded by former JBoss developers will come out of stealth mode Monday to announce a new product designed to help businesses zero in on their best sales leads.The startup, called LoopFuse, has developed a lead generation product that is offered as a paid on-demand service or as open-source software that can be downloaded for free and installed on-site.The Atlanta-based company is entering a growing market where it will compete with several other small providers, along with established players like Eloqua, based in Toronto. LoopFuse hopes to distinguish itself with its open-source model, which it said will allow it to price its service lower than rivals&#39; services.Lead generation products track the activities of potential customers on a company&#39;s Web site and use factors like their job titles and activities on the site to assign &quot;lead scores,&quot; which help salespeople to target their efforts. The products work in tandem with customer relationship management software.Kim Collins, a research vice president with Gartner, said interest in such products is growing in all industries. The challenge for new companies like LoopFuse -- and for customers -- is that many small companies are offering similar products, each with a slightly different twist.&quot;They each do things a bit differently and utilize different channels for [lead] generation and distribution (e.g., Web, sales, e-mail). Some focus more on workflow and process. Others focus more on analytics and scoring. It makes the vendors and their solutions hard to directly compare,&quot; Collins said via e-mail.LoopFuse was founded early last year by Tom Elrod and Roy Russo, who each spent three years at JBoss, the Java server vendor acquired by Red Hat. Elrod was lead architect for JBoss Remote and Russo cofounded the JBoss Portal, according to LoopFuse&#39;s Web site.The company has quietly rolled out its product to a handful of customers over the past year. On Monday it plans to launch a new release and start marketing itself more actively.The product, called LoopFuse OneView, includes tools for e-mail marketing, Web analytics, managing campaigns and scoring and prioritizing leads, among other things. The new release, version 3.0, will add lead management and lead nurturing tools, a spokesman said. The software is released under the GNU General Public License.LoopFuse hopes to shake up the economies of the market. The open-source model can help vendors reduce their costs by drawing on existing software components and contributions from users.LoopFuse OneView will be priced at $300 per month for an unlimited number of users, although usage will be capped at about 2,500 e-mails and 100,000 page hits, said Matt Asay, an adviser to LoopFuse who is also a vice president with content management company Alfresco. Users will be able to pay more to lift the cap, he said.That pricing compares favorably to Eloqua. Its service starts at $3,000 per month for a team of about five users, but with no limits on e-mail or page views, said Thor Johnson, Eloqua&#39;s senior vice president of marketing.Still, Johnson said he was unconcerned with LoopForce, noting that he already has a plethora of smaller rivals. Eloqua has a battle-tested service that is being used by more than 400 customers, he said, including Nokia Enterprise Solutions, Sybase and Red Hat. It also has some capabilities that LoopFuse does not, such as direct-mail marketing, he said.Eloqua was founded in 2000 and recently closed a $23 million funding round, which it will use to expand in Europe and Asia. Johnson questioned the ability of startups like LoopFuse to serve global businesses, or to scale quickly enough to handle big customers. &quot;We&#39;re processing more transactions than the Nasdaq,&quot; he said.LoopFuse will be hoping to parlay its JBoss connections and the rising confidence in open-source software to its advantage. It has partnered with open-source company SugarCRM, allowing customers to use a complete open-source stack for marketing and sales.&quot;While our proprietary competitors tread water, and ask you to empty your wallets for 8+ year-old brittle-ware, we&#39;re busy innovating, innovating, and innovating, by applying open source principles and methodologies to every facet of our products and business,&quot; LoopFuse said in its blog last year.
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JBoss Inc. has added business process management (BPM) to its growing roster of open source software.
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Former executives from companies including Sun Microsystems, BEA Systems and Oracle are launching a venture called Cassatt, which looks to automate IT operations, leverage commodity hardware and software and govern network compute cycles in a gridlike manner.
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A group of industry veterans are aiming to become the &quot;Dell of the software industry&quot; by creating a company dedicated to supporting Open Source software.
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When Linus Torvalds first posted a fledgling version of Linux to an obscure software bulletin board in 1991, no one would have predicted that open-source software would be much more than a short-lived hacker experiment.
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Red Hat put some muscle behind its intention to make its JBoss middleware as ubiquitous in the enterprise as its Linux software on Wednesday, committing new sales, marketing, and technical resources to accelerating the adoption of JBoss among the largest corporations.At its JBoss World conference in Orlando, Florida, Craig Muzilla, vice president of Red Hat&#39;s Middleware Business, said the company hopes JBoss will be a major part of 50 percent of all enterprise software infrastructure deployments by 2015. &quot;We believe it is an achievable, realistic goal,&quot; he said.To reach that goal, Red Hat introduced a multifaceted plan that includes opening technology &quot;acceleration&quot; centers, adding sales and marketing support, and putting together an enterprise-class middleware stack. The stack would be made up of JBoss and other open-source software for management, application integration, and application development.Red Hat purchased JBoss in April 2006 and has been trying to integrate the Java-based application infrastructure, or middleware, with its Linux business to become a multiproduct company.In an interview last week, Red Hat&#39;s new CEO, Jim Whitehurst, said the hardest part of this has been changing JBoss&#39; business model to Red Hat&#39;s. JBoss gave its software away for free and charged for consulting and services. Red Hat has a &quot;.org&quot; community version of its product for anyone to use, as well as a more robust enterprise version for large-scale deployments. He said at the time that Red Hat now will use a similar model for making JBoss more successful in the enterprise.Muzilla echoed Whitehurst&#39;s notion that Red Hat will use the same strategy to boost JBoss in enterprises as it did to make Red Hat Enterprise Linux so successful. However, he said there is still &quot;a lack of understanding that you can really run your enterprise on open-source middleware.&quot;To change that perception, Red Hat plans to offer an &quot;enterprise-hardened, rock-solid&quot; stack of JBoss middleware that includes both existing products, such as JBoss Application Server, JBoss Cache, JBoss Transactions, JBoss Clustering, and JBoss Messaging, and other open-source products, Muzilla said Wednesday. Red Hat will test and certify the middleware stack to ensure the pieces work together and can sustain large-scale enterprise deployments, he said.Sales and customer support also are key to making a successful enterprise play, Muzilla said. In the past six months, Red Hat has added JBoss sales and presales specialists in North America to help sell the middleware to enterprises. The company also is hiring new marketing executives and is planning its first acceleration center. He said the centers will be in places &quot;where there is a lot of customer activity,&quot; without giving more details.Once the new technology labs for JBoss are open, customers will be able to use them to test Red Hat&#39;s JBoss stack, and it&#39;s likely Red Hat will build centers for a specific task, Muzilla said. &quot;Performance will be one lab, interoperability will be another,&quot; he said.
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Open-source software maker releases big update to Java-based application server program.
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Fortify, FindBug launch open-source project to share analysis and tools.
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JBoss (Profile, Products, Articles) Inc. has added business process management (BPM) to its growing roster of open source software.
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Red Hat on Thursday revealed a JBoss middleware project aimed at displacing BEA&#39;s Tuxedo transaction-monitoring engine, which has a significant legacy install base.At its JBoss World conference in Orlando, Red Hat unveiled JBoss BlackTie, a project for integrating Java and legacy-based distributed transaction-processing environments. The new product will complement and extend the current JBoss transaction-monitor project, JBoss.org Transactions, through the addition of C, C++, and mainframe-compatible transaction capabilities, according to Red Hat.JBoss, the open source middleware company purchased by Red Hat in April 2006, already had built its reputation by commoditizing the Java-based application server market once dominated by BEA&#39;s WebLogic, which soon will become an Oracle product once the software vendor completes its purchase of BEA.Now JBoss aims to go after the Tuxedo install base, which Sacha Labourey, vice president of engineering middleware at Red Hat JBoss, said represents &quot;tens of millions&quot; of dollars in revenue opportunity. &quot;BlackTie is about helping companies migrate away from one of the key legacy lock-ins out there, Tuxedo,&quot; he said.The BlackTie project will focus on building technology that can emulate transaction-processing monitor APIs, such as the ones for Tuxedo, and can provide open source legacy services such as security, naming, clustering, and transactions. According to Red Hat, the project is aimed at giving enterprise users the opportunity to easily integrate their C, C++, and mainframe applications into JBoss Java-based environments.Code for the BlackTie project will be available in about 60 days. Eventually, Red Hat will offer its own enterprise version of both BlackTie and the JBoss Transactions projects.Red Hat has been trying to integrate the JBoss Java-based middleware with its Linux business to become a multiproduct company. News this week at its JBoss World conference is aimed at dispelling the notion that Red Hat can&#39;t move beyond its Linux roots to offer an entire portfolio of open source products for application development, integration, management, and the like.JBoss gave its software away and charged for consulting and services. Red Hat has a &quot;.org&quot; community version of its Linux product for anyone to use, as well as a more robust enterprise version for large-scale deployments. The company is taking the same approach with JBoss by having JBoss.org community for open source and freely available products, and the JBoss enterprise middleware products that have fees attached to them. The BlackTie project falls under the former category.In addition to BlackTie, Red Hat also Thursday unveiled the global availability of its JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform, which originally was expected to be available by the end of last year.The JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform includes JBoss ESB, which comprises integration, transformation, and a registry and repository for services. IT also includes service orchestration and workflow with the JBoss jBPM product and business policy and rules management and integration with the JBoss Rules product. The JBoss SOA platform is aimed at competing with proprietary SOA infrastructure from companies such as Microsoft, Oracle, and IBM, and is part of JBoss&#39; enterprise middleware offerings.Eventually, there also will be a business analysis component to JBoss&#39; SOA platform, which will make it more competitive with current SOA infrastructure offerings on the market, said Craig Muzilla, vice president of Red Hat&#39;s Middleware Business.Red Hat also launched two other JBoss.org projects Thursday.&#160;One is RHQ, a management platform jointly developed with Hyperic. Eventually, RHQ project will serve as the code base for JBoss Operations Network 2.0 (JON 2.0), due out by midyear.The RHQ project aims to develop a common services management platform that will be used in future versions of both the JBoss middleware and Hyperic&#39;s products, said Katrinka McCallum, vice president of Red Hat&#39;s newly established Business Management Unit.Source code for RHQ is available for licensing now under the GPL open source license. The code, as well as additional project information and community forums, are accessible online at the project&#39;s Web site.Red Hat also introduced a JBoss SOA governance project aimed at keeping track of how enterprise composite applications and services are developed, deployed, and managed throughout their lifecycle. The first open source code for the project, JBoss.org DNA, will be available in 30 days, with more products and source code to come to tackle other areas of governance, according to Red Hat.
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The creators of the widely-used Globus Toolkit have formed a company to provide commercial software, services and support for the open source software that has become the de facto standard for grid computing.
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TechWeb - The new members aim to strengthen the organization's efforts to create an open source mobile software platform.
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A team of computer industry veterans including a former Microsoft executive are launching an open-source company that aims to be the Dell of the software industry.
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Private no more, the open-source database will find new customers.
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Blog: The Open Road looks at emerging open-source business strategies and opportunities.
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A newcomer on the open source scene has received funding to expand operations and develop new product lines.
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JBoss has released a new version of its open source business process management application, called "jBPM."