Is the Independent Software Company a Relic?
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Some business software vendors are determined to steer their own ships in a sea of acquisitions.
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If a company isn't failing at some things, it probably isn't innovating.
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How this once-tiny company hinted it was ready for a turnaround.
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The software company's investments are showing some promise.
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Microsoft has an offer open-source startups are having a hard time refusing.  Should they?
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Since 1993, Siebel dominated the market for customer service software. In recent years, however, it has stumbled. Can it regain its former glory?
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Today, Seesmic, the company founded by Loic Lemeur, announced their initial $6 million funding. Several people noticed that my name isn't on the list of investors.  I'll probably end up kicking myself when Seesmic becomes the next Google or YouTube. I remain a fan of the company and Loic and his team and will be rooting for them.  Why did I get cold feet? It has nothing to do with the product or the company, both of which appear to be outstanding. It's the stock market. I had to make the final Seesmic decision as I was getting out of stock, at a significant loss. The only stock I hold now is AAPL, and sadly, it's way under the price I paid for it a few months ago. Like a lot of other investors, right now stocks give me the willies. I will likely get back in, slowly, a little bit every week to average out the price, hoping the market has found a bottom.
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The company is far from resting on its laurels.
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Businesses don&#39;t have to dump Windows to test drive free or low-price applications whose use may improve the bottom line. Sometimes the big software vendors act like their customers are locked into the proprietary products they sell.
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The Story: Look in the mirror, Mr. or Ms. IT buyer. You?ve got more muscle than ever ? and you did it without steroids.[ Slideshow: 2007's top underreported tech stories ]                                                    Despite the wave of consolidation sweeping the industry, buyers have actually gained more leverage than ever when it comes to making deals with their vendors, notes a PricewaterhouseCoopers analysis. ?Software buyers need to realize that the pendulum is beginning to swing in their favor and that there are an increasing number of alternatives in today?s software market,? concurs Gartner analyst William Snyder (no relation to this writer).There are a lot of reasons for the swing, but one certainly stands out: The shift to SaaS (software as a service). The poster child for this phenomenon is Salesforce.com. "Both its development and delivery models are having a disruptive effect on the entire CRM market,? notes Forrester Research analyst Bill Band. But it?s not just Salesforce: By 2011, Snyder says, fully 25 percent of all new business software will be delivered as a service as Salesforce and other vendors push upstream from the small-business market. Already, SaaS providers make up the majority of sales for several segments of human resources applications, and is well-established for supply-chain management.[ InfoClipzflash video primer: Software as a Service ]SaaS is just the first wave of services that are pushing pricing power over to buyers: The more recent move to Web services and the beginnings of SOA (service-oriented architecture) deployment are encouraging the use of modular software, which in turn cuts development costs, makes it harder for vendors to sell expensive suites, and lessens the need for expensive consulting services.And yet another factor is upping buyer?s power, notes Gartner?s Snyder: the emergence of third-party support options that are reducing software?s TCO (total cost of ownership). ?Maintenance services have been a quasi-monopoly for software vendors,? he said. ?For many years, only the software vendor had rights to the source code of the critical components of the system. This made it impossible to go to an open, competitive market to obtain upgrades, services and support, which in turn made it impossible to negotiate maintenance fees.?Interestingly another software trend ? the growth of virtualization ? is beginning to affect pricing for hardware, particularly servers. A report by Infiniti Research suggests that server shipments will start declining in 2008: ?The server market of tomorrow will be a value game and not a volume game.? And that means better pricing for hardware, too.Don?t let your head swell too much, but Gartner vice president Mark McDonald credits ?savvy CIOs? for containing costs that were once out of control. ?They?re saying, ?I want you to implement in a way that gives me the advantage over my competition? ? and they?re not accepting the traditional vendor model, which favors homogeneity and the economics of scale.?The Bottom Line: Chances are that you?re looking at SaaS, Web services, SOA, virtualization, open source, and other technology-delivery methods for a variety of specific reasons, without realizing the cumulative effect is to give you more pricing power. Now that you?ve got the power, use it.Complete list of 2007 underreported tech stories: 1.? Java is becoming the new Cobol 2.? Sun Microsystems is back in the game 3.? Hackers take aim at Mac OS X 4.? There are some threats you can worry less about 5.? Companies may have found a way around H-1B visa limits 6.? Open source?s new commercial strategy 7.? End-to-end Ethernet finally arrives 8.? Blade servers arrive for the masses 9.? BI is dead; long live BI 10. Balance of power shifts to software buyers
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Want to know whether the company you own is any good? One question: Does the bull case stay the same?
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... is a company you've never heard of.
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The company speaks of slow U.S. sales growth, but has its makeup really smeared?
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If you had any doubts about Sun Microsystems? commitment to open source, it?s time to set them aside. Sun put its money where its mouth is Wednesday, with the announcement that it would buy open source database vendor MySQL for a whopping $1 billion. If the price tag set tongues wagging, however, it was no more tantalizing than the question that immediately sprung to the minds of IT managers everywhere: Now that Sun owns MySQL, what on earth does it plan to do with it?Sun has toyed with the idea of a database offering of its own for at least two years. But in a market where basic relational database functionality is increasingly considered a commodity, competing successfully is no mean feat, even when playing the open source card.Certainly, Sun isn?t the first to try it. In 2001, leading Linux vendor Red Hat launched its own branded version of the open source PostgreSQL database, only to scrap the project a year later after deciding that servicing and supporting a database was not its core competency. Similarly, Computer Associates opened the source of the Ingres database in hopes of becoming a one-stop shop for customers in need of an enterprise application stack, but had little luck winning market share away from the likes of IBM, Microsoft, and Oracle. CA spun Ingres off into its own company in 2005, where it continues to nurture a small installed base.In his blog announcing the MySQL acquisition Wednesday, Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz remains characteristically effusive. ?Until now, no platform vendor has assembled all the core elements of a completely open source operating system for the Internet,? he wrote. ?No company has been able to deliver a comprehensive alternative to the leading proprietary OS.?Yet CA?s and Red Hat?s experiences seem to discredit the idea that a stem-to-stern platform offering from a single vendor is what customers really want. Not to mention the fact that Sun already offers enterprise support for PostgreSQL, a competing open source database that is widely perceived as being technologically superior to MySQL. Schwartz reaffirmed Sun?s commitment to PostgreSQL in a conference call Wednesday, causing some analysts to speculate whether the MySQL acquisition was anything more than a billion-dollar PR stunt.But there may be method to Sun?s madness. The considerable goodwill that MySQL has cultivated among enterprise customers could have benefits for Sun that technology alone never could.?I think the answer is simple: ubiquity,? says Andy Astor, CEO of EnterpriseDB, which markets a high-performance, commercial database product based on PostgreSQL. ?[Sun is] a big company; to move their needle, they need to see millions of potential users, which MySQL provides.?According to MySQL?s own estimates, there are already some 11 million active installations of the MySQL database worldwide. What?s more, MySQL is virtually the de facto standard relational database for rapid application development, particularly for the Web. In future, as these fledgling sites mature and their needs broaden, they will become natural customers for Sun?s enterprise support offerings.Sun?s new role as steward of MySQL is sure to ruffle feathers in the software industry, as well -- particularly at Oracle, which, with its recent acquisitions, increasingly competes with Sun in the enterprise application platform arena. In 2005, Oracle bought Innobase, makers of a plug-in component that adds advanced features to MySQL, in what was widely perceived as a competitive swipe at the open source upstart.For his part, MySQL CEO M?rten Mickos has repeatedly denied that his company?s aim is to displace high-end databases such as Oracle?s. And that?s only appropriate; for those customers who demand Oracle?s most advanced features, no other product will do. But Mickos? protestations verge on false modesty. On the low end, MySQL is an absolute pandemic, and it?s already making headway into the mid-tier territory traditionally owned by the likes of Microsoft. That trend is only likely to accelerate with Sun?s backing.What is unclear, however, is whether Sun will take any steps to alter MySQL?s license terms. Licensing and project governance have played key roles in MySQL?s success, and as a result, MySQL?s license policy is somewhat more restrictive than the one that Sun has used for the rest of its software portfolio.Although all MySQL code is available under the GNU GPL (General Public License), the product is developed primarily by full-time employees of MySQL. Furthermore, the MySQL company requests that community developers sign over copyright to their code contributions to the company before those changes become part of the main MySQL code base. This allows the company to offer a separate, commercial version of its database for enterprise customers who don?t want to be bound by the terms of the GPL. Initially, this license structure was used mainly to allow companies to embed the MySQL database into their own products, but the MySQL company was criticized last year for making it more difficult for non-paying customers to download the enterprise version of the database.By comparison, Sun has been freer with its own code, foregoing separate, commercial versions of its products in favor of a subscription-based enterprise support scheme. PostgreSQL is arguably even more free; it is governed in a much more distributed, community-based fashion than MySQL, and its permissive license even allows proprietary derivatives, such as EnterpriseDB.Ironically, however, MySQL?s stringent intellectual property policy may be precisely what makes it so appealing to Sun. Red Hat Database and Sun?s own version of PostgreSQL were merely different retoolings of an existing open source software product, one that customers could just as easily download from elsewhere. To the enterprise IT community at large, however, there?s really only one MySQL -- and from now on, that name will be indelibly associated with Sun. Remember, for all Sun?s talk about open source, this is a company that banks so heavily on its trademarks that it had its stock ticker symbol changed to JAVA.Ah, but there?s the rub. Sun open-sourced the Java platform in 2006, and while the move has been widely hailed by developers, not everyone in the business community was as thrilled with the idea of Sun giving away its crown jewels. As former Sun vice president Larry Singer put it, ?We [at Sun] were spending all of our time and attention ? on things that were important from an intellectual standpoint, important from an innovative standpoint, [but it was] hard to understand how they were going to drive revenue for the company.?So far, MySQL has built a solid business selling open source database software. Whether Sun has the strategic acumen to take that success to the next level, however, remains to be seen. But stay tuned; after all, $1 billion gives Sun a hell of an incentive.
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By James Thorner, St. Petersburg Times, Fla.  Sep. 4--Technology companies used to enjoy rich, long lives: Consider  graybeards like IBM and General Electric.   No longer.   Peter Marcotullio, an SRI International executive visiting St.
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Microsoft is not the realÂ patent threatÂ Linux and open source developers should be worried about, said Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth. In fact, the software giant will itself be fighting against the software patents system within a few years, Shuttleworth predicted.
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Is open source the best bet in a recession?