Denis’ Blog

Rumors have been circulating since 2002 that HP would buy BEA. Since I like risks, I’ve bet that SAP would buy BEA by 2005. I was wrong. SAP did not bought them. Not sure they need BEA anymore. But HP does. BEA market capitalization is ~5 Billions US dollars. HP is flying at ~120B US$. With the premium, that’s a 5% dilution at max. BEA has great products HP do not have: Portal, ESB, BPM, Web 2.0 server side solutions. So I was wrong. HP will buy BEA by the end of 2007. New bet. 2 beers on it.

I’ve just noticed that Hasso Plattner, former founder of SAP AG, has invested in Mindquarry, a interesting open source collaboration solution. The open source market lakes a good collaboration, enterprise ready, solution. Mindquarry can be the missing link.

What amazed me is how fast young companies can build high end solutions:

- In the DMS space, Alfresco (and yes Jean-Thomas, Nuxeo 5 also)
- In the BI space, Pentaho
- In the Supervision and Datacenter Management, Hyperic, Groundwork or OpenQRM
- In the Collaboration space, XWiki
- In the CRM space, SugarCRM
- in the ERP world, OpenBravo
- in the VOIP space, Asterisk
- In the Virtualization Space, Xen
- In the collaboration & Enterprise 2.0 space Mindquarry and Zimbra
- In the Application Integration space Apache ServiceMix, Mule or PeTALS
- In the Portal space Liferay or eXoplatform
- etc, etc..

How can they manage to build so fast so complete solution ?

First, they leverage most of the time existing open source components like Hibernate, JackRabbit, Spring, Dojo Framework to accelerate and industrialize development. They can go faster to what is the key: advanced features and true innovation.

Second, and most important: They understood how to cooperate with a community, and they try to leverage that. Not sure all of them will succeed on the long run, and maybe some of them will leave one day or another the open source model. But it is not important. What is important, is that like the Internet accelerated the changes in the telecom industry, open source is accelerating the mutation of the whole IT industry. New pricing models, more for less. Promising. Exciting

It’s done. I’m FONed. I’ve received my FON and installed it in 30 seconds. I know this is a wanna-be-a-geek thing, since none in my neighborhood need a shared wifi access. But it does not matter. I’m happy to be part of that, and I will have more options when I will travel to find free wifi access.If one of my beloved reader wants to have one FONERA for 20$/euros, just drop me a mail.

BTW, I remember back in 2000 when my former colleague Cédric Nicolas told me that one day wifi mesh networks will compete UMTS and other 3G services. This time is coming Cédric