There is alot of great work going on in the Zend community and we recently have made some good connections there. With more and more PHP development going on it is no surprise to see the success happening in the Zend community. Zend recently published they have over 27,000 customers taking advantage of their technology. Great job guys!
The Zend Developer Zone is a great source of information and we recently listed EasyIngres as a project to get involved there as well. If you’re working with Ingres and PHP, here’s a good page to help get you started.
Ingres Vectorwise continues to break speed records and early indications look strong for this project. The team is working hard as they launched the Technology Preview Program this week. The Technology Preview Program is an excellent opportunity to get first hand experience with Ingres Vectorwise and see what this technology can do for your BI solutions. Signing up for the Technology Preview Program is easy and it’s a great opportunity to help provide direction for the project.
The team is very open to suggestions and it’s a great time to get engaged to help drive this project forward. We would love to hear what you have to say about the project and your ideas for future product improvements.
It was great to read the post this am where Brian Gentile, Japsersoft CEO, announced Jaspersoft 3.7. This release brings a number of key features to the market and shows how BI tools are continuing to grow. Sure he talked about all the cool features that the product brings to market like in-memory analysis, charts and graphs made with Adobe flash but the real news in this was how Jaspersoft has figured out how to work the open source model.
Jaspersoft has done a great job in working with partners and shared that half their paid subscriptions come from this channel. He talks about how Jaspersoft is delivered in software appliances and to deliver services in the cloud, both from partners. We at Ingres are strong partners with Jaspersoft and can attest to the energy from the team and the interest from the market.
Jaspersoft has chosen an open source model where they release a community version of the product for users to take advantage of while they reserve selected features for paying customers. This model works well for Jaspersoft and coupled with their strong partnering capabilities have led them to being cash-flow positive. It is delicate balance that the guys at Jaspersoft admit they have to watch carefully but this dual- distribution model is certainly working for this BI startup.
Being in open source for the last 10 years, it’s great to see success from other open source companies and I’m always interested in the business models behind them.
Tom Rabon and I continued our discussion with more information about Open Source for America , the organization, vision for 2010 and how members can get involved. The organization has made significant strides this year in growing it’s membership to over 1200 with numerous working groups. It’s a great organization to get involved with and has lots of opportunity for members to contribute.
Part III of the podcast focus on the Open Source for America organization and it’s vision for the future.
Tom Rabon and I continued our discussion around open source use in government applications and what more was possible. It has been most encouraging to see all the openess and transparency efforts underway by the Obama administration and part II of this podcast continues to share these ideas.
Take a listen and let us know about other examples of ideas where you see open source being utilized in government applications around the globe.
I had the opportunity recently to talk with Tom Rabon, EVP Corporate Affairs, about some of the recent activity with open source in and around the US government. In case you haven’t met Tom, he is a wealth of knowledge when it comes to government relations and has been furthering the open source cause for government at Red Hat. He is part of the original brain trust that help found Open Source for America . Tom agreed to participating in a podcast to share his ideas and some of the interesting things going on with OSfA.
Take a listen to Part I below as Tom discusses the recent DOD Memorandum, recent use of open source in government and GOSCON .
I am always impressed with the wealth of knowledge that the Ingres team pulls together and this is no exception. Last week the team had an opportunity to host a workshop and help new users get started on various open source projects. As a result Michael Flower who is responsible for Educational Services here at Ingres created some nice wiki pages to help users get started. Topics such as how to Install Ingres , How to create a database in Ingres, and How to import data to Ingres are all recent additions to the wiki with complete instructions and screen shots. Check them out and let us know other topics you would like to see more information on.
In my last post, I discussed how the White House is using open source (drupal) to build the whitehouse.gov website. This is a gread validation point for the US Government and open source and if that wasn’t enough to signal open source growth in Washington we get this guidance on open source from the DOD. This topic is getting quite a bit of press around the web from Matt Asay, Jay Lyman (451 Group) and it is welcomed news to see this guidance for open source at the DOD. One can only agree the US Government is no laggard here and is definately leading the charge.
Last week I was at GOSCON and had the opportunity to hear David Wennergren, Dep Asst SEc of Defense for Information Managmeent and Technology/ Deputy Chief Information Officer speak. Mr. Wennergren was the author for the DOD memorandum and he talked about the advantages of open source.
It was great to hear someone in the federal space talk about open source and I wanted to share some of his thoughts around on open source:
By sharing information openly, teams are able to work more efficeintly and effectively. Ideas build on other ideas and so goes the trend.
Quick and inexpensive means to deploy your application and assess your progress in real time.
Future must look like iphone apps – Where users can quickly find what they need or develop it themselves. Must be easy to plug into.
Secure Information Sharing – These two things must be managed together.
Power of the Cloud – ‘Server huggers’ must move past control and trust. The world doesn’t work in silos anymore.
These ideas aren’t new to the open source world but to hear them spoken and accepted in such a forum was great news. The time is right for open source and it looks like the US Government is helping lead the way.
In case you missed it on Saturday, the White House switched the whitehouse.gov site over to run on open source platforms. It’s a big step for open source solutions and providers showing the capability for open source solutions. Reasons cited for the choice included security, state of the art technology, openess and transparency that open source provides.
It’s great to see open source solutions get more visibility especially in our government and what better place to start than at the White House.
There’s something I really like about being involved in open source and that is all the work that is given back to the community, especially in the academia space. Ingres has been involved with academia since it’s beginnings at Berkely and now with the University of Toronto with the Undergraduate Capstone Open Source Projects (UCOSP) . We started discussion earlier this year with Greg Wilson, Asst Professor at the University of Toronto and he helped us engage with UCOSP. UCOSP started from the University of Toronto where students from universities across Canada and the US work together in a distributed work environment on open source projects. Ingres is participating in this opportunity and it’s great to see the excitement among the students as they learn valuable skills in contributing to open source projects, how to work in a distributed environment while working on real world problems.
Other academic project Ingres has participated include Ingres Vectorwise, open source bootcamps (FOSSLC), alliances and guest lectures at Carleton University in Ottawa, Ilmenau University in Germany, NC State University in the US, Warwick University& Leeds Met University in the UK are just some of the universities we enjoy working with.
Another interesting group working is Open Source for America, they have a working group that Ingres participates is working with to help educators get more involved with open source.
We find when we work with the various universities not only are sharing knowledge but gaining tremendous insight into our products and future solutions as well. We get the opportunity to work with bright individuals that don’t have preconceived ideas and they just want to write better code. It’s a win win for all.
I always enjoy hearing how other open source members are working with local universities and would enjoy to hear what is going on with your local community. Let us how your project is engaging with students and ideas you may have to help academia communities get more involved with open source.
There’s lots of ways to get involved, so pick one that meets your needs and get started.
Deb WoodsVice President of Product ManagementDeb provides leadership regarding future product direction and is responsible for the Ingres products in the marketplace. Read more about Deb Woods and the team
