“You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change
something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”
- R. Buckminster Fuller
What does Software as a Service (SaaS) have to do with open source? Not much,
you might think.
SaaS, as you probably know, is a delivery- and business-model for software
that has been proving quite disruptive to the traditional software business -
just as the Open Source model has been. The two combined may turn out to be
even more so.
Internet Companies, Hosters, Telcos, Carriers, Service Data Centers and
others, have been making money for more than a decade by providing services
based on Open Source software. Unfortunately for the makers of such software
- Linux, Apache, PHP, MySQL, Postfix, Sendmail – just to name a few -
it didn’t help them to generate much revenues (sometimes,... (more)
Money is being made with Open Source. Some make spectacular money by
exploiting Open Source (Google, Apple) and some things wouldn't even exist
without it (Internet, Software as a Service, Cloud Computing) - so it really
boils down to finding the right business model.
BusinessWeek has a good one on making money and growing fast in the open
source world, titled "Open Source: An Open Question for Red Hat and Others".
The general theme is: Open Source companies have a tough time growing fast
and making profits - with RedHat and Novell as examples - altough "Software
supplier Red Hat... (more)
Yahoo is unloading Zimbra and with it the whole SMB hosting business. While
the Zimbra part is interesting to us here at Open-Xchange, as it also shows
some technology related weaknesses, the bigger picture may be even more
interesting - especially to Service Providers.
Tier1's Phil Shih get's it right (as usual): "...Yahoo is also set to unload
Zimbra, which Yahoo has had little success leveraging across its small
business customer base, although it continues to grow. T1R does not agree
that Zimbra had (or has) no hope within Yahoo because it is a solely
enterprise-focused prod... (more)
To meet the "who is who" of our Service Provider and Channel Partners you had
to be at the Rhein-Energie football stadium in Cologne on Oct. 8, 2009. The
day before 30 had registered for our technical workshop, 55 showed up so we
split it into two. At the summit we and our 9 summit partners where very
happy with the attendence, in total we had 120 people from all over the
world. The venue was exciting, a whole stadium just for us (and yes, in a
couple of years we intend to fill it up ;-).
What was really unique was that we had a good mix of Service Providers and
Channel Partners... (more)
If the Internet did one thing, it dramatically accelerated the flow of
information. This, in turn, has led to additional pressures on today's
white-collar workers - the so-called knowledge workers.
A reply to a written letter may well take a week - more than adequate in the
not-too-distant past. Today, not replying to an e-mail within a day is close
to an offense - and watching the "Crackberry Heads" and Instant Messengers -
"expected" response time is coming down to minutes and even seconds. One
thing that made this possible was the availability of open source operating
systems... (more)
Rafael Laguna is Chief Executive Officer of Open-Xchange Inc., of which he was co-founder and chairman of the board until he took over responsibility as CEO in January 2008. In 2001, Laguna initiated the technology partnership between Open-Xchange's development team and SUSE Linux - today a Novell business. The result of this partnership, SUSE Linux Openexchange Server, became the best selling Linux-based groupware solution. Most recently, Laguna was crucial to the extention of Open-Xchange's product portfolio and formed the partnership with the world’s largest web host by known servers, 1&1 Internet AG.
David Lucas
Cathy Lopez
Shaul Efraim
Terence Martin Breslin
Cory Marchand
David Hughes
James Carlini
John Iffert
Dan Stolts
Joe Zeto
