Kaltura is an open-source video application server that competes with the likes of Brightcove. In a nutshell, it helps companies put video on their Web sites.
Kaltura recently released an integration of its product for Drupal, which was a great way to quickly enable its technology for broad distribution. Of more interest to me, however, is that Kaltura was recently selected to power the video on Footbo, a dedicated social network for soccer (football).
With more than 1 billion soccer fans on the planet, Kaltura couldn't do much better than to tap into this passion, starting with Footbo. From the press release:
Footbo has integrated Kaltura's video management platform, allowing Footbo admins to manage and moderate video content, create playlists based on tags, ratings and other criteria, track video statistics and usage, and more. Kaltura's platform also enables users to upload videos and photos and import them from leading social networks and content sites. Kaltura's platform enables Footbo to easily add over time more advanced interactive functionalities such as content discovery, subtitles, remixing and editing tools.
It sounds awesome. It also sounds like a copyright train wreck waiting to happen. I should know. I was booted off YouTube for posting some video I took at an Arsenal match.
But that's not Kaltura's problem to solve, and I was excited to give the Footbo service a try, starting with that most divine of teams, Arsenal. Watching the video of Arsenal's last good season (2003-2004), I nearly broke into tears, all enabled by Kaltura.
My Arsenal fetish satisfied, at least for the moment, I'm back, and I'm impressed by the Kaltura technology. As an end user, it makes for seamless video integration into an existing site. As a publisher, it promises to be much the same. This is an open-source project worth watching.
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- video,
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Wow. Satyam Computer Services, the world's fourth-largest systems integrator, just declared that $1 billion, or roughly 95 percent, of its Q2 cash...isn't.
Despite using PricewaterhouseCoopers as its accounting firm, Satyam's chairman, Ramalinga Raju, today declared that he has "systematically falsified accounts," as reported in The New York Times.
Wow. 53,000 employees serving one-third of the Fortune 500, and yet so much of its heft is a lie. Virtually all of the cash and bank loans Satyam reported in its second quarter do not exist. More than $1 billion in paper lies.
How it started or, rather, why it persisted, is a lesson in the importance of honesty, early and often:
In the four-and-a-half page letter distributed by the Bombay stock exchange, Mr. Raju described a small discrepancy that grew beyond his control. "What started as a marginal gap between actual operating profit and the one reflected in the books of accounts continued to grow over the years. It has attained unmanageable proportions as the size of company operations grew," he wrote. "It was like riding a tiger, not knowing how to get off without being eaten."
The first step down the wrong road led to many more, and ultimately to a situation in which it was easier to keep lying than to come clean. In Satyam's fraud is a lesson for us all.
Apple may be the poster child for showing the industry how to compete effectively with Microsoft, but the company isn't free of Redmond's long arm just yet.
Despite spending years, and millions of dollars in research and development, on its own suite of productivity software, 77 percent of Mac users stick with Microsoft Office, according to a TechFlash report.
I love my Mac, but I couldn't use it without Office. In this, I'm sure I'm not alone, which must give Apple pause whenever it celebrates its rising Mac market share.
Perhaps this is why Apple is releasing a SharePoint-esque knockoff designed around its Pages and Numbers programs, taking Microsoft head-on in document collaboration.
The strategy won't work. Until Apple actually starts winning market share with its iWork suite, it won't matter if the five or six customers who actually use it can collaborate with each other.
No, to end Microsoft's latent stranglehold on its Mac market share, Apple needs to do one of two things vis-a-vis office productivity: go disruptive with a Web-based offering in the manner that Google has, or invest deeply in OpenOffice.org to make it a viable, rock-solid enterprise competitor to Microsoft Office. The first path leads to Mountain View (Google). The second? To Menlo Park (Sun).
Regardless of which path Apple takes, at some point, it must address Microsoft Office. Yes, people could just run Office in a virtual machine or through Boot Camp, but that really only deepens its dependence on Microsoft.
What do you think Apple should do? Or does it matter?
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- Microsoft,
- Strategy,
- Apple
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- market share,
- SharePoint,
- Microsoft Office,
- iWork,
- competition
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Apparently, someone forgot to tell Sun Microsystems CEO Jonathan Schwartz that the market for tech mergers and acquisitions is dead.
On Wednesday, Sun announced that it has acquired Q-layer, a cloud-computing management and automation company (see CNET's coverage here):
Imagine scaling up instantly to massive capacities to meet changing needs. Then imagine doing it on the Web, without having to invest in new infrastructure, train new personnel, or license new software. That's cloud computing, and Sun is making it a reality.
That's Sun's pitch, and it sounds promising. Cloud computing is a great fit with Sun's past and with its current technology portfolio, including open-source MySQL, the database leader on the Web. But is the market big enough yet to fill the holes in Sun's declining revenue?
That's the big question on Sun. I'm optimistic on its strategy, going forward, as I think its use of open source to drive add-on sales is smart and increasingly well-defined, and I also think, as I noted previously, that cloud computing is a good fit for Sun. But neither are likely to pay big dividends in the short term, which begs the question, can Wall Street be patient with Sun during this transition period?
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- Q-layer,
- cloud computing,
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I've blogged about Marketcetera before, a cool open-source hedge fund trading platform. Later this week I'll be posting an update after I interview the Marketcetera team, but keep bumping into stories that make me wish the interview were today, not Thursday.
For example, Businessweek recently offered up an opinion piece from a San Francisco-based hedge fund trader, who argued for an open-source trading platform:
After headcount, a typical hedge fund's largest expense item is technology. Much of that expense goes to the trading systems that we use. Let me tell you a secret: Our "secret sauce" is our trading strategies--it's not our systems for trading. These platforms can cost even a smaller fund like mine hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars a year. Look, I just need a trading platform that executes our strategies. The software needs to connect to other systems that our different brokers and exchanges use and complete the trades driven by our increasingly automated strategies. This trading platform market is probably a $1 billion annual industry today.
It's also exactly what Marketcetera already offers. Has the Marketcetera team called this guy? I'm hoping the answer is 'Yes.'
Computer Business Review recently went into detail on the Marketcetera trading platform, calling out its high download numbers and promise for the hedge fund industry. For those who think that hedge fund traders can afford to waste money on expensive, bloated systems, this article offers good reason to believe otherwise.
In this environment, no one can afford to waste money. It doesn't grow on trees or hedge fund trading desks. But I believe Marketcetera is well poised to help hedge funds trade more efficiently and, hence, make more money with fewer resources. Yes, even hedge funds need to do more with less.
I can't wait to talk with the team later this week.
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- Startups
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- hedge funds,
- IT spending,
- open source
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Not that anyone was in doubt, but The New York Times is reporting that venture capitalists are struggling to sell their start-ups. With technology entrepreneurs having little prospect of a big exit through the IPO or M&A markets, is the bi-weekly paycheck the new god of Silicon Valley?
Maybe, maybe not. Silicon Valley culture is heavily entrepreneurial and that's unlikely to change anytime soon. However, I suspect that the rank and file at companies like Digg are going to be much more concerned with their paychecks than their underwater stock options for the next year. Cash is king in a recession, both for companies and for their employees.
As BusinessWeek suggests, the short-term effects on Silicon Valley aren't positive:
Declining valuations are throwing a wrench into the gears of Silicon Valley's wealth machine. In the worst cases, the money dries up and startups are shut down. But even for fortunate companies such as Digg that can still raise money, complications abound. Falling prices can make it harder to attract the best and brightest. Morale can suffer, and workers with stock options underwater may be less likely to stick around. Such pressures can force companies to grant new options at lower prices or reprice existing options, which can infuriate venture capitalists backing the company.
On the other hand, the recession is doing one thing that nothing else seemed capable of doing: getting technology start-ups to focus on revenue and profit, rather than eyeballs and downloads. From Digg to Sun to Google, the focus on actually making money will have long-term, positive implications for Silicon Valley.
Indeed, I'd go so far as to suggest that this recession will be the making of the next Microsoft (or IBM, if you'd prefer), but one born and raised on the Web. It will start with the employees that make up this and other technology companies, employees who now have the most serious incentive of all to help their companies figure out how to make money from an open Web and open source: their paycheck.
Larry Dignan at ZDNet calls out a significant customer concern with SaaS: data lock-in, particularly if a SaaS vendor goes out of business. How can a SaaS customer get its data out of a failed SaaS system without undergoing the burden of escrow agreements?
The answer is simple, but perhaps not palatable to SaaS vendors: open source a version of their software.
SugarCRM does this, letting its customers run SugarCRM "in the cloud" but giving them the code via an open-source license so that they can support their own deployment if necessary. Why couldn't a Salesforce.com or RightNow do the same?
Answer? They could, and wouldn't even need to open source their code today. Perhaps they could create a special escrow agreement that triggers open sourcing the code upon a winding down of operations? There are problems with this, of course, as it may diminish the value of the vendor's assets, but it's a relatively clean resolution to a customer concern, and one that is already being used in the industry.
Disclosure: I am an advisor to SugarCRM.
I suggested on Monday that Dell should acquire Red Hat to build its software business with open source. While there is a range of valid concerns about such a move, perhaps the biggest complaint was, "What if Microsoft doesn't like it?"
This concern seems to be all-conclusive for some, but I'm not sure why. In case no one has noticed, the days of kowtowing to Microsoft's desktop dominance are, or should be, over. Apple is the best example as to why.
The media is fond of calling out the Mac's rising fortunes against Windows, but many apparently forget that a little more than 11 years ago, Apple was on the ropes and had to humbly accept a $150 million investment from Microsoft. Microsoft, largely playing to the U.S. antitrust authorities, made a big deal of porting Office, Internet Explorer, and other applications to the Mac platform. This move would pave the way for Apple's resurgence just a few short years later.
Surely, if anyone was in a position to cater to Microsoft's whims, it would have been Apple, whose very existence largely depended on the good graces of Microsoft. How many of us would have been able to switch to the Mac, had Office not run natively on it?
And yet Apple fought. Slowly but surely, Apple began to make announcements that must have irked Microsoft, like the Safari browser in 2003, eventually taking its applications like iTunes and Safari to Microsoft's door by porting them to Windows in a bid to make Windows users comfortable with a Mac experience.
Today, Microsoft continues to improve its applications for the Mac platform, announcing this week, for example, the Microsoft Document Collaboration Companion for Mac to improve the SharePoint experience for Mac users. Apple? Well, let's just say that it continues to stick its finger in Microsoft's eye.
Apple did what few besides Google have dared to do: defy Microsoft. Apple, more than most, was dependent on Microsoft, and yet it still refused to pull any punches against its benefactor. Judging from the company's market share gains, I'd call its strategy an unqualified success.
For those who insist that Dell and others set themselves up with an umbilical existence to Microsoft's whims, I suggest that you take a close look at Apple. Companies that try to placate Microsoft and avoid ruffling its feathers often find that Microsoft has no such compunctions about avoiding stepping on their toes.
Microsoft is a big company, one that must grow by expanding into new markets, thereby competing with its one-time partners. Today, Dell serves a complementary market to Microsoft. Tomorrow? Well, everything is on the table for tomorrow's competition.
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- Apple
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Dell's biggest problem is that its one-time differentiation--low-cost hardware assembly and distribution--is now common industry practice. Indeed, it now routinely gets beaten at its own game, as called out in a recent article by Ashlee Vance in The New York Times.
Dell's growth, to revenue of $56 billion in 2006 from $5.3 billion in 1996, has come from within. But company executives now concede that they need to make a large acquisition, or a series of them, to tap the repeating, higher-margin revenue streams that come from the software and services businesses....
"It's not a question of size (of acquisition)," said Brian T. Gladden, chief financial officer at Dell. "I think the question is more around diversifying our revenue base and becoming bigger in some things that are attractive for the long term...(Servers, storage systems, software, or services) is where we have to do an acquisition to become relevant. There is no question."
Assuming that this is correct, and that Dell needs to look beyond hardware for growth, it could hardly do better than to buy Red Hat, or possibly Sun or Novell, for two reasons. The first is that buying Red Hat might be the least painful option for Dell getting into software in earnest, as it would offer Dell a close analog to what it has done to hardware: a commoditized software business that depends heavily on low-cost assembly and distribution. Dell and Red Hat were made for each other, in many ways.
The second reason is that buying Red Hat would also position Dell to do what no other software company has done, but which offers tremendous financial promise: consolidate the open-source ecosystem to provide huge value to chief information officers. I argued earlier that Red Hat should do this and become the ASCAP of the software industry, allowing CIOs to subscribe to its ever broadening portfolio of open-source solutions. Dell could expedite this, bringing cash and heft to the relationship.
Of course, Dell doesn't have much of a history of acquisitions, and might struggle to incorporate Red Hat, or any other software vendor for that matter. Red Hat, for its part, has a checkered history with acquisitions, though it is now making its JBoss acquisition pay healthy dividends.
Red Hat is brilliant at consolidating and delivering open-source software. Dell is brilliant at consolidating and delivering commodity hardware. Dell needs software to grow, and Red Hat could use some financial cushion as it seeks to expand its business beyond application servers and operating systems. Imagine if Dell/Red Hat could start offering open-source customer relationship management, enterprise resource planning, IT management, and more.
If you were a sales guy calling on CIOs, wouldn't you want to be selling the Dell/Red Hat suite of hardware, software, and services? The two companies routinely top CIO Insight's annual CIO surveys--combining them would give CIOs an amazing alternative to Microsoft and other solutions.
Update: The VAR Guy smacks me around a bit for thinking Dell would imbibe Red Hat. His thinking is strong, but I still think it depends far too much on Red Hat boxing itself into a corner as "the Linux company." If Red Hat gets ambitious with open source, all bets are off.
TechNewsWorld suggests that the technology industry may be relatively insulated from job losses in the recession. Yes, technology has its share of job cuts, and any cut is painful if you're on the receiving end, but there are bright spots in the economy.
Open source is one of them.
While the article points to a few different areas of technology that should comparatively thrive in a downturn, as I note in the article, open source is particularly well-suited to a troubled economy:
In a recession, headcount looks like a cost center, but open source can turn employees into profit centers -- or, at worst, into less costly cost centers.
Why? Because to the extent that you're savvy with repurposing others' code, it means you can write a lot less code while simultaneously getting a lot more done.
Google is perhaps the classic example of this. Google writes a heck of a lot of software, but it also borrows heavily from Linux, MySQL, various Apache projects, etc. Google arguably wouldn't be Google without open source, as it's dependent on the cost and flexibility advantages that open source delivers.
Enterprise IT can take a cue from Google and make its employees more efficient by encouraging them to use more open source, a topic that Google's Chris DiBona will be addressing at this year's Open Source Business Conference. For those that already do, you're ahead of the pack (and making a nice income as a result).
Do more with less. That's the open-source ethos, and one that should pay handsomely in a recession.
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- open source,
- employment,
- recruiting,
- recession
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