July 31, 2008
Snapping Together Open Source Projects
Earlier this year, in March, I was interviewed by Tina Gasperson for an article she wrote for linux.com on the role of open source software in the enteprise. I had asserted that companies we've done business with over the past decade are now more than ever remaining open to -- and in some cases embracing -- open source solutions for certain business challenges (go to Link).
I had a meeting with an old colleague/friend, Douglas Maxwell, who works over at Lippincott Mercer, a global branding agency with offices here in NYC. He mentioned that they are using an open source product for mail server (calendaring/scheduling, Blackberry integration, general mail services) called Zimbra (www.zimbra.com). I wondered whether the technology integrated with any CRM solution like Sugar CRM (www.sugarcrm.com) since many of the commercial packages integrate with Exchange Server. No such integration is in place at this time. I am not endorsing the use of Zimbra, I need to check it out a little more before I can make any kind of recommendation. Douglas speaks highly of it.
Douglas also mentioned they were using a collaboration product called Hot Project (www.hotproject.com). It appears to be a LAMP-based solution that offers some of the functionality you might get out of Sharepoint, with document management, version control, workflows, notifications and other such portal functionalities. I'm in hot pursuit to track down the makers of the product -- somewhere in the U.K., but my sense (as well as Douglas' experiences with the vendor) is they're quite busy. This isn't open source per se since a company is making the product, so it doesn't seem to fall under the GNU GPL. However, it is LAMP-based, so theoretically could snap into the overall picture of LAMP-based solutions in an enterprise.
I had a thought; What if there was an open source project that was a sort of program office for related enterprise technologies, and that project was focused on enterprise application integration with these related solutions? Thus, the effort could be to standardize the interfaces among the different classes of applications (portal, CMS, DAM, CRM, ERP, accounting, mail services, workflow management, etc).
The obvious challenge would be that the hundreds of solutions within a class of applications -- say CMS -- might make it difficult to standardize beyond the obvious Web service calls. That would cause the 'EAI project' to fall back into the hands of the integrator. Thats not necessarily a bad thing, except then we don't gain ground with enterprise application integration of LAMP-based solutions if the knowledge and IP rests in the hands of the local company.
It may very well be that someone will step up and select what he thinks are the best-in-class LAMP-based (ideally copyleft) solutions for the enterprise, then integrate them. It would be a mammoth task, but once accomplished could provide great value to organizations that need the business framework as an antidote to the big-box solutions out there in the marketplace.
I think this idea may be a bit ahead of its time, but there could come a day when it happens. Hope I'm around, or even part of it!
Posted at 09:52 am by Joseph Bachana
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