SugarCRM Studied, Broadband 'Crucial,' EGain, OOCOSPI, NetSuite's Zander

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and we'll play The Jackson Five's "ABC," the last recording Michael Jackson made First Coffee would want on an iPod, then put on PJ Harvey's Stories From The City -- Stories From The Sea. The real tragedy of Wacko Jacko is that he was, along with Prince, Paul McCartney and Stevie Wonder, one of the most ridiculously gifted musicians of his era. Yet those three have full, rich catalogues with years of quality work, while Jackson, who never made a good record without Quincy Jones, had Off The Wall, Thriller and a handful of singles. That's not much for such a rare talent.

You'll be relieved to know that there will not be a "religious war between an open source community on one side and commercial proponents on the other" in Europe, according to IDC.

Rather, says Bo Lykkegaard, research director, European Enterprise Applications and Services, IDC, "it will all come down to a battle over who can provide the customer with the most ERP or CRM per euro."

The research firm has issued a study titled Open Source Enterprise Applications in Europe: Disruption Ahead? examining SugarCRM and open source vendors' adoption in the enterprise applications market "from both a demand side and a supply side," firm officials say.

The study offers in-depth profiles of SugarCRM and other open source application vendors in Europe.


 
DC officials say the survey of 515 Western European IT decision makers in organizations with more than 50 employees showed "surprisingly high usage of open source enterprise applications." IDC identified the "main driver" behind open source adoption as "the absence of an upfront license payment along with a lower total cost of ownership. 

Not that it's overwhelming European business -- nine percent of respondents reported current use of an open-source back-office application and seven percent reported using an open source CRM application. Still, relatively speaking, that's not bad. "In an enterprise applications market in which large vendors boast a ten percent market share, adoption rates of nine percent and seven percent appear very high," says Bo Lykkegaard, research director, European Enterprise Applications and Services, IDC, adding that the survey results "show that open source adoption in ERP and CRM has reached a critical threshold and should now make a 'bleep' on every vendor's radar screen, particularly for those that compete in the mid-market."


 
Other vendors profiled in the study include Compiere, Openbravo, xTuple and vtiger.
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Good news for those of you in the broadband industry: We're addicted. 


 
Economic downturn or no, consumers aren't giving up home broadband services. They'll cut dining out and leisure travel first, according to a series of recent studies sponsored by Alcatel-Lucent.

The global study, conducted by Alcatel-Lucent's Market Advantage Program on the impact of the economic recession on spending for telecom services and "the role broadband services can play in promoting global economic growth and social welfare," determined how consumers prioritize household spending during a recession, "comparing the relative value of a wide variety of specific fee-based services."

So if you're earning your bread off broadband services you appear to be in luck, as the study found them "nearly recession-proof," with 84 percent of consumers identifying broadband as an "essential" network service not on the table for cuts. Heck, you might even get an extra loaf: More consumers globally are even planning to subscribe or upgrade their broadband services, the study found. 


 
Why is broadband so crucial? Key factors identified by the study include a desire to reduce the cost and travel time associated with commuting, and in developed countries a "growing dependence on the Web as an information source, business tool, social network and entertainment venue." Basically, friends, we're junkies who'll give up toothpaste before broadband.

"This clearly shows that people across the world rely on broadband services as a central part of their social and economic lives," says Tim Krause, Chief Marketing Officer for Alcatel-Lucent. Do tell.

The research also turned up some interesting attitudes about broadband from different regions and socio-economic strata. In markets such as France, for example, consumers indicate that the financial crisis has had "a greater negative impact" on their household when compared to consumers in other countries, the study found. Yet people in emerging countries are "more optimistic about the future than those in developed countries" -- two thirds of consumers indicated they are cutting expenditures, 85 percent of consumers from emerging countries indicated that their household economic situation would be the same or better a year from now compared to 64 percent of respondents in the developed countries.
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If you're an American or Canadian business with on-site deployments from certain vendors, and you're not happy, you may be interested in eGain Communications's promotion letting enterprises with "obsolete and non-integrated systems for customer service management" switch to eGain's multichannel customer service with no license fee for acquiring the eGain software to replace existing vendor licenses, one for one. 

The idea behind the promotion, according to eGain officials, is that enterprises with legacy, non-integrated customer service products "face non-existent product road maps or costly, forklift upgrades to new unproven versions." For companies who want something else, Ashu Roy, CEO of eGain says their SafeSwitch Program "will make the decision even easier for them."


 
EGain's selling an alternative, eGain Service, described as a "customer interaction hub software suite" with Web self-service, chat, co-browsing, e-mail, SMS, fax, postal mail and other capabilities on a common platform. "Unlike CRM generalists, eGain has focused on enterprise customer service needs," company officials say.


 
Okay, the fine print: To qualify for the promotion you need to have incumbent on-site software deployments fro Brightware/FirePond, Colloquis, Kaidara, KANA, KNOVA/Consona, Mustang/Quintus, noHold or Talisma. A typical conversion effort would be "in weeks, not months," eGain officials say.
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From Tokyo comes news that the ObjectsOnClouds Open Source Project Initiative, "OOCOSPI" to his friends, is "a worldwide collaborative effort to develop a set of integrated technologies as a cloud computing platform."


 
The ObjectsOnClouds Cloud Applications Computing Platform consists of a Java-based server component (The Ionosphere Server), IDEs for building cloud applications (Aurora), platform-native desktop cloud application clients (Gravity), as well as AJAX/Web-based cloud applications.

Features the ObjectsOnClouds Platform include real-time multi-user collaborative multi-language content editing, version control with instant push notifications upon content changes and fine-grained permission control for secure access to contents. It also has a free-form "natural" database, project officials say, which "abstracts the complexity of traditional relationship databases." The advantage here is that "non-technical people" can create cloud applications.

The Ionosphere Server is a Java EE/GlassFish-based server component, and Aurora is an Integrated Development Environment (IDE) for building cloud applications. As a native application for Mac and Windows, Aurora is "designed to take advantage of the platform's speed and efficiency.," company officials say.


 
Right now the ObjectsOnClouds Project is looking for both professionals and students with "the skills and dedication to open source software development" to become involved in creating the next cloud applications platform. Developer membership is free. Guess what the pay is.
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NetSuite has announced the appointment of veteran technology exec Edward Zander to its board of directors. 


 
Zander was most recently chairman of the board and chief executive officer of Motorola, and was with Sun Microsystems for 15 years before that, serving as president and chief operating officer. NetSuite officials say Zander will also serve on the Compensation Committee and the Nominating and Governance Committee of the Board. 


 
"I am personally excited to have the opportunity to work with him again," says Zach Nelson, CEO of NetSuite. "Cloud computing is the convergence of telecommunications, advanced data center capabilities, and great Web-native software."


 
Zander has also worked as managing director of private equity fund Silver Lake Partners, vice president of marketing at Apollo Computer, and as an engineering and marketing executive with Data General. He is a member of the Board of Trustees at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and a member of the Dean's Advisory Council of the School of Management at Boston University.


 
Zander has served on the board of directors of several technology companies, and in addition to NetSuite he serves on the board of directors of Netezza Corp. and Seagate.

 
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