As Open Source continues to grow and expand so do the companies successful using this technology.  The ZDNet article “5OSS Up-and-Comers to Watch” showcases some of the hottest open source software companies in the market.  Before listing the top 5 the article first gives special recognition to the company Red Hat. After netting $1.3 billion in 2012, it became the first open source company to hit the billion dollar revenue mark.

With Red Hat’s example in mind, ZDNet Asia spoke to industry watchers to find out which other OSS vendors could potentially take after the industry trailblazer, in terms of monetizing their products or being in position to meet present and future business needs.

Black Duck Software is well known for providing strategies, products and services for enabling enterprise-scale adoption of open source software.  They prove that not only can they build commercial products, but they also do it successfully using open source tools.  Sencha is another up and coming start and it provides users with Open Source Web applications frameworks.  Both major enterprises and independent developers count on their technology for their internal and external business applications.

Next up is Hortonworks, the spinoff from Yahoo, which some are calling the next Red hat.  Puppet Labs provides uses Ruby programming language and provides server automation frameworks which are used by a growing number of enterprises.  Last on the list is Zenoss, which is a system management provider, which has grown to prominence and is used in several large IT vendors such as Cisco Systems.  Open Source Software companies are definitely on the rise and with other notables not mentioned such as LucidWorks there is no sign of them slowing down.

April Holmes, September 20, 2012

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