Category Archives: Flexible

Black Duck On Open Source

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Three months into 2013 and no one has rundown how open source is fairing so far.  LinuxInsider finally took the initiative with “Black Duck’s Dave Gruber And Peter Vescuso: Open Source Is Maturing.”  Black Duck does not have its own open source software, instead the company helps software developers build better software faster through open source.   The article is an interview with Dave Gruber the Software Director of Developer Programs and Peter Vescuso the Executive Vice President of Marketing and Business Development, asking them about how open source has matured and where it still needs growth.  In the interview, the pair mentions they keep close watch on the open source community and have ideas on new trends.  There are many rookies that Black Duck believe have dynamite projects, mostly with Javascript and a few with non-browser functionality.  They keep track of projects via Github, SourceForge, and Bitbucket.

Because of open source, Vescuso and Gruber mention that the enterprise market is growing rapidly.  To continue growth, Vescuso says:

We are trying to do some educating around that with regard with our own consulting organization. I’m saying, however, that it is a general market trend. At the same time, enterprises are engaging directly with communities. These organizations are looking to influence the direction. They want to make sure that their changes and patches, etc. are part of the mainstream so they are looking to become extensions of those organizations. The whole software development process has gone through a lot of very positive changes, all around open source technology and methods.

Open source is more viewed from a profit standpoint and the entire community has insights that used to regulated to a small niche.  The biggest thing the open source community needs is to put all the pieces together and build on that foundation.  Consumers, though, are still not aware they are using open source.  Black Duck gives more of a general overview, but nothing about where open source is going immediately.  LucidWorks, an open source search vendor, is headed down a path that delivers reliable enterprise, Cloud and Big Data applications to customers.

Whitney Grace, April 3, 2013

Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Beyond Search

Liferay Continues To Expand

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It is the perfect time for open source vendors to take new risks and grow their company.  Liferay, one of the leading open source software providers, has seen record growth according to The Times Union article, “Liferay Reports Another Year of Double-Digit Growth.”  Liferay’s revenue increased over 50% as well as expanding its business and community ecosystems.  The success comes from the global opportunities in health care, financial services, and government.

Demand for Liferay’s products continue to grow, mostly for its Liferay Portal Enterprise Edition product.  Clients are flocking to the open source company and its projects continue to see rapid success.  Also Liferay has opened offices in Tokyo, Paris, London, and the US Midwest as a result of the demand.

Liferay has every reason to be proud:

‘I’m very pleased to announce another successful year, delivering Liferay’s solutions to clients around the world in sectors adopting open source at a high rate,’ said Bryan Cheung, Liferay’s CEO. ‘Last year’s growth is a testament to the Liferay platform’s ability to address today’s wide-ranging enterprise needs such as increasing customer engagement online and managing complex business content and processes. Liferay’s persistent global growth in all areas, including customers, partners, and community members, doesn’t show any signs of slowing down in 2013.’

Liferay’s forecast for 2013 is just as record-breaking, maybe even seeing growth in the triple digits.  Liferay has the enterprise portal market in the bag just as LucidWorks’ enterprise search applications are demonstrating power and reliability that makes great strides forward.

Whitney Grace, March 12, 2013

Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Beyond Search

How To Be Innovative

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On All Things D, CEO Bryan Cheung of the open source leader Liferay wrote a piece called, “How Innovation Happens (And Why It Doesn’t, When it Doesn’t).”  The article discusses that businesses need to do two things well: create products that deliver value to its customers and get the products to the market conveniently and quickly.  It highlights the recent legal battle between Samsung and Apple.  Samsung infringed on Apple’s patents, but what they did was deliver phones and tablets quickly from conception to distribution.  While they may have the second part of Cheung’s philosophy down, but the South Korean company has yet to offer a product that makes an impact like Apple.  Apple is willing to take risks, while other companies are happy to ride on its coattails.

Cheung likens this to open source in that it can be delivered quickly and offers products that are top of the line:

But this highly collaborative and open way of writing software can also lead to a lot of new ideas, and we’ve experienced this as well. Because our software is freely downloadable, Liferay’s ecosystem of users, partners and customers grew very large, and some used our products in ways they weren’t designed for. Because our source code is open, people have found new solutions to old problems themselves, instead of waiting for us to fix things. So it turns out that what’s best for operational efficiency and what spurs innovation can be aligned.

He also offers some advice about how to be more innovative.  He leaves off by saying innovation is not just about new ideas, but about applying ideas to new situations.  LucidWorks did the same with Apache Lucene for its search applications.

Whitney Grace, March 7, 2013

Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Beyond Search

LucidWorks Growth Centers on User Experience

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The recent Forbes article, “LucidWorks: Bringing Search to Big Data,” is food for thought for Andrea Hayden at the Beyond Search blog.  Her work was picked up by the LucidWorks blog and titled, “LucidWorks Growth Focuses on the User Experience and Search Features.”  Hayden states that LucidWorks is gaining ground because of its devotion to the user experience, but that does not mean that the LucidWorks Big Data solution doesn’t have serious chops.  Hayden writes:

Created in 2008 as Lucid Imagination, the team is adept at managing and developing in the ever-shifting enterprise search marketplace. Changing the company’s business model to become innovators in the open source technology realm and now tackling the global emphasis on Big Data, the developers are aware of what needs to be done to fully contribute and make an impact in the expanding market. With a commitment to innovation and user-experience, we agree with Forbes about the future of LucidWorks.

The key is to unlock Big Data stores in a way that provides meaning and usefulness, but do so in an intuitive interface.  LucidWorks is definitely leading that charge and offering customer support and training along the way.  The power of open source lies in its flexibility and cost effectiveness, and on those counts LucidWorks cannot be beat.

Emily Rae Aldridge, November 14, 2012

Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext.

Apache Foundation Getting Good Feedback on Lucene Solr Upgrades

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In the days following the release of Lucene and Solr 4.0 from the Apache Foundation, good reviews have been racking up.  Additionally, LucidWorks, a company who builds its enterprise search tools on top of the solutions, is sending formal congratulations and hosting celebrations.  Read more in the Virtual Strategy article, “LucidWorks Congratulates Apache Foundation on General Release of Solr 4.0.”

The article states:

Integrated tightly with the Apache Lucene search library, the combination, Lucene/Solr, is the industry’s most widely used platform for writing real-time embedded search applications that can scale to handle billions of documents and high query volumes. Solr is considered by many to be the open source standard for fast, flexible and scalable implementation. To congratulate the Apache Solr community on this release, LucidWorks, the trusted name in Search, Discovery and Analytics, invites the community to mark the occasion by sharing praise for Solr and posting comments to the Solr 4.0 goes GA blog post located on SearchHub.org.

The growth of multi-structured data is at an all-time high, and LucidWorks is rising to the occasion.  This year the company went through a name change and rebranding, helping to clarify their mission and purpose to their customers.  They remain the most sought after and trusted open source enterprise search solution.  The SearchHub.org blog mentioned above is yet another way to offer a sense of community and means of support to customers.

Emily Rae Aldridge, November 1, 2012

Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext.

Oak Investment Partners gives Attivio first Outside Funding

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Helping companies turn unstructured data into a business knowledge gold mine is the main focus for many start-up tech companies. One such tech company, Attivio, recently announced they have received their first round of outside funding. Details can be read in the Boston.com article, “Attivio collects $34 Million in New Funding to Help Companies Figure Out What They Know.” The investment is explained,

Oak Investment Partners is leading a $34 million round. ‘Before this, we had money from the founding team, but no outside venture capital,’ Riaz says. The company got its start in 2007.

Plans for the funding is also explained,

The new funding will primarily go to sales and marketing, but the company also plans to dedicate some of the $34 million to additional product development. The company is hiring in all of its offices, in Massachusetts, Israel, Germany, and the UK.

Attivio founder Ali Riaz was previously president of FAST Search & Transfer, an enterprise search company sold to Microsoft in 2008. The funding is good news, but funneling most to marketing rather than developing more innovative solutions and improvements may not be the best for customers. When it comes to enterprise search, it may be worth it to look at solutions from the open source community. LucidWorks Search is a commercial-grade and cost-effective development platform that allows for building highly scalable search applications that can be deployed on-premise, in the cloud, or a hybrid deployment. In addition, the open source community is dedicated to collaborating and developing innovative solutions.

Philip West, October 31, 2012

Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext.

Good Design is at the Forefront of IT

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Before the dawn of the Internet, when people mentioned the word “innovation” what they meant was groundbreaking technology. Think driverless cars, electron microscopes, and mobile phones. Now, innovation is closely tied up with design – sleek dxand intuitive interfaces, easy-to-navigate websites, and so on. There’s Apple, Google, and a whole bunch that has made tons of money from successful design ideas. The article “Why Good Design Is Finally A Bottom Line Investment” tells us why:

The back-end nuts and bolts eventually fade as a competitive advantage: Your manufacturing prowess, once a reliable bulwark, moves to China; your distribution channels, once the best, are now beaten by the Internet. When that happens, how can you sell anything–from a new thermostat to a new passenger plane–without fundamental design improvements that prove their worth to consumers with every use? And whom do you trust to cultivate that relationship between your product and your customer? An engineer? Or a designer?

In the open source world, design has quickly become an important component. Before, the developer merely needs to write the source code to make his/her desired functionality work. Now, a developer must work hand-in-hand with a designer to create an end-product that would perfectly blend together aesthetics and functionality and improve overall user experience. But of course, the challenge nowadays is how fast you can innovate to keep yourself ahead of the pack.

A good example of a design-focused company that stays on top of the pack is LucidWorks. It has formed partnerships with design solution providers that focus on enhancing user interface, search engine functionality, and overall search experience. The end result is their LucidWorks Product Suite, which possesses an intuitive open source design that makes it easy for organizations to develop their own search applications.

Lauren Llamanzares, October 1, 2012

Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext.

Next Generation Liferay Unveiled

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Liferay continues to drive open source innovation through its enterprise platform, open source portal and collaboration software.  PR Web provides the latest on Liferay in the release, “Next Generation of Liferay Developer Studio Adds Visual Workflow Designer.”

The release begins:

Liferay, Inc., provider of the world’s leading enterprise-class, open source portal, announced today the latest release of Liferay Developer Studio, an Eclipse-based development environment that helps developers create applications for the flagship Liferay Portal platform. The new release, Liferay Developer Studio 1.6.0, now incorporates a powerful visual design tool that helps Java developers build sophisticated workflows.

Liferay does have an impressive product, especially for those who simply want the tools, choosing to do the building and customization themselves.  However, some organizations need a more complete package, something optimized for the enterprise and ready to go.  Look to LucidWorks for those solutions.  Choose from LucidWorks Search and LucidWorks Big Data and trust in LucidWorks’ longstanding reputation, devotion to customer support, and array of training options.

Emily Rae Aldridge, September 13, 2012

Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext.

Open Source Storage Begin to Take Over Proprietary Solutions

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As the Big Data challenge continues to grow and alarm businesses, it has become extremely important that organizations choose the storage technology that’s best suited for their needs. More specifically, that technology has to be flexible and scalable since storage requirements don’t remain static. The Computer Weekly article “Dungeons and (Open Source Storage) Dragons” describes the potential of open source, specifically of Sun’s Zetabyte File System, to take over proprietary storage hardware:

The shift to an open source-based storage world is argued to be able to give developers the potential to have much more freedom and choice in their work. As ZFS is based on open source, developers are able to dip in and out if they need to work on any problem in the system and upgrade it individually by themselves.

… Open source is also much better suited to the virtual world because ZFS is more flexible for developers using virtual machines to create, run and test pilot projects or programmes.

This is another proof that open source has the power to dominate over proprietary storage solutions and we’ll probably see a LAMP stack-like model soon. In terms of costs, performance, efficiency, and upgrades, open source clearly has its advantages.

But aside from storage, open source takes the lead in another related field – enterprise search. Top commercial vendors like LucidWorks have already based their main products on well-known search technologies like Lucene/Solr. In fact, one of the platforms included in their LucidWorks Products Suite called LucidWorks Big Data rely heavily on Apache open source projects to help businesses make sense of their dark data.

Lauren Llamanzares, September 3, 2012

Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext.

Drupal Company Expands Physical Location

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It is a good time to own a company that builds software and services based on open source technology.  Virtual Strategy Magazine reports that “Achieve Internet Brings Open-Source Enterprise Web Development to LA with New Office.”  Back in the day, many corporate companies and IT professionals fought tooth and nail about open source technology’s configurability to enterprise platforms.  Achieve Internet is a company built entirely around that concept.  It provides southern California with leading Drupal enterprise solutions.  Due to high demand the company has been able to grow:

The explosive growth of the open-source Web infrastructure, Drupal, has resulted in a shortage of enterprise-level Drupal engineers and consultants in the region. Achieve Internet aims to fill that void and already supports many of the area’s top companies deploying open-source software.  ‘As the media and publishing industries in Southern California are increasingly evaluating and adopting the Drupal platform, the timing is right for us to expand to LA,’ said Ron Huber, president, Achieve Internet.

Drupal is a flexible and powerful open source platform that can be built to cater to most enterprise needs.  Like most open source technology it is not weighed down by a software licenses and is easy to configure.  LucidWorks is also built on open source platform Apache Lucene and provides users with a robust Big Data and Cloud search.

Whitney Grace, August 29, 2012

Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext.