My Internet Notebook

Since my last post touched on this open source service provider as a viable business model, I might as well find and list a couple of prominent companies in this space.

SpikeSource – Business-Ready Open Source Infrastructure has a celebrity CEO Kim Polese.

SourceLabs | Dependable Open Source Systems is in the business of providing no-charge, certified stacks of Open Source infrastructure software, and charging for service.

OpSource – The Software as a Service (SaaS) Experts is in the OSS for SaaS areana.

Whenever people are touting free stuff, either open source or closed-source free software, the tagline is almost always, what have you got to lose?

Bragging nature of that tagline aside, this is a miss-leading question. The proper question to ask, of yourself if you are tempted to try out the free software, is that what have you got to GAIN?

I know the cost of acquiring the free software is $0, but how about the time you spend evaluating the software. There are just so many choices out there, especially in the open source software arena. To use content management system as an example, there are PhpNuke, DotNetNuke, Mambo, etc. etc. On top of that you got tons of plug-ins for each that you have to individually evaluate. In the non-free software arena, the vendor would probably be happy to explain to you all the features they can offer, albeit in a biased tone. I am a fan of open source, but the time I spent on evaluating them is just enormous. I don’t know how that will make sense to a for-profit organizations.

Another point is that while OSS are generally stable, they are not certified to be scalable and all that. The good news is that there are now companies that specialize in certifying the OSS stacks.

More: whenever there is pain, there will be business opportunities. Case in point, SourceLab created a business around certifying OSS stacks, such as its Spring, Apache Axis, Struts and Hibernate (SASH) distribution, and AMP stack. And there are numerous open source service companies already out there. Maybe the big outsourcing company would eventually jump into this space as well pretty soon.

SAP debuts hosted CRM service | News.com to go | CNET News.com

The initial service costs about $75 per user per month, but only has the Sales management functionality. On-demand Marketing and Call center etc would come later this year.

So by now, every major software companies (including Microsoft, Oracle) already has an On-Demand CRM offering. By some estimates, the total market for on-demand CRM was $600 million in 2005. But it is a market that is expected to grow 30% for the next five years. No other software segment can match this level of projected growth. No wonder everyone wants to get onto the on-demand CRM train.

In its last issue, Business 2.0 profiled a hosted CRM startup called Entellium, which has some interesting features and low prices.

AJAX demistified in 30 seconds:

Rasmus’ 30 second AJAX Tutorial

In your JavaScript code, you create an request object (Microsoft.XMLHTTP for IE; XMLHttpRequest for FireFox); then using the http oject to make a get request which can then return some string (or XML file) for you to consume and display in a meaning manner.

Do you know what skills are in high demand of a Sr. Software Engineer? The following job requirements may give you a good starting point:

You know you are the perfect candidate if: –You have three years of expert experience in: (1) Object Oriented Programming (2) C#, Java and/or J2EE—You are proficient in: (1)Object-Relational Mapping (2) Data Modeling with Object Role Modeling (3)Visio for Enterprise Architects (or another modeling tool.)(4) NUnit (or JUnit)(5) NAnt (or Ant) (6) AccuRev (or other Source Code Control System and Incident Tracking Systems)(7) CodeSmith (or other code generation tools) (8) ASP.NET deployment to a web-farm environment (9)SQL Server, Oracle, and/or DB2 in a clustered environment (10) XML, XML, Schema and source-code generation from XML.

You have utilized: (1) Agile Software Development (2) AQTime (or another .NET Performance Profiling Tool)—You are familiar with: (1) Design by Contract (2) Aspect-Oriented Software Development (3) Visual Studio .NET (4) Object-Relational Mapping tools such as OJB, OJB.NET, Hibernate, NHibernate or TopLink. (Maybe wrote own tool.) (5) CCNet or another Continuous Integration Tool.