Occam's Razor

OSS consolidation

Following recent rumors of Oracle aquisition and IPO, it was announced todat that Red Hat (Nasdaq: RHAT) has agreed to acquire JBoss Inc., an Atlanta–based provider of open-source middleware.

The deal is valued at around $350 million (40% cash, 60% stock), plus up to $70 million in possible milestone payments. JBoss has raised VC funding from firms like Accel Partners, Matrix Partners and Intel Capital.

More Identiy Management Transaction

Following on my post from yesterday about SRD (aquired by IBM) , and the old Metamerge (Acquirred by IBM) et BusinessLayers (Aquired by Netegrity) , the fourth member of the identity-management-meta-directory-DB-integration class Calendra was sold to BMC for 25M€ ( good deal for the recent investors like Elaia Partners (who invested in May 2004), not so sure about the exit multiple for the old ones...).

BMC Software to Extend Identity Management Offerings with Acquisition of Calendra for 33M$ (25M€) BMC Software, Inc. (NYSE: BMC), a provider of enterprise management solutions, announced its intent to acquire privately held Calendra, the leading provider of Web-based business-oriented identity management solutions.

The acquisition enables BMC Software to deliver an integrated suite of identity management solutions that include enterprise directories (white pages and yellow pages), workflow, PBX management, and active directory management. The combined solution removes the complexities customers traditionally encounter when integrating various technologies from multiple vendors. Additionally, this acquisition strengthens BMC Software's Business Service Management (BSM) offerings, which enable customers to manage IT from a business perspective. Calendra is a privately held company headquartered in Paris.

Calendra has more than 200 customers and five million managed users worldwide. Its customer base is very broad, ranging from small and mid-sized companies to Global 2000 companies with complex business problems and large populations of employees, suppliers, partners and customers.

Identity Management Transaction

IBM has announced the acquisition of SRD, a privately held developer of identity resolution software based in Las Vegas in an all cash deal. Under the terms of the acquisition SRD's operations and products will be integrated into IBM's Information Management software division.  SRD's technology, based on SQL and Java J2EE, is designed to work with IBM and non-IBM data sources, including Oracle and Microsoft databases, enabling customers to integrate the software with existing infrastructures.

Sounds a bit like the old Metamerge - now tivoli directory integrator -  (funded by RVC and aquired by IBM in 2002).

Semantic Web 101

Everything you always wanted to know about the semantic web but were afraid to ask...

This video from Ben Hammersly is not only VERY funny but also a good talk explaining the Semantic Web for beginners. It's a great resource to explain what the Semantic Web is all about for people who are new to the subject or simply interested in the underlying technology of RDF, the concept of triples, etc.

In depth discussions by Nova Spivak on the problem of Ontology can be found here.

This should be consider in the context of Clay Skirky position on how:

The Semantic Web, with its neat ontologies and its syllogistic logic, is a nice vision. However, like many visions that project future benefits but ignore present costs, it requires too much coordination and too much energy to effect in the real world, where deductive logic is less effective and shared worldview is harder to create than we often want to admit

Nevertheless...  ... Interesting applications from such technology can be found in Radar, Unicorn  or Xyleme.

RFID acceleration

Interesting views on RFID from a consulting perspective (Doug Lattner, chairman and CEO of Deloitte Consulting,)

Wal-Mart is insisting its top suppliers have such tracking technology in place by next year. Target and Albertson’s have issued similar directives. It’s not just the major retail chains pressuring their suppliers. The Department of Defense is requiring more than 40,000 suppliers to have RFID tags placed on containers, pallets or individual items with a value of $5,000 or more by 2005. The Healthcare Distribution Management Association—a national, nonprofit organization for health care distributors—also recommends that the makers of drugs implement RFID tagging systems by 2005. And, the transportation industry, which must contend with homeland security requirements, must now be capable of accommodating RFID mandates set forth by other industries in the shipping of their products and materials….

…It’s not as if the early successes of RFID aren’t already known. E-ZPass and Speedpass, two examples of so-called “passive” RFID technology, ease payment management and serve as ID badges for identity management. In Britain, pilot RFID trials have been a part of the retail industry for several years. Marks & Spencer, for instance, implemented a pilot program involving the tagging of 3.5 million reusable containers used in its supply chain and reduced data collection time by 83 percent. More than 100 suppliers are working with Marks & Spencer on this program....

Good RFID focus feed can be found here

For a techie backgrounder, check the great ACM Queue article

The next major hurdle is not directly related to the technology, but the software systems that will be needed to manage RFID-based inventory control. The extensive use of an electronic tagging technology will generate a flow of product information that will be several orders of magnitude greater than it is now. Database management software in the future will need to deal with item-level references, track product sales in the event of a recall, respond to data recovered from a tag’s writable memory, and make automatic decisions about reordering items as buying trends develop. Many of these processes will need to operate in realtime because tag tracking is automatic and continuous, and the data flow will be derived from products shipped globally across all time zones. Systems that encompass all of these capabilities do not exist today, but as they are built they will need to be integrated into less-capable legacy inventory management systems, a task that will challenge commercial software system developers...

Also some previous posting on:
- SAP RFID integration
- value in the RFID food chain

Interestion European examples of RFID suplliers include:
- Baracoda
- Tagsys
(i'm as usual interested in any other relevant examples...)

Open Source Strategies

Ingres r3 for Windows and Linux is available today under the Computer Associates Trusted Open Source License. Under the terms of this license, customers can download the database for free, view the source code, and integrate it with other products that are also offered under the same Trusted Open Source License. CA also announced four paid support options for Ingres to generate revenue for the free product. Ingres currently has around 15,000 customers. CA earlier announced a $1 million development contest to spur interest in its database. The company hopes to draw customers away from MySQL, Sybase, and an IBM open-source project called Derby. CA says Ingres' features compete with those of Oracle's massive database suite.

Software service going mainstream

If you has any doubt about the timing of the shift from package software to onilne service, this should adress them, the German software vendor SAP has extended its partnership with Hewlett-Packard to offer a mid-market hosted ERP solution for a monthly service fee that starts at $325 per user. The companies will jointly market and sell SAP's ERP platform running on HP's Adaptive Enterprise servers. The fee covers the software, technical support, and installation services.
The service model helps draw in small and midsize businesses because it reduces the risk that normally comes with a high-priced ERP investment. The companies expect the deal to generate between $100 million and $1 billion revenue. HP and SAP have been working together since a 2002 partnership to create business portals.

Liberty Alliance 7 :: Passport 0

While MS Passport usage and actual traction seems to be fading away, Liberty Alliance just announced 7 new members

The Liberty Alliance, a group of tech firms working to create universal ID standards on the Internet, has signed up seven new members: Adobe Systems, DAI-Labor, Deny All, M-Tech Information Technology, OpenNetwork Technologies, Senforce Technologies, and Telewest Broadband all joined the alliance. The Liberty Alliance is best known for creating a single sign-on system that competes with Microsoft's Passport authentication...

As the usage of on-demand services increases, the single sign-on capabilities will become crutial form enterprise wanted to leverage web services. I will be interesting to watch how this space will unfold, and how innovators like PingID deliver on they promises (a good paper on PinID views on the various topologies of identity federation can be found here)

From media business to community management infrastructure

The long tail + (last.fm | del.icio.us)

=> migration of online media business model into collaboration/social infrastructures
=> news investment opportunies

I was reflecting on Chris Anderson The Long Tail recent article, and some of Loic recent comments (here and here), when i realised that last.fm and del.icio.us are tow good examples of what Chris describes. I spend the afternoon playing with last.fm (VERY cool and adictive..) and it does demonstrastes how:

The future of entertainment is in the millions of niche markets at the shallow end of the bitstream...

An analysis of the sales data and trends from these services and others like them shows that the emerging digital entertainment economy is going to be radically different from today's mass market. If the 20th- century entertainment industry was about hits, the 21st will be equally about misses...

Many of our assumptions about popular taste are actually artifacts of poor supply-and-demand matching - a market response to inefficient distribution...

This is the world of scarcity. Now, with online distribution and retail, we are entering a world of abundance. And the differences are profound...

When you think about it, most successful businesses on the Internet are about aggregating the Long Tail in one way or another. Google, for instance, makes most of its money off small advertisers (the long tail of advertising), and eBay is mostly tail as well - niche and one-off products. By overcoming the limitations of geography and scale, just as Rhapsody and Amazon have, Google and eBay have discovered new markets and expanded existing ones...

Content for social software

Interesting reference from Steve Halls on a new meta-data based people finder, a "content-focus social-software service" which seems to browse and aggregate web content about people, and store current and past corporate information. I had a look at my profile which is out of date, but still pretty accurate.

Eliyon gathers the information from the Web in a very different way than today’s search engines. Using patented technology, our computers can extract business-specific information from millions of web sources. Our technology then automatically compiles this vast amount of information into profiles of business people. We continuously read small and large company Web sites, company filings with the government, news sites, press releases, and millions of other public Web pages.

I have recently seen several projects like this one who aggregates web information using a specific ontology (people, company, history etc....) in order to create useful business content. I look at this as the Content-based Linkedin whereas Linked-In is more People-based, and the two complements each other nicely.