Open source software ready for big business

Established open source company Talend is worth watching as it expands into master data management (MDM) technology. The company, which competes with other open source vendors such as Jitterbit, offers a suite of data integration tools. The MDM piece extends Talend's tools across data integration, data trust and data consistency, according to Yves de Montcheuil, vice president of marketing. The tools are available for internal deployment or as a service.

On the enterprise search front, Lucid Imagination is offering commercial support, training, consulting and software add-ons to its certified distributions of the Apache Lucene search library and the Solr enterprise search server.

The company is working on LucidGaze for Solr, an open source visual framework for monitoring Solr performance. Solr, which runs in a Java servlet container, features XML/HTTP and JSON APIs, hit highlighting, faceted search, caching, replication and a Web administration interface. Doug Cutting of Cloudera, who created Lucene along with Hadoop and Nutch, sits on the company's advisory board.

On the collaboration front, MindTouch, touted by Forrester Research as the best product alternative to MicrosoftMicrosoft SharePoint and IBM Lotus, offers both a standard and enterprise version of its open source platform that is part wiki, portal and application server. It includes integration with Microsoft productivity tools, database and CRM adapters, charting tools and directory integration. Alles zu Microsoft auf CIO.de

"Quite frankly one of our challenges is explaining it," says Aaron Fulkerson, CEO and former distributed systems researcher at Microsoft. "It is kind of like an app server with a wiki-like interface. I can use it like a wiki, like a portal or like an app server for developing apps on." Amazon's Shelfari.com social book site is built on MindTouch.