Regular visitors to the 451 CAOS Theory blog will be well aware of The 451 Group’s CAOS (Commercial Adoption of Open Source) research service and our CAOS long-form reports.

They are probably less aware of the open source coverage that The 451 Group provides on a day-to-day and week-to-week basis, however, and I thought it would be worthwhile to provide some examples of The 451 Group’s ongoing open source coverage by highlighting a few recent reports.

The company’s core services are 451 Market Insight Service, which delivers daily insight into emerging enterprise IT markets, and 451 TechDealmaker, a forward-looking weekly analysis service focused on M&A activity within the enterprise IT business.

Here’s some examples of how our coverage fits in to those two services. Needless to say, these reports are only available to clients, although you can apply for trial access. Vendors – open source or otherwise – do not have to be clients in order to be covered by our analysts.

451 Market Insight Service
The 451′s CAOS analysts – Jay and I – are responsible for much of the coverage of open source specialist vendors. Recent examples include:

• Novell lessens Linux push for Intelligent Workload Management strategy

• OpenLogic offers code scanning and compliance, community Linux support

• DotNetNuke rides the explosion of open source on .NET for app development, WCM

Meanwhile The 451 Group’s team of analysts also cover open source related vendors in their respective coverage areas, often in conjunction with CAOS analysts. For example:

• Google’s online channel for smartphones changes little in terms of market dynamics

• JasperSoft eyes the enterprise with latest commercial open source BI suite

• xTuple’s open source ERP attracts more manufacturers, strikes chord with distributors

• Gluster targets virtualization, unstructured data with new clustered storage platform

• eZ Systems gears up for growth with new funding and new CEO

Additionally, we also provide reports assessing the strategies of proprietary/mixed source vendors towards open source. Examples include:

• JetBrains has an open-source IDEA that could expand its profile

• Day Software aims to become the patron saint of open source Web content management

• Microsoft’s new position reflects changing attitude toward open source

• Putting Oracle’s open source moves in perspective

• SAP is learning to give and take with open source

In addition to our vendor-centric MIS output, open source also regularly makes an appearance in our reports assessing wider industry trends. For example:

• Open source users voice concerns over Oracle’s acquisition of MySQL

• ‘Vendor wars’ push challenges, opportunity to HPC and its enterprise outlook

• Unpaid community Linux serving as foundation for provider and private clouds

• Open source and cloud computing – a match made in heaven?
  

451 TechDealmaker
451 Group analysts follow open source-related M&A in their coverage areas, again often working with the CAOS analsyst. Examples include:

• VMware grows cloud stack, sends message with Zimbra buy

• Terracotta acquires Quartz, adding job scheduling to Java-caching lineup

• Pentaho snags LucidEra assets in bid to give analytics mainstream appeal

While we also provide reports assessing the prospects of potential acquirers and targets alike. For example:

• EC concerns over Oracle-Sun deal center on MySQL

• Will Red Hat have to buy to meet aggressive growth targets?

• Further acquisitions could boost Novell’s Linux business, indirectly

And again, open source makes an appearance in our reports assessing wider industry trends. For example:

• Could an open source project survive a hostile acquisition?

• How will recent moves by Intel and Google shake up the embedded OS space?

• Opportunities for open source M&A in 2009

• Will code scanning and analysis get large vendors shopping?

For those with an interest in M&A it is also worth mentioning is 451 M&A KnowledgeBase – the company’s merger and acquisition database, which contains details of all M&A deals tracked by The 451 Group, and offers the ability to filter search results to contain deals that are themed “open source”.