Matthew Aslett and I are in San Francisco for the next few days at the Open Source Business Conference (OSBC). We will be moderating a total of three panels this year. Matthew’s panel on the the state of the open source database market is especially interesting, given that we are days away from publishing a [...]

451 CAOS Theory, along with the myriad of other services provided by The 451 Group, are now on hiatus for the rest of the year. We’re all off for winter break / holidays / Christmas (whatever you wish to call it, these days) until January 2nd, 2008. Check back in early January for continued open [...]

2008 could be a very good year for the likes of Compiere and Openbravo if 451 CAOS Theory’s blog stats for this year are anything to go by. I’ve just been taking a look at the most read stories of the year, and following the usual suspects (Oracle Unbreakable Linux, the Linux desktop, the EC’s [...]

A few weeks ago, we released our fifth 451 Commercial Adoption of Open Source (CAOS) Research Report entitled ‘The SMB Market Opportunity – How big are SMBs for open source?.’ In this report, we explore the challenges and conditions that must be met in order for open source software and its vendors to succeed in [...]

As previously mentioned by Raven, today is my first day at The 451 Group and I’ll now be blogging here at 451 CAOS Theory. For those of you who were subscribers to my previous blog, I’ll be bringing more of the same to 451 CAOS Theory, starting tomorrow with a look at the third quarter [...]

I’m pleased to announce that Matthew Aslett will be joining The 451 Group on October 1st to further advance our open source research efforts. I will be in our London office during early October to work closely with Matt. Many of you are already familiar with Matt’s work at Computer Business Review (CBR), and his [...]

In the wake of the VMware IPO and Citrix-XenSource acquisition, it’s pretty clear that virtualization management will become the hot new market. We’re fairly chuffed about that since we’re hard at work on a major report on the sector. We’d love to get your input. If you’re at an organization that has some virtualization management [...]

Earlier this week, we released the fourth CAOS Report (press release) – ‘Managing in the Open – The Next Wave of Systems Management.’ In this report, The 451 Group investigates the impact of open source on the systems management software space. This is a software segment that has been dominated by proprietary software vendors on [...]

The O’Reilly Open Source Convention 2007 (OSCON) is taking place in Portland, Oregon, this week. Portland is my home, but I’m in New York City most of the week for business meetings. Ah, priorities. It takes an important meeting for me to give up my time at OSCON, that’s for sure. I will be at [...]

I’m in San Francisco for the next few days (along with fellow open source analyst, Jay Lyman) for the Open Source Business Conference (OSBC) at The Palace Hotel. The 451 Group is the Industry Analyst Sponsor this year. We’ll have a booth in the exhibit area, as we did last year – please stop by [...]

In a few days, I’m headed off to the 2007 Open Source Think Tank event in Napa, CA, hosted by the Olliance Group and DLA Piper. If you’re planning to be at the event, I will have some availability for meetings during the networking sessions and after-hours from Thursday evening to Saturday afternoon. Send me [...]

Last week marked the public release of our third CAOS Report (press release) – ‘Going Open – Software vendors in transition.’ The growth of open source software is increasingly placing pressure on the business models of proprietary software vendors. As a result, software vendors are looking at open source as an opportunity to grow distribution, [...]

In my blog post before the holidays, I briefly mentioned that we were adding a second full-time open source analyst to The 451 Group. I’d like to introduce Jay Lyman, although for many of you, Jay will be a familiar name in the open source world already. Jay’s focus at The 451 Group will be [...]

As we enter the holiday break, the volume of news announcement, media articles, and blog activity, will drop dramatically. Therefore, the daily 451 CAOS Links (and all other blog postings) will be on hiatus until Tuesday, January 2nd. This also will give me the opportunity to focus on the completion of the third CAOS Report [...]

Next week (12/11-12) is The 451 Group’s 2006 Enterprise Computing Strategy Summit at the Westin Times Square in New York. The topic of this end-user focused event is on grid technology as the underpinning for service-oriented IT. From the event site: The 451 Group has tracked the adoption of grid technology by enterprise organizations since [...]

Yesterday marked the public release of our second CAOS Report (press release) – ‘Cost Conscious – A practical guide for understanding and calculating the financial benefits of open source for enterprise IT projects.’ With continued cost pressure on IT budgets, despite enterprises’ growing dependence on IT (i.e., ‘doing more with less’), open source is an [...]

We’ve been saying here and elsewhere that the Microsoft-Novell and Oracle-Red Hat announcements have been market changing events. Some ripples are at the fore: Microsoft has siezed an opportunity to simultaneously head off Oracle and irritate Red Hat. Novell has turned its greatest weakness (the spectre of irrelevancy as recently as last week) into what [...]

I don’t travel much – I really don’t. I may travel 8 to 10 times per year, and this is light compared to many of the ‘air warriors’ I know out there. Yet, the three most significant events in open source this year – Red Hat’s acquisition of JBoss, Oracle’s Unbreakable Linux, and Microsoft’s partnership [...]

Earlier today, we reported on our discussions with Mark Shuttleworth on the release of Edgy Eft and the speculation about whether Oracle might announce a partnership or closer business ties with Ubuntu. We weren’t playing All The President’s Men – it wasn’t a major scoop when we said that nothing would happen today between Ubuntu [...]

Rumors buzzed, but nothing during today’s keynote at Oracle OpenWorld by Larry Ellison regarding Oracle’s commitment to Linux – possibly in collaboration with a major Linux vendor. Whether Ellison used the word, “Ubuntu” in this speech, we believe that an Oracle-Ubuntu partnership is in the cards, based on an interview this morning with Mark Shuttleworth. [...]