Content Management Matters ™

If you're looking to take part in some big open source fun, the fourth annual Red Hat Summit is happening in Boston June 18-20 at the Hynes Convention Center. And from the looks of it, there are good geeking times to be had.

SaaS and Virtualization have played a prominent role in the tech industry landscape for a while now, and the latest studies seem to show that they're going stronger than ever. In a CIOZone.com study that ranked the top-60 fastest-growing public software companies of at least $150 million in revenue in 2007, VMware lead the pack and Red Hat came in 12th place boasting a 33.6 percent growth rate.

Even more interesting is the role that SaaS seems to be playing in the success of some of these companies.

In a move sure to shock no-one at all, RedHat has announced the launch of the JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform.

The new product brings Service Oriented Architecture to the JBoss application platform for the first time, as well as the exemplary integration of applications and processes which we've come to expect. Red Hat calls the new package 'the first comprehensive open source SOA product offering'. Three cheers for Red Hat, then.

Alfresco Software announced the availability of its second global survey of trends in the use of open source software in the enterprise. The survey, touted as the largest-ever study of open source enterprise stack, revealed that deployments of Ubuntu and Red Hat Enterprise Linux have a market share of 24% and 21% respectively.

Red Hat has announced the winners of the JBoss Innovation Awards 2008. The Awards, in their second year, highlight the individuals and companies which are judged to be the most innovative and effective in providing JBoss solutions.

JBoss, a division of Red Hat, provides open source middleware solutions for the enterprise, offering a platform for building, integrating and presenting Web applications in a Service-Oriented Architecture.

Every week, it seems, there's a big announcement from Alfresco. Last week 2.9 came out, offering integration with iGoogle and Adobe Flex.

A little bit before that, the company released a cheeky Facebook hookup that turned heads. And in between announcements, Alfresco has been boasting to anyone who'll listen about how great the product is, ragging mercilessly on Sharepoint, and generally acting like drunken cowboys in a frontier saloon.

Open source stalwart and Red Hat favorite JBoss officially announces the JBoss Enterprise Portal Platform with the release of an updated version of its foundation application: JBoss Portal 2.6.

Bullies can only survive so long -- and like some Marxist fantasia, particularly debauched, abusive bullies are known for awakening the revolutionary ire of those who, en masse, could easily spell tyranny's downfall.

The context is set. Now for the major players. The diverse and ever-growing Linux community, newly united as The Linux Foundation, may be preparing an assault against longtime ruler Microsoft that is expected to sting - if not immediately, then with time.

The Kerala government in India is going out of its way to demonstrate that open source software is a critical component to the future of democratic information. And toward that noble end, Red Hat has decided to help out.

Joining thirteen other open source stalwarts including MySQL, JBoss, Zimbra and Sugar CRM, Alfresco is now one of the founding members of a new online marketplace for business applications called the Red Hat Exchange (RHX).