Open Source Software (OSS) getting that old-time industry religion - Open Source Software Up the Stack

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November 20, 2007
Open Source Software (OSS) getting that old-time industry religion

The list of former closed-source software companies “going open source” gets longer and longer and I’m beginning see a couple of trends.
• First, as I said in writing about Volantis recently, OSS is no longer just a marketing strategy or an attempt to fix a strategic business issue. OSS is a legitimate software development model and a business strategy in and of itself for successful, established software suppliers.
• Second, I am starting to see some industry centricity, a sure sign that a technology is being accepted in the heart of enterprises where the needs for information technology meet up with the need for profits (keeping track of the payroll is one thing; making payrolls is what it’s really all about)

I saw the industry centricity more recently in talking to XAware of Colorado Springs which recently created an OSS project and the availability of its XAware 5 data integration software as OSS. XAware 5 is available under the GNU General Public License version 2 (GPLv2) at www.xaware.org.

Bill Miller, XAware CTO and founder, said the company was founded in 2002 with some technical expertise out of the MCI research lab, also based in Colorado Springs (of 1990s “friends and family” fame, an earlier generation successful effort at data integration in the telecomm industry). XAware built up a healthy customer base in traditional fashion but was seeing OSS in customer sites more and more, and realized it could use OSS to build out extensions to its engine more quickly. (See my blog entry/podcast on whether OSS will be the salvation of SOA, which needs thousands of services to make it viable, a quantity that will never appear in a timely fashion from the vendor community.)

Bill noted that “it took a while to get there” because of cultural changes needed inside his company. He believes software today needs to be delivered in a fashion that people can be using 20 minutes after it is downloaded, which meant XAware had to make some technical changes to its earlier version. As a result, the XAware Engine is now built on the Spring Framework and ships with JBoss and MySQL (but runs with any other compatible application server and data source, or on its own if desired). It has also been changed to be an Eclipse plug in.

As for the industry centricity, data integration can be most easily tied to industries through XML vocabularies with which the XAware engine works. XAware supports industry accelerators for ACORD (insurance), EDI (manufacturing), HL7 (healthcare), and SWIFT and IFX (finance). Also long before OSS, the company had success in state and local government, an industry where OSS excels per conventional wisdom. The products can be used as well in more cross industry data migration projects and Bill says they have seen an uptake in providing a services orientation to enable loosely coupled data mashups in a Web 2.0 environment.

I think the industry centricity issue is so important that I am going to do a special report on the subject early in 2008. We’ll come around and visit with XAware again at that time.