Infobright Blog

Late last week, Momentum Index ranked the 96 top open-source companies (url: http://bit.ly/eZ9tfa).  On that list, we find many of the heavy hitters within Business Intelligence as well as Big Data.  Because I feel it provides a compelling story, I wanted to break down many of those within the top 50 from that list.  While many great companies also appear on that list (SugarCRM, Mulesoft, Engineyard, etc.), I specifically wanted to comment on a few.

	Top Three	My Rationale
BI Tools	Talend (#1), Pentaho (#3), Jaspersoft (#4)	Data simply is king.  In fact, data is almost the biggest (if not the only) asset for many of our online companies.  Look at Yahoo! or Amazon.  They fuel the experience with their data.  They need to understand trends.  BI tools such as Talend, Pentaho, and Jaspersoft offer amazing solutions.
Customer Experiences	Kaltura (#2), Flumotion (#49)	Companies always look for an edge to improve their customer experience.  Hundreds of milliseconds can make or break your site.  Look and feel can cause a visit of under 3 seconds.
Cloud	Eucalyptus Systems (#10), Intalio (#12), eXo Platform (#18), Appcelerator(#19), Cloud.com (#33), Albiquo (#41)	With the cloud becoming so prevalent within resource sharing, it's no surprise that so many open-source companies reside in the top 50.  In addition, they're all so compact in the middle -- I'm curious to see which one(s) emerge within the next two years.  Cloudera has a strong hold on the market -- how will these open source variants play?
Databases	EnterpriseDB (#14), 10gen (#22), Infobright (#30), Membase (#38)	Row-oriented DB, NoSQL DB, and a Columnar DB.  Transactional, unstructured, and analytic databases.  I'm not surprised to see this mix in the top 50 -- you basically hit the gamut with these technologies.  Of course, I'm biased -- I'm pleased to see Infobright make the list.  I expect it to crack the top 20 next year, though.
OSS Management	Astaro (#5), Black Duck (#6), Zenoss (#17), Nuxeo (#50)	With great power comes great responsibility.  At least that's what it says when I try to sudo something Same goes for these players.  Management of Open-Source software is critical for the success and longevity of open source.  Kudos to you.
Mobile	Funambol (#21), Magnet Technologies India (#47)	If you aren't reading this blog from an iPad, you probably will very soon.  I see OSS to be in its early stages within Mobile, but I guarantee it'll become dominant in the next few years.
Consulting/Services	CIGNEX (#16), Openbravo (#24),	Sometimes, you need a little help and guidance.  Some companies rely entirely on services with their open-source products.  I'd argue that the business model is entirely dependent on what market you're facing.  There's really no one-size-fits-all.

There are also many notables not on this list.  They stated they went from over 260k open-source entries down to 200 then ultimately to 96.  There are obviously companies which missed the bubble -- or even were mistakenly missed.  Regardless, it's fun to see all the players get their game moving forward.