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SpikeSource, Bull Agree for Open Source Partnership By David Sims TMCnet Contributing Editor SpikeSource, a vendor of open-source business software with research operations located in Bangalore, and Bull, a European IT company, have announced a "worldwide technology and business partnership" to "accelerate adoption of open source applications in the enterprise market," according to SpikeSource officials. The agreement is SpikeSource's first pan-European partnership. It will include integrating CRM and other open source software applications. The partnership combines the efforts of both companies to help organizations use open source to innovate and reduce costs, by benefiting from business-ready, fully industrialized open source applications and services. It will combine Bull's platforms and services capabilities, with SpikeSource pre-integrated stacks and applications, designed to reduce the costs and deployment challenges associated with open source middleware Bull and SpikeSource will work together in three areas: Open source platform readiness. Bull will integrate current and future SpikeSource open source software applications -- such as enterprise content management, e-mail, CRM and Web 2.0 suite -- with its NovaScale servers, extending the range of the ready-to-deploy OSS infrastructures it provides to its customers. Bull and SpikeSource will collaborate on optimizing SpikeSource products on NovaScale servers. Open source integration services. Bull will integrate SpikeSource products as components of its Open Energy offering. Open Energy is a set of services aimed at helping enterprise and government IT organizations maximize the benefit of OSS in their IT projects. There will also be open source support. Within Bull's Open Access offer, Bull customers may elect Bull Support Centers to receive global support for all SpikeSource software products, as well as to subscribe to the SpikeNet service developed by SpikeSource. Bull will provide first and second level support capability, backed up by SpikeSource for third-level engineering support, and will provide a single point of contact to customers for both software delivery and support. Late last year SpikeSource opened a facility in Bangalore as a "center of innovation" where complete products are conceived, developed and delivered along SpikeSource's range of enterprise applications for businesses based on open source middleware and application software. Headed by Gajanana Hegde, Vice President, the Bangalore center houses the core development team working together with the company's Silicon Valley engineers as one global development team. SpikeSource was established in 2003 at the Silicon Valley Venture firm of Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers by Ray Lane, former President of Oracle (News - Alert), now a Partner at Kleiner Perkins; and an entrepreneur in residence, Murugan Pal. David Sims is a contributing editor for TMCnet. For more articles please visit David Sims' columnist page. |
