DataSync Business News

In my endless search of the web for trends, I found an interesting article about the status of open source and SaaS with some research thrown in by Gartner. We already know from experience that open source and SaaS (Software as a Service) make a great combination, but this article really illustrates the scale. First, open source is getting a lot of traction in SaaS organizations. What’s interesting is that the most important development is value added services on top of open source:

“By 2012, more than 90 percent of enterprises will use open source either directly or as embedded components. The Gartner team believes vendors will use open source code synergistically but direct their primary engineering efforts on what is described as “true value-added features and functionality above the ‘commoditized’ layer of open source software.”

This is closely in line with what we’re doing at DataSync. Open source itself can be difficult and expensive for traditional IT departments to support. However packaging open source into streamlined SaaS environments just makes sense. It eliminates the variables associated with deploying open source on site, and allows just about anyone to take advantage of open source. We’re finding that although open source is great, it needs to be delivered smoothly to be an effective cost advantage:

“By 2012, software as a service (SaaS) will surpass open source as the IT cost-cutting method of choice. Although Gartner believes both open source and SaaS are priced by subscription and low profit margins, SaaS is better positioned because it reduces the requirement for IT technical skills, as opposed to open source solutions, which tend to increase those very same requirements.”

At DataSync, we’ve been drinking the same coolaid. Don’t get me wrong, open source is the best way to develop software. We live and breathe it, heck we’ve got our own open source project. But delivering open source software as a smooth, robust, hosted service just makes sense for everyone. It allows any organization to take advantage of the cost-cutting nature of open software, yet doesn’t require a brainiac support staff to keep the whole system humming along smoothly.

So we’re happy that open source and SaaS are getting married. We’re already RSVP’d for the wedding and reception.

There’s a big movement out in the technology sector, and it’s taking the world by storm. It’s the open source movement, and it’s gaining major traction worldwide. So what is open source? For those of you new to open source, it’s a method for creating software centered around the idea of collaborative development. Instead of only allowing a small group of software programmers to build software, open source software is given away for free on the internet, giving millions of developers around the globe access to the code used to build software. This allows software developers access to improve and extend what the original developers started on. The result is software that is flexible, powerful, and very secure.

Opensource.org, the worldwide open source initiative, states that:

“Open source is a development method for software that harnesses the power of distributed peer review and transparency of process. The promise of open source is better quality, higher reliability, more flexibility, lower cost, and an end to predatory vendor lock-in.”

As the above quote states, the best feature of open source is that vendors can’t hold their clients hostage to their software (Microsoft anyone?). This allows businesses to choose software, modify it, and use it without major upfront costs.

How big is open source? Gartner recently published market research on this very topic. It states that by 2012, more than 90 percent of enterprises will use open source. Furthermore, by 2011, open source will become the primary software for cloud-based providers (massive data centers connected to the Internet).

Now you’re wondering, how can software companies afford to just give software away for free? It’s all in the model. Instead of charging large fees for access to their software, open source companies charge for the service, support, and enterprise features of the system. Red Hat has a market cap of $4.3 billion, and they give away Red Hat Linux away for free. However they charge for the services, support, and enterprise features of their package. Another company, Zimbra, was purchased by Yahoo for $350 million, and their software can be downloaded any day of the week at zimbra.com. Their revenue comes from the support and “add-ons” for their open source package. The model is superb in that these companies can make money offering corporate support, while still offering the tremendous advantages of the open source software model.

So what does it mean for you? In the future you won’t be required to pay insane license fees to big software providers to get software that locks you in. Software development companies aren’t going anywhere, but instead of holding us all hostage to their products, they will give software away, and make money by offering value added services and enterprise features. In order for computers and technology to really permeate our lives, we’ve got to be able to trust the technology that we depend on. Open source software is the development method for the next generation that gives developers the freedom to build the right software without the restrictions that current software is inhibited by.

DataSync is proud to announce that the latest build of DataSync Suite Community Edition is now available on SourceForge.org. DataSync has selected SourceForge as the primary means to manage community edition releases, and will be publishing upcoming release builds early and often. DataSync Suite Community Edition is currently in alpha stage, and will be released as a production software platform sometime in early 2009. However the release builds are already used by a variety of industries from around the globe. DataSync is focused on uniting best of breed business applications, and has already received positive support from industry.

Development velocity has increased significantly, and DataSync is on track to release the first “core services” component of DataSync Suite next month. The first supported applications in this integration feature will be SugarCRM and Zimbra. Both applications have show tremendous traction, and DataSync is excited to be a part of this growth.

As a part of DataSync’s overall strategy to integrate common business applications, our “release early, release often” development lifecycle will allow for early participation from the community. If you are a developer or have open source developers in your organization, we’d love your participation. Get in touch with our engineering team to find out more about how you can become a part of the DataSync open source integration movement.

In an effort to keep you updated on our progress on DataSync Suite, I decided to sit down with our engineers and ask a few probing questions. We’re excited about our progress with the package thus far, and have a strong commitment of keeping you up to date on what we’re up to. We have an extremely dynamic group of engineers who are making fast progress on our software package.

Q: What aspect of DataSync Suite are you working on right now?
A: Right now we’re working on the ability to archive emails to SugarCRM from Zimbra. This is just the first step in reproducing many of the features of the Outlook and Thunderbird plugins but for Zimbra.

Q: What technologies will you use use for data synchronization?
A: Data synchronization will be handled by what we’ve dubbed the “Integration Bus”. The “Integration Bus”, in short, will listen for changes to certain types of data in applications. When a change occurs in a particular application the Bus will distribute those changes to all other applications which rely on the same type of data.

Q: What are some of the upcoming features to expect?
A: The next major feature that we’ll be releasing is, of course, the email archiving. The communities surrounding Zimbra and SugarCRM have been looking for a way to keep their addressbook (contacts) and their calendars synchronized. After the email archiving our focus will be on just that, giving users a way to keep their calendars and contacts in sync between SugarCRM and Zimbra. Of course the DataSync Suite won’t be limited to just those two applications but will provide the means to allow other applications to be added to the mix easily.

Q: What applications will you be supporting in the future?
A: The next application we will be adding support for is Alfresco. Alfresco is an innovative open source content management system which provides digital management for documents, records, and website content. Following Alfresco will be Magento, an open source ecommerce solution.

Q: How do you handle feature requests?
A: Feature requests and bug reports can be submitted through our website feature request form.

Q: When are the next minor and major releases of the software?
A: The next release will be 0.5.0. This release will include the new email archiving functionality, an improved dashboard that takes up less screen real estate, and will introduce a new application server.

Q: When do you expect a 1.0 release?
A:  We’re looking to release version 1.0 around the end of the year.

If you have questions or comments, please post on our forums or contact us directly.

Developing open source software is a very unique and rewarding experience. The economic landscape is changing and is conducive to high-velocity open source development projects. We’ve been publishing our development builds (a big release is on the docket), launching our forums, and getting some velocity and automation behind our efforts. Zimbra and SugarCRM are products we’re watching grow extremely quickly, and hope to contribute more to in the future. We’re also watching Alfresco closely, and may include it soon in DataSync Suite.

Even though we’re in the early stages of developing DataSync Suite, it’s been fascinating to see early participation from the community. I was very apprehensive at first that we’d be on our own with development until we had a stable production package out the door. However this has not been the case. We have developers from around the world looking at our code, giving us great feedback, and participating in our thinking process.

We’re still in the early stages of building this product. We have solid development efforts devoted to the project, and are adding capacity (our next developer is starting in a couple weeks!). It’s still a challenge to pick which features to write first, balancing the desire to move forward with the financial restraints of a young company, and releasing code early and often. However through it all the project is moving forward, and we’re growing as a company. I’m excited as ever about the future of open source and how DataSync Suite will impact the world.

Regards,

-Mike

This came off the wires over the weekend. It looks like Balmer and the people at Microsoft have abandoned their bid for Yahoo. We think this is great news for Zimbra, one of our finest software tools. Ballmer threatened an ugly proxy fight for Yahoo, but it now seems that was mostly an intimidation attempt. Microsoft’s exit from this deal may also be related to the fact that earnings fell this quarter for Microsoft, making the stock portion of the deal more expensive.

Overall this is great news for the advertising and open source world. Consolidating search engines won’t be good for the common internet user, choice is always a good thing. Because Zimbra was right in the middle of this deal, it’s also good for this high-growth entity. Zimbra competes with Microsoft Exchange, and has done extremely well at doing so. DataSync has moved countless users from Exchange over to Zimbra with solid results. We think that Yahoo has a strong position to win against the software giant, and we look forward to watching from a front row seat.

Go Yahoo!

We’re finally ready to commit to a timeline for our first landmark feature for DataSync Suite: Zimbra email archiving to SugarCRM. You’ve been asking for it, we’re going to deliver. It’ll be open source and up for grabs in a couple months.

We’ve been focused on developing the single sign-on and account management portions of DataSync Suite. Now that we’ve made some progress there, we’re going to focus on a cool new feature over the next few weeks: developing a plugin that allows users to archive their email in Zimbra to SugarCRM.

We’ve already seen this done in desktop clients such as Thunderbird and Outlook, but no one has done it in the web interface of Zimbra. We’re doing this to remove the need for a desktop client to move information between SugarCRM and Zimbra.

In the future we’re also going to add contact, task, and calender syncing to the plugin. We’ll probably take a break and work on some other aspects of DataSync Suite (such as the integration bus) before we tackle that. However if there’s a group out in the community who would like to help us out, that would be much appreciated

DataSync is excited to launch full BlackBerry BES (BlackBerry Enterprise Server) support for Zimbra and SugarCRM. We’ve been in testing for a long time (thanks to all you beta testers!) and have confidence in our backend systems. BlackBerry support is a key part of our ongoing strategy to mobilize our applications, and Zimbra and SugarCRM are the first apps to jump on this trend.

Zimbra is currently in “beta” BlackBerry support mode, however we have had a very solid response over the past 30 days in our test environment. We’ve decided to offer this service commercially because of the overall stability of the system. Even though it isn’t 100% solid yet, it’s a massive improvement over NotifyLink’s software (which regularly angered DataSync and our users). So in light of the move forward, we’ve decided to pull support for Notify and move our users exclusively to BES.

On the SugarCRM front, we now have numerous options for managing CRM on your BlackBerry. If you’re in a high-speed mobile network, you’ll really appreciate the funcionality. If you’re still on 1x or a slower mobile network, the connectivity will be slow. We don’t have EVDO here just yet, but I still take advantage of the ability to look up contacts, log cases, and track accounts on my BlackBerry. If you’re interested in mobile SugarCRM options contact us and we’ll give you the scoop on our experiences.

Mobile devices are a growing part of our client’s lives. Managing email, calendars, contact lists are becoming a regular part of business. We’re committed to doing our best to provide our clients with the latest mobile technology to set their workforce free.

DataSync is proud to publish our updated DataSync Suite architecture document in our wiki. This document is currently under heavy modification as we start publishing our strategy for future development of DataSync Suite. Right now we’re working hard on our understanding of Zope and how it ties into our application, and are finding that our “DataSync Core Services” application will be split into two parts:

1. Application Server - This will be heavily powered by Zope, and will be focused on communication and managing plugins with supported applications.
2. Integration Bus - This is the ground-level communication layer. We’re working to make this a scalable protocol that allows our application to scale to enterprise levels.

Overall the document is a skeleton model for how we’ll be building our application out. Right now we’re still looking to the community for input, so we’d like to hear your thoughts about the direction we’re taking. Also check out or roadmap for information on what we plan to build and when.

After a ton of research, we’ve decided to use Zope as the application framework that will drive the future of DataSync Suite. Zope is a widely accepted standard in the open source world that has an army of developers working on improving it. It’s also extremely flexible, actually one of the most flexible application frameworks out there in our opinion.

Our internal guys have already started working on moving some of the portal over to Zope, and will be working on layering in the Integration Bus. Our transition to Zope will probably be done over the next few months gradually. However our move to Zope is an important strategic decision that will help us make DataSync Suite more flexible and robust. One of the biggest features we’re looking forward to utilizing is Zope’s plug in features. We want to make it extremely simple to add applications to the suite, and Zope allows us to do that.

If you’re interested in more about ongoing development of our suite, feel free to contact us.