Will 2007 be The Year of the Hat? We’re well into the second quarter and so far Red Hat is making all the right moves. Even the financial analysts are starting to trumpet the firm’s praises, with one Credit Suisse analyst upgrading Red Hat shares from “neutral” to “outperform” just last month.
I am frequently amazed at the lack of awareness of open source issues regularly exhibited by IT decision makers. I’m not talking about the people inside the server room but rather the people on the other side of that deceptively thin barrier. The bad news is, of course, the guys with the teakwood tables tend to want to be involved in decisions relating to a firm’s IT direction. Though they may not be able to tell the mail server from the fax machine, they seem compulsive about being consulted on larger IT issues (defined as “those with dollar figures attached”).
A battle is brewing for a piece of some increasingly lucrative tech turf: Enterprise Content Management Systems (ECM). Analyst group IDC posits that the global Content Management market is growing at a steady rate and that software revenues from the segment will reach US$ 5.9 billion by 2010. The trend clearly has not gone unnoticed by the major players and over the course of the last 12 months we have seen significant movement in the market as the players position themselves to grab their share - and perhaps a little of the other guys’, too.
After my recent switch to Back to Mac, I've received a variety of comments from my more vocal friends and associates. The Mac users in the crowd uniformly gave me a hearty "welcome back to the fold" slap on the back (the unspoken subtext: "we KNEW you'd be back."). The Windows users seemed almost cavalier in their attitude towards losing yet another user to the Mac fold (the unspoken subtext: "You never really were one of us anyways."). The Linuxtistas simply shrugged and said "Dude, why don't you just switch to Linux, you're already halfway there." (the unspoken subtext: "It's inevitable.
This week saw the premier of two long-awaited resources for the increasingly active Mambo Open Source community: Mambo-Extensions.com, and Mambo-Manual.org
Mambo Manual is a community-driven wiki project. The site provides assistance for users and acts as a supplement to the documentation resources provided by the Mambo Foundation.
