Open Source Service with Sourcesense

I spoke with Gianugo Rabellino of Sourcesense this morning about the way they help both the buy and sell side of open source. This division, common among talking about industry analysts, just means customers and vendors.

Lubricating the Adoption of Open Source

Sourcesense is something of an open source consulting, system integrator company. It’s sort of like the idea of an open source service company I mentioned awhile ago (see Covalent, as well).

They’re not so much a product company, as someone who you hire for consulting in the open source area. That consulting could be helping open source companies sell their offering better, helping companies figure out how to use open source software, and even integration help (the SI angle). Their mission, simply put, is to help the adoption of open source.

While there are several Apache Foundation tie-ins at Sourcesense – Gianugo is the VP of XML over at Apache – they’re not, as you might partly characterize Covalent, an Apache open source company.

Instead, on the buy side they help companies sort out process and culture things like getting the legal and procurement people happy with open source. Also, pulling for their own open source experience, Gianugo told me, they help development teams switch over to the sort of Agile/open source/geo-distributed bucket of excitement that’s going around now-a-days.

Geo-Agile-Open-Development

On that note, I asked Gianugo if they paid attention to IBM’s Rational Jazz. But of course, was the reply. Reading between the lines in our conversations the feeling I got was that Sourcesense (or Gianugo, at least) thought that there was, of course, plenty of market for IBM in such a space, given their success with the Rational community.

For folks like themselves, there’s that ecosystem to sell into as well as the people who like the general idea, but don’t want the IBM solution. This sort of market-wiggling reminds me of the WebSphere IDE (MyEclipse Blue Edition) that Genuitec put out last month.

Kicking out Remedy for JIRA

On the topic of helping commercial open source companies, Sourcesense’s main thing seemed to be helping out with business and sales in EMEA. They offered general business consulting to these companies as well, as RedMonk does for many companies.

One of the more interesting parts of our discussion was around Sourcesense’s relationship with Atlassian and their use of JIRA and Confluence. As Gianugo said, JIRA and Confluence are selling like hot-cakes. And, as if he’d been asked “but aren’t they closed source” countless times before, he explained without asking that, sure they’re closed source, but they’re about the most open company to work with that isn’t, well, open source.

What really caught my ears though was that Sourcesense had worked with a large enterprise to replace a BMC Remedy help-desk/issue-tracker install with JIRA install. Related, and as an example of their integration work in applying JIRA at large enterprises, they wired up JIRA with Terracotta for clustering.

Anytime you hear of a Remedy replacement, BMC’s golden goose, it’s time to start paying attention.

Disclaimer: Atlassian, Terracotta, Genuitec, Covalent, and BMC are clients. As is IBM.

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