Numbers, Volume 6

While we “don’t do numbers” at RedMonk, I come across a lot of interesting numbers each week. Here are some, though admittedly slimmer this week what with the 3 shows I’ve been banging around at over the past week plus:

Making Money in Open Source

At the Eclipse Open Source Strategy Summit, Paul Clenahan of Actuate said that BIRT had 6.5M+ downloads thru 2005 to Dec 2008. It had over 4M last year. In 2007, Actuate did $8M in “BIRT based revenue.” Last year, 2008, it was $15.4M [I didn’t jot down the number soon enough -Coté].

Eclipse

Under [Mike Milinkovich’s] watch, the Eclipse Foundation has grown to over 185 corporate members worldwide, over 90 open source projects, and over 1,000 Eclipse committers.

WebEx, GoToMeeting, & Friends Must Love This

Connecting to the Cloud

West admits that the current economy has slowed Clearwire’s rollout: “Our plans were to cover a lot more of the U.S. population than we have finances to do at the moment.” He added that the $3.2 billion gives Clearwire enough money to make big inroads, although the company needs to raise even more money. That means having a goal of establishing WiMax service in 80 metro areas by 2010.

One hopes their angling for those pots of Crater Cash so that we can start downloading (and uploading!) videos faster while driving through BFE.

Man, what is our problem in the US with broadband? Do Europe, Korea, and others just have better broadband because they’re geographically smaller, pay more for it, or what?

A Global Company

The Wall Street Journal reported that IBM is planning to lay off about 5,000 U.S. employees, with many of the jobs being transferred to India. It cited people familiar with the situation.

The latest round of cuts target the company’s global business-services unit, according to reports.

India has emerged as key location for IBM and other multinational services companies for the global delivery of services. IBM is estimated to have over 80,000 staff in services delivery and sales in India.

I’ve in the past made snarky comments about a “smart planet” meaning “not having to fly Yankees around the world.” Indeed.

Shrinking the Googlebot

So today we have informed Googlers that we plan to reduce the number of roles within our sales and marketing organizations by just under 200 globally. (via Rich Sharples)

SXSW Tracking

[U]sing ITDatabase (shameless plug) I did a search for the 30 day period ending March 25th so see how many articles were written about SXSW this year.

The numbers break down as follows:

• Number of articles: 328
• Number publications: 109
• Number of authors: 143

Interesting isn’t it? The data implies that more than one author per publication wrote something about SXSW.

Going a level deeper, let’s take a look at the top 10 vendors mentioned in SXSW stories:

• Twitter 122 (37.2%)
• Facebook 96 (29.3%)
• Apple 69 (21.0%)
• Google 60 (18.3%)
• Microsoft 32 (9.8%)
• Palm 22 (6.7%)
• Adobe 13 (4.0%)
• Amazon 13 (4.0%)
• Dell 12 (3.7%)
• Intel 9 (2.7%)

How much does a cloud cost, part 2

Amazon spent $56 million on servers with Rackable in 2007, but boosted that to $86 million last year…. Microsoft (MSFT) bought about $126 million in Rackable equipment in 2007, but just $35 million in 2008, according to data from Rackable’s latest 10-K filing with the SEC. Yahoo (YHOO), which accounted for a quarter of Rackable’s revenue in 2007, no longer makes the list of the company’s largest customers.

Disclosure: Eclipse, IBM, IT Database are clients.