Investing in Top 'Open Source' Companies

I recently looked over the "Top 50 Open Source Companies Ranked by Momentum Index" posted at http://momentumindex.com/50-open-source-momentum-index/  These are businesses built on top of open source technologies. The list of successful companies is growing and investors have been pouring money into them.

The following are selected mid-size open source companies to watch and possibly invest in as they grow and go public over time.  Many of these were simply open source projects just 5 years ago. They're now thriving startup companies that continue to innovate, expand, and position themselves to become some of the top companies in the future as we move further into the 21^st century 'Information Age' where collaboration, open solutions, and innovation (COSI) are king.

Company & Website

redhat.com hortonworks.com datastax.com mongodb.com mulesoft.com mapr.com cloudera.com couchbase.com automattic.com

pentaho.com kaltura.com revolutionanalytics.com talend.com acquia.com bonitasoft.com forgerock.com appcelerator.com sugarcrm.com

cignex.com alfresco.com zend.com enterprisedb.com datameer.com basho.com blackducksoftware.com zenoss.com eucalyptus.com

What other companies do you think ought to be added to the list? Explain

Open Source Space Satellites Launched

This news story in NewScientist by Lisa Grossman caught the attention of a lot of people this week – "Space station poised to launch open-source satellites". Known as CubeSats, these open source mini -satellites were launched into space this week aboard a Japanese resupply vehicle heading to the International Space Station (ISS). This citizen-science project was partially funded by a Kickstarter campaign.

Paying customers will be able to program controls on the satellites and run experiments for three days for $125, or for $250 per week. The open source CubeSats run Arduino, an open source computer hardware and software platform popular with science hobbyists. Five years out, the project team expects to see hundreds of these satellites deployed in space.

Students of Sara Seager at MIT helped design and build CubeSats for planetary science.  "This definitely is helping open up space both to all people and all nations," Seager says of the Ardusat launch.

This is all kind of amazing to me – and to the rapidly growing open source global community. What's next? Open source space vehicles heading around the moon and off to Mars? 
BTW - how much would a large commercial company have charged for a similar solution? $50 million? $100 million? Interesting to speculate about.

Open source has come a long way over the past decade.  What other spectacular new innovative uses of open source platforms do you see coming down the road?

The Emerging 'Open Source' Industry & Mega-Companies

Speaking of new companies and job growth - senior executives, politicians, economist, and investors pay attention. Hundreds of major open source companies have been established and are now succeeding in the 'Open Source' Health, Education, Publishing, and other industries.  Think Alfesco, Red Hat, KitWare, MedSphere, Black Duck, Google, Eucalyptus, Mirth,  Canonical, Pentaho, JasperSoft and many more [not to mention well established companies like IBM and Oracle also playing in this space]. See COSI Open Solutions.  

Open source software has had a revolutionary impact on the software industry. With the success and ubiquity of open source projects, most enterprise and commercial software development teams now mix open source with internal code to shorten software development schedules and save on the development costs.  See BlackDuck Open Source ROI

The latest reports from Gartner, Forrester, Cenatic, and many other news and industry research organizations all point to the continuing growth of the open source marketplace. In fact, Red Hat recently became the first open source software company to generate more than $1 billion in annual revenue, a watershed moment for the global open source business community.  See COSI Open Business Studies & Reports.

Open source software has obtained a significant share of several markets, such as web servers, server operating systems, desktop operating systems, web browsers, databases, e-mail and other IT infrastructure solutions. A major driving force behind the adoption and growth of open source solutions in the U.S. has been the emergence and growth of open source software product and service providers with a profitable, sustainable economic model.  See Cenatic Report on International Use of Open Source Software – 2010

It would seem the time is right to start building more 'mega' companies in this space like Red Hat. Companies in the Open Source, especially in the Open Health, Open Education, and Open Publishing space, are ripe for the picking with potential growth as far as the eye can see. What do you think is going to happen?

A recent survey by Gartner, Inc. found that more than half of organizations surveyed have adopted open-source software (OSS) solutions as part of their IT strategy. Nearly one-third of respondents cited benefits of flexibility, increased innovation, shorter development times and faster procurement processes as reasons for adopting OSS solutions.  See Gartner Report

Looking forward to your comments and a 'heads up' about any major movements in this arena.