Red Herring covers open source software companies
This week’s Red Herring magazine features several articles about open source software, including the cover story about Mozilla. Particularly interesting is another article that discusses how “venture firms are swaming to open-source startups”.
The article showcases five companies, including Alfresco, which makes an enterprise content management system, Funambol, which allows BlackBerry-like capabilities even on low-end phones, JasperSoft, which makes reporting software, as does Pentaho, and XenSource. Of course, XenSource gets my biggest thumbs-up, as it grew from the work of Cambridge University researchers.
One comment, from the CEO of SugarCRM, is worth repeating: “he spends about 25 percent of his revenues on sales and marketing whereas a proprietary competitor like Salesforce.com spends 48 percent. SugarCRM’s engineering costs are minor compared to what proprietary companies have to spend.” I am a big fan of SugarCRM, using it for my own consultancy work, but also of its CEO, because he’s so quotable.
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