Bickel Blog

For the past 5 years Liferay and Alfresco have had great growth and emerged as the leaders in the US for Open Source Portal and Content Management. Over the past year I have seen eXo grow from leading the French market in this same space to be the emerging, modern alternative to Liferay + Alfresco . The diagram at the right (from the Real Story Group ) shows how eXo has taken a lead over Liferay in both the evolution of the vendor and the product development. There are several key reasons for that shift: Partnership with Red Hat. Clearly Red Hat taking our product to market on a worldwide basis, having the resources to meet the needs of the largest customers is a big win. Benjamin Mestrallet, the founder and CEO, moved to the US and opened an office in San Francisco. This has helped spur new relationships (some announced and many in the works) as well as visibility in the world market. Funding to allow us to expand and meet the additional worldwide demands and build out our new t...

Last week we got another hint that CloudBees is moving in the right direction when IBM announced their Cloud offering for Development and Testing . I was raised in an IBM family, read Buck Rogers book when I was younger, my Father feared for me when I did not go to work for IBM, and heard the “You never get fired for going with IBM” line more than a few times. While some make fun of IBM, I do have an inbred healthy respect for them. They have superlative marketing and well-thought-out positioning. They have a huge installed base that mirrors the market, although perhaps a bit on the laggard side so their customers feel “safe”. This announcement reflects all of that. It has compelling benefits for the customer: “Traditional development and testing environments pose several challenges: high labor and capital costs, long development cycles and greater risk for configuration errors. Developers are now finding ways to meet these challenges using cloud computing.” It includes a clear h...

It looks like the big guys are following the lead that CloudBees took back in August to bring Cloud Services to developers and QA groups. Spring announced its upcoming (Q1, 2011) Code2Cloud offering this week - http://www.springsource.com/code2cloud . It is a nice announcement that reconfirms the direction that CloudBees – www.CloudBees.com is taking. The Cloud can definitely bring Development and QA processes great improvements in costs and agility. Spring seems to be focusing its early Cloud efforts on trying to tie it easily to Eclipse and several other projects like Mylyn, Git, Hudson and Bugzilla. The basic idea is that a developer sitting in Eclipse can run services that reside in the Cloud. Since it is several months away for Beta, it is difficult to tell how open or scalable it will be. For example, there was no mention of Maven, SVN, Ant, scalability for Hudson, or long term positioning of a Java PaaS. CloudBees has taken a different approach for our first version of DE...