xSource

Some of you remember the days when along highway 237 , there was hardly a company to be found whose name didnt end in some form of "NETWORKS". Redback, Caspian, etc etc. Something to be said about the buzz and the prefix/suffix of the start-up names. Current moniker - Source.

When we started Apptility, we started with the idea of filling in the demand/supply gap of open source assurance services and empowering internal IT organizations with the open source support services. At that time the companies involved in this segment were mostly open source "product companies" such as MySQL, JBoss and Covalent among others. Other set of companies which started within 6 to 8 month time interval were on the compliance side, namely - Blackduck and Palamida.

Recent entry of some heavy hitters such as Spikesource and SourceLabs suggests that the support and certification segment of open source is ready for a nice competition. It's good for everybody, more market awareness for the internal IT-driven open source adoption and faster realization of open source as a vendor of choice.

There will be many more start-ups in this space, good scope for healthy competition out there.

Happy days for the open source and happy days for the customer.