SpikeSource offers Adaptability and Interoperability : By Ramesh Shastri Managing Director, SpikeSource, India

Open Source has actually grappled with many issues since its inception – sometimes for ill publicity and at other times for lack of competent technical support hands. And, there have been a lot of efforts from vendors like Ubuntu, Suse, RedHat, Oracle, Sun, etc. to fizzle out the issues and take it forward. They have been well supported by the large solution vendors like HP, IBM, Sun, Oracle, etc. 

Here is another company, SpikeSource, which is positioning its solutions to fizzle out the so-called issues with Open Source. Regarding this, VARIndia spoke to Ramesh Shastri, Managing Director, SpikeSource, India.

He says, “SpikeSource was founded in 2003 with the objective of bringing open source solution to the enterprise.” Though the core focus of the company is to help small and medium enterprises adopting open source, but the company of late found the large enterprises are also showing a lot of interest.

What SpikeSource does is, it brings all the best-of-breed open source technologies from the industry and makes a stack and enables applications run on it easily at a low cost of ownership. Not only that, the company also provides services on top of it in terms of testing the application and supporting the same as well.

The SpikeSource Core stack includes over 50 open source components, including Apache, Axis, Hibernate, JBoss, MySQL, PHP, and Tomcat, and it is supported on the SuSE 9.0, Red Hat 9, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3.0, and Fedora Core 1 platforms. It is fully integrated and certified in its entirety – not just per component – using test suites developed by the open source teams providing each component, as well as SpikeSource’s own additional tests of cross-component behaviour. The newly released stacks incorporate feedback from users of the prior versions, as well as enhanced and updated versions of the integrated components. The SpikeSource Core stack installs and is configured and ready to use in about 10 minutes.

The genesis of the SpikeSource is that it is a 100-per cent VC-funded company and founded by the famous personality, Ray Lane – incidentally, the present Chairman of the company. Ray Lane is the ex-Oracle President, who reigned the company at the helm for 10 years and took the company from US$1 billion to US$10 billion turnover. After leaving Oracle, he joined KPCP (Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield and Byers) as a partner and has been instrumental in various successful projects, including SpikeSource. The CEO of the company is Kim Polese, who is also a well-known personality and has been rated as one among the 10 most powerful women by eWeek.

He says, “Actually, Open Source initiative started in the universities who wanted to bring something better, nicer and most competitive than the proprietary software. But, today, there is a flurry in industry standard open source softwares. Although there is a proliferation in open source software in the market, but the adoption has not matched the steps with the concern of who will support those products. There is a concern in terms of cost, interoperability and reliability.” He adds,”“SpikeSource comes here as an answer to all these concerns. We add technology and create stack of middleware and make applications work comfortably and the whole process is called ignited.”

He maintains, “Today, we have solution like Alfresco SpikeIgnited, which is an open source Enterprise Content Management, which works with the package. Alfresco and SpikeIgnited is one package. We also work in product suites to provide greater value to the enterprises – for example, SuiteTwo SpikeIgnited. It is basically built from the web 2.0 technology. Today, the industry is collaborating heavily. They need platforms for collaboration. Things like Wikies, Blogs and RSS Feed, etc. SuiteTwo helps the enterprises in creating all these functionality quite easily.”

“You create content in Blogs and Wikies, the contents are created under a variety of platforms. We have created a federated search and it searches all the repositories. We provide interoperability of applications.”

As far as sales and marketing is concerned, SpikeSource follows the channel model. The company engages ISVs, who build their applications on its solutions. And, on the other hand, the company also engages the SIs and VARs who take SpikeSource solutions to the market.

He adds, “Our goal is not to sell directly to the individual customers; we prefer selling through the channel partners. For example, Dell sells our solutions Suite 2 in the US market. And recently, Dell India has started carrying it.”

The company is also helping the partners to enable them with all technical and non-technical capabilities.

The company’s sales model is based on an annual subscription basis, whereas others charge licence fee for a particular software use. SpikeSource takes India seriously as far as investment is concerned. Recently, the company has set up an engineering centre and has just started looking at the Indian market. But the company has a very good base of customers in the US and Japan.

Ramesh says, “Intel is a big partner of ours. We have met a lot of potential partners in India and they are evaluating our solutions it will take 3-6 months time.”

The company has nearly 90 employees, out of which 45 are based in the US and the rest in India. The company is looking forward to expanding the headcount soon.

The solutions of SpikeSource are also supported by SpikeNet service, which monitors the vulnerability and checks the vulnerability by sending patches to the customers, etc. This service involves a high-level of automated including monitoring and detecting.

The company also provides certification to the partners. The company is also engaged in OSA (Open Solution Standard) to influence the use of standards for the service of the community. Part of this, the company is trying to promote open standards. Many of our products are well compared with the proprietary products.

SpikeSource offers a portfolio of SpikeCertified and SpikeIgnited solutions for enterprises that may not have deployed open source before. Solutions that SpikeSource has brought out so far include:SpikeSource Solutions for Content Management, Centric CRM SpikeIgnited solution for Customer Relationship Management, SpikeSource Solutions for Email, Calendaring and Collaboration, JasperSoft SpikeIgnited Business Intelligence Suite, JasperSoft SpikeIgnited Business Intelligence Suite, SuiteTwo SpikeIgnited, Hyperic SpikeCertified Application Management Solution, etc.

The company has released a new version of the company’s integrated, validated and certified LAMP/LAMJ stack.

Additionally, SpikeSource released a new open source inventory tool, the Spike Asset Manager, which is available for download from SourceForge.com. With Spike Asset Manager, users can see exactly what open source components and versions are currently installed on their machines, allowing developers to spot stale versions of technology that should be upgraded.