Last year, a survey conducted by Accenture revealed that a majority of organizations anticipated increased investment in open source software this year. To further reinforce this notion of increasing open source software (OSS) usage, a recent survey by Gartner found that more than half of the organizations surveyed have adopted OSS solutions as part of their IT strategy. Over the past five years, each of Gartner’s OSS surveys taken have reflected an increase in the amount of OSS that makes up responding organizations’ portfolio, from less than 10% five years ago to more than an expected 30% within the next 18 months. Not surprisingly, the rate of proprietary software has decreased at about the same rate as OSS usage has increased.

Similar to the Accenture survey, which stated reasons beyond cost savings benefits that make OSS seem attractive, the Gartner survey yielded analogous responses in which respondents cited benefits of flexibility, increased innovation, shorter development times and faster procurement processes as reasons for adopting OSS solutions.

“Gaining a competitive advantage has emerged as a significant reason for adopting an OSS solution, suggesting that users are beginning to look at OSS differently — if they can customize the code to make it unique to their company, they have created a competitive advantage,” said Laurie Wurster, research director at Gartner.

The survey also sheds light on some other aspects of how OSS is being used, including key initiatives supported by the use of OSS and how OSS components are used in conjunction with internally developed software to enhance existing systems.

The full report is available on Gartner’s website at http://www.gartner.com/DisplayDocument?ref=clientFriendlyUrl&id=1528219.

Alfresco is kicking off 2011 strong with Content.gov, a free, special one day event in downtown Washington DC focusing on open source content management in the government and public sector agencies. The event will be held on January 20th, 2011 at the Washington Marriott at Metro Center.

There’s been a long-time conception that government agencies are slow to adopt emerging technologies including open source products. However, in recent years, open source adoption has rapidly increased in the commercial sector due to a combination of factors, from the down economy and enterprises seeking cost saving alternatives, to the maturity of open source products finally proving themselves in areas of quality, security, and flexibility. The government, while slow to follow, are now beginning to realize the true benefits of open source software.

Content.gov 2011 will feature John Newton, Alfresco CTO & Founder, as the keynote speaker, followed by customer case studies delivered by actual customers and Alfresco implementation partners.

Rivet Logic will present a customer case study featuring a guest speaker from the National Academy of Sciences (NAS). The presentation will cover how Rivet Logic helped NAS implement an open source Alfresco WCM solution that helped streamline operations, resulting in faster publishing cycles, increased productivity, richer site experience, and better accountability.

For more information and to register, click here.

As a new year starts, we’re optimistic for what’s in store for us in 2011. in 2010, Rivet Logic experienced continuous growth as an organization even in this down economy. Open source continues to impact the content management, collaboration and search markets, and we are excited to be part of this revolution.

In a recent CMS Wire survey, open source CMS and related vendors share some of their insights for 2011. Some of the high priorities for product enhancement include:

• Improve General Usability - 78%
• Additional APIs / Integration / Platform Features and Social / Engagement / Personalization / Optimization Features - Tied at 64%
• Address Performance and Scalability Limits - 52%
• Better Mobile Device and/or Multi-Channel Support - 48%
• CMIS Enhancements - 29%

Alfresco and Lucid Imagination participated in this survey and here’s what they have to share:

“What are the top 2 things you want to achieve for your project/product in 2011?”

Alfresco: Focusing on Web engagement to evolve how users produce and consume content, and improving technical aspects of their products like scalability, stability and performance.
Lucid Imagination: Cloud readiness and deployment, and widespread acceptance and displacement of commercial search vendors.

“How do you see content / information management evolving in 2011?”

Alfresco: We’ll see CMS’s “supporting a greater diversity of content distribution channels, such as consumer-oriented social networks, as more and more businesses express a desire to gain better visibility and ‘control’ over their respective brand and messaging.”
Lucid Imagination: Better integration across vendors will further legitimize open source as a strategic alternative to enterprise content technologies.

“How do you see open source business models evolving in 2011?”

Alfresco: Commercial open source models will be refined, with adjustments made to address factors like the economy, evolving technology, and so on.
Lucid Imagination: The folks at Lucid Imagination see continued acceptance of commercially-supported open source as the best practice in open source enterprise adoption.

“What do you expect to be the most disruptive technology or trend in 2011?”

Alfresco: Intelligent application of social computing principles behind the firewall with an eye toward efficient collaboration will continue to change the way that enterprises conduct business while improving overall agility and productivity.
Lucid Imagination: Search integration in cloud-enabled content technologies.

To see the full survey results, click here.

Lucid Imagination officially launched LucidWorks Enterprise (LWE) last week at the 2010 Lucene Revolution conference in Boston. LucidWorks Enterprise is the search solution development platform built on the power of Apache Solr/Lucene. By building and extending the scalable power of Solr open source with vital new features, this integrated platform simplifies and empowers predictable, reliable search application development. LucidWorks Enterprise focuses on providing:

• Search within reach, makes search accessible to the broad range of application developers and architects by taming the complexity of search
• Build better search applications faster through accelerated streamlined Solr app development and integration with search experience innovations. With a robust set of APIs built atop Solr, LucidWorks Enterprise simplifies integration while delivering the full breadth of search capabilities — faceted navigation, auto-suggest, spellcheck; fine-grained results and relevancy tuning; and full web-based encapsulation of the Lucene search libraries in XML-based search & data configuration
• Lowering the cost of growth, with a subscription purchase price five to ten times lower than equivalent commercial alternatives

Some of the features of LWE include:

• Integrated Crawler
• Admin and Config UI
• Query Parser
• Click Scoring
• Alerts

Rivet Logic was one of the partners that participated in the Beta Test of LucidWorks Enterprise. Hear what our very own Sumer Jabri and Paras Jain, along with other system integrators, have to say about their experience working with LWE.

Last week’s Lucene Revolution conference in Boston was the first conference dedicated to open source search in North America. It generated a great turnout and a lot of buzz around Lucene/Solr. Presented by Lucid Imagination, the conference brought together users, developers, thought leaders and market makers for two full days of sessions on the innovative Lucene/Solr open source search technology.

The conference kicked off with a panel of search engineers from flagship firms including Twitter, eHarmony, LinkedIn, and Salesforce.com.

Lucid Imagination also officially announced the release of LucidWorks Enterprise (LWE), a search solution development platform that delivers the power of Solr/Lucene technology in a convenient, robust, well-organized package.

Rivet Logic participated as both a sponsor and speaker, with our very own Michiel Verkaik presenting a session on Alfresco WCM and Solr integration.

Throughout the conference, the sessions continued to generate buzz as well as provide both developer and business focuses tracks around open source search and the promising outlook for its future. Some of the other topics covered include real-time searching with Solr, open source market trends, open source search in BI, how search enables cloud applications, and what’s in store on the Lucene/Solr roadmap.

A recent survey conducted by Accenture found that over 69% of organizations anticipate increased investment in open source software this year, and more than 38% expecting to migrate mission-critical software to open source over the next twelve months.

While this is great news for open source adoption, the real surprise is how organizations are perceiving open source. Previously, the key benefit of open source software has been its cost savings, but now organizations are realizing other benefits such as quality, reliability and speed. A whopping 76% of respondents cited quality as a key benefit of open source, and another 71% cited improved reliability. This shows significant progress in dissolving some of the myths of open source software, where it has traditionally been seen as products that lack the functionality and security that proprietary products have.

We hope to see this momentum grow as more open source myths are debunked and as commercial open source products continue to prove themselves to be formidable rivals of their proprietary counterparts.

We recently released a new case study, Team Beachbody: A Large-Scale Social Community Platform Built on the Open Source Liferay Portal, which highlights how Rivet Logic utilized Liferay Portal to build a revenue-generating social network for Product Partners and the business benefits derived from the solution.

Product Partners, LLC, an exercise and nutrition market leader, launched the Team Beachbody program as a membership-based online support community that offers a wide array of fitness programs. In order to generate revenue growth, Product Partners decided to harness the existing community around its products and combine it with the power of social networking to turn the site into a revenue generating resource. By offering active community members a percentage of sales of Beachbody products that they refer to new members, it encourages increased community participation.

Liferay Portal was selected as the development platform for its flexibility and scalability to cater to evolving business requirements and future growth, as well as its low total cost of ownership. Rivet Logic was chosen as the system integrator to implement the solution, and in particular, the WOWY SuperGym application, a featured element of the overall Team Beachbody experience. The WOWY SuperGym application has resulted in stronger customer loyalty and recurring revenue opportunities through a set of social collaboration features that encourage use and membership retention.

Click here to download the full case study.

Rivet Logic recently released the newly updated Remote Alfresco API rivet (RAAr) to support the latest Alfresco releases. RAAr was first released to the Alfresco community back in October of 2008, and provides an abstraction layer for remote communication with Alfresco ECM.

RAAr provides a simple, Java-based local library that may be used by one or more content rich applications and allows these applications to interface to Alfresco (including multiple Alfresco repositories from the same application). RAAr’s lower layers handle communication to remote Alfresco instances over ReSTful calls to Alfresco that get mapped to calls to the Alfresco Foundation Services (AFS) API.

RAAr’s Java library is backed by an Alfresco Web Script-based Java services that marshal/unmarshal calls and direct them to AFS. RAAr takes care of marshaling/unmarshaling of parameters and handles connection management to multiple-Alfresco instances. Furthermore, RAAr provides more coarse-grained calls for better remoting to enhance performance.

This new version of RAAr will support the latest Alfresco 3.1.x and 3.2.x releases.

RAAr is a free and open source software licensed under the GNU General Public License (GPL) version 3.0. For more information, please visit http://www.rivetlogic.com/Forge/Rivets/Remote_Alfresco_API_Rivet.

AIIM (Association for Information and Image Management), released its “State of the ECM Industry 2010″ report yesterday. This report, underwritten by Rivet Logic, surveyed over 750 members of the AIIM community and yields some interesting facts about ECM, and in particular, open source ECM.

The study revealed that open source ECM solutions are only used by 6% of organizations, along with 3% for WCM and 2% for portals. But the good news is that an additional 9% plan to adopt open source for ECM, WCM or portals within the next 2 years. Most respondents also have an open mind on open source usage, with 64% saying that they would consider it mainly due to its cost benefits.

The report also covers other ECM-related topics including ECM business drivers, SharePoint, and Enterprise 2.0.

To download a full copy of the report, click here.

This year, BIZcon Europe 2010, hosted by Ricston, will be held in Malta on March 4th and 5th. BIZcon is all about informing business leaders about significant trends and developments in business, and interestingly, the theme this year will be “Understanding and Leveraging Open Source”.

While many business executives are familiar with the term open source, not many have a clear understanding of how open source can be used and integrated into their organization’s environment, and more importantly, the value that can be gained compared to traditional proprietary solutions. As open source continues to gain traction, it’s important to keep business executives informed so that open source can be effectively incorporated into their strategy and leveraged to deliver bottom line results.

The agenda includes presentations from various business executives and leaders in open source, including Liferay CEO Bryan Cheung.