Newcomer spikes concerns over open source bundle support

Oct 11, 2004: Inspired by the challenge of providing customers with an avenue of support for systems that incorporate multiple open source applications, start-up company SpikeSource is to go live in December, with plans to test, certify and support a variety of open source software stacks for enterprise customers.

"Adoption of open source software has its own set of challenges. There are over 85,000 open source projects in existence today and quality and capabilities vary dramatically across all these efforts," a statement on the company's website reads.

It continues: "While each of these projects solves a problem, the frequent release of many open source projects means that version mismatch is a continuous headache. IT is never certain which versions of which projects will actually work together in a reliable manner. IT demands support, documentation, and extreme reliability, yet open source projects rarely see the traditional rigor of software management. There is no formal product management, no disciplined release plan, and no integration testing with the thousands of other open source projects they need to work flawlessly with. Above all, support is informal at best, and where to go for help with cross-component problems isn't always clear. Customers want to hold someone accountable. But who?"

SpikeSource is looking to assume that responsibility, removing it from the customer's IT department, according to recently-appointed CEO, Kim Polese.

"Enterprise architects are faced with a huge array of open-source applications, but how do they know what works with what? Right now, that responsibility falls to the IT staff, and it uses up a lot of time and effort. We save them that effort."

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