Small Business: Features

With the world economy in shambles many businesses are already battening down the hatches expecting rough seas ahead. IT budgets will shrink along with all other budgets, and maybe even more than other budgets. After all, companies still need to advertise and pay their workforce, but they may be able to do without new servers or software for a while. And that is where open source software vendors can help keep the ship sailing.

Linux is enjoying growth, with a contingent of devotees too large to be called a cult following at this point. Solaris, meanwhile, has thrived as a longstanding, primary Unix platform geared to enterprises. But with Linux the object of all the buzz in the industry, can Sun's rival Solaris Unix OS hang on, or is it destined to be displaced by Linux altogether?

By combining business intelligence and two foundations of Web 2.0 -- search and mapping -- a police department in the US state of Kentucky has built a brand-new window into crime. This Web-based BI portal allows patrol officers to enter data -- or even pieces of data such as a few numbers from a license plate -- into a simple search interface and retrieve information from their own databases and those of neighboring towns.

With the Open Source Conference (OSCon) and IDG's LinuxWorld show in the rearview mirror of 2008, it is clear that open source is no longer just a trendy conversation.

Once upon a time at a NASA space flight center a long way away, I was an e-mail administrator. At the time, the 1980s, e-mail was still chaotic. The RFC 822 standard was only beginning to bring rhyme and reason to e-mail. One of RFC 822's competitors, the Common Messaging Calls (CMC) X.400 standard, wasn't making much progress, but then Microsoft adopted it in 1992, added the concepts of folders to it, and re-named the result Mail Application Programming Interface (MAPI). And, ever since, the e-mail world can broadly be divided into two camps: the RFC 822 Internet compliant e-mail group and the MAPI-compliant Microsoft Outlook/Exchange pack.

In our conversations, we spoke to Sam Lamonica, CIO of Rudolph and Sletten Construction, a general building contractor; Philipp Huber, CTO/COO of the UK based XCalibre Communications, a hosting firm; Clyde Williams, Infrastructure Systems Manager for Southeast Alabama Medical Center; and Walt Cornelison, Director of Information Technology for Tropitone Furniture, a manufacturer of high-end outdoor furniture. Here's how our conversation went:

We spoke to Clyde Williams, Infrastructure Systems Manager for Southeast Alabama Medical Center; Walt Cornelison, Director of Information Technology for Tropitone Furniture - a manufacturer or high-end outdoor furniture; Jason Ford, CTO of BlackMesh Hosting and Solution - a managed hosting and managed services firm; Keith Parnell, CIO of Stratum Marketing - a marketing communications agency. Here's how our conversation went:

"We have come into real contention [for mindshare] in the enterprise," said Tim O'Reilly, CEO at O'Reilly Media, in his keynote address at OSCON, last week's Open Source convention in the US. "So we should be patting ourselves on the back, right? I'm not so sure."

Web-based office suites are coming into their own at last. For quite a while, Web-based suites -- which offered word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, and other tools associated with desktop office suites -- were extolled not because they did these things well, but because they could do them at all. But the three major competitors, Google Docs, ThinkFree, and Zoho, have all made major improvements in recent months. They're becoming both broader, with more applications, and deeper, with more features and functionality in existing apps.

Big Linux systems plot climate change, simulate nuclear explosions, and secure bragging rights. But IT customers are starting to find that high-performance computing technologies make a difference in the real world, from clustered processing to data center greening.

Windows Vista debuted to muffled applause, followed by lackluster sales. Up until June 30, cash-strapped businesses looking to avoid the cost of upgrading to new Vista-compatible hardware could still purchase trusty Windows XP. Now, however, Windows XP is available only as a costly "downgrade" from Windows Vista--if you buy a copy of Vista, you can install the 6-year-old XP operating system using the Vista license.