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Most Organizations Now Use Open Source Software According to Gartner

Gartner logo 150x150 More than half of the 517 organizations surveyed by Gartner use open source software (OSS). When the firm first started tracking open source in the enterprise five years ago, only 10% of organizations were using OSS. Gartner published the results in a report titled Survey Analysis: Overview of Preferences and Practices in the Adoption and Usage of Open-Source Software. This announcement summarizes the findings.

Decision makers aren’t just looking to OSS because it’s cheaper – they’re also trying to gain competitive advantages through open source. “Nearly one-third of respondents cited benefits of flexibility, increased innovation, shorter development times and faster procurement processes as reasons for adopting OSS solutions,” reads the announcement.

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More than one in five respondents (22%) are using OSS in all departments of the organization, while 46% are using OSS for specific departments. According to the announcement, the top uses for OSS were “data management and integration; and application development, integration, architecture, governance and/or overhaul.” Other popular uses were security and compliance, data center modernization and virtualization.

Last year we reported an Accenture survey that found that 40% of organizations planned to migrate mission-critical software to open source within a year. It appears that this might be happening quicker than thought, though Gartner includes non-mission critical deployments in its figures.

For a look at some of the most popular open source applications in the enterprise, check out this post.

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A Muddled Look at Today’s Cloud Computing Landscape [Infographic]

Thumbnail image for Cirrus_clouds2.jpgToday’s cloud computing landscape is as complex as it is to decipher what the term actually means.

Last week, an animated Steve Mills made it clear in an interview with me that for him the cloud is nothing new. Mills leads the software group at IBM and spoke critically of the all-inclusive nature of what the cloud means. The cloud is more an evolution than an innovation. It’s an extension of the computer as a metaphor for the transition from the mechanical age to the information age. The computer gives us a space and the cloud is an extension of that space.

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Mills’s remarks provide a point of context to an infographic from Wikibon that demonstrates how definitions about cloud computing continue to be muddled.

“Today’s Cloud Computing Landscape,” breaks the cloud into three categories: private/Enterprise Cloud; public cloud and hybrid cloud.

Breaking the cloud landscape into categories gives only a partial context for what the cloud encompasses. For example, VMware is also considered a hybrid cloud provider. IBM could fit into both categories, too. Both are listed only as private cloud providers.

Cloud Computing Landscape
Via: Cloud Computing Landscape

The infographic does give a view of the companies playing in this new space but its organization takes away from the broader context of what the cloud encompasses. It also minimizes the influence of companies such as Amazon.com, which is widely considered the most innovative provider in the cloud landscape. It also includes Twitter, which is a bit of a stretch.

As a landscape representation, I’d prefer to see these companies represented as mountains more than clouds. Instead the infographic layers clouds into classifications that take away from what the cloud is really about.

Mills perspectives ring true to some extent. Views about cloud computing are not taking into account the transformations that come with cloud computing. The market is evolving to meet business demands. The drive to create more applications comes from a demand for more ways to use programmatic tools for managing information.

It’s not as much about categorizing the cloud as it is about understanding how the extensions we create help us better understand the new spaces that are generated as businesses evolve to adopt information infrastructures.

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Digital Urdu: New Software Improves Data Analysis of Pakistan’s National Language

urdu_alphabet.jpgThe extent to which social media sites like Twitter and Facebook play a role in the recent political uprisings in Tunisa, Egypt, Bahrain and so on continues to be a source of debate. What is more clear, however, is that the major languages of these regions are not well-served by electronic resources that make text analysis of these documents and data possible.

But now computer scientists have developed the first software system that will allow for the processing of documents in Urdu, the national language of Pakistan and one of the five most-spoken languages in the world.

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The software will help lay the foundation for data mining in Urdu and provide for more accurate transliteration, as well as open the door for projects in similar languages. “This is the first comprehensive, natural language processing system for Urdu,” says Rohini Srihari, University of Buffalo associate professor of computer science and engineering.

The work is a joint project between her department and Janya, an Amherst-based company she founded that provides information extraction technology in multiple languages, including Chinese, Arabic, Pashto, and Russian.

Natural Language Processing and Urdu

The problem with data mining and sentiment analysis in other languages is that they don’t often have the same sort of “established electronic infrastructures” that we have for English and European languages. “If you are trying to do sentiment analysis – to find out what are the main topics people are talking about in a country, is there intensity building up over something and who is swaying opinion – then you must have an information extraction system,” Srihari says.

That is what she has been working on with researchers, something that can perform word segmentation (tagging parts of speech, for example) and entity-tagging (recognizing people, place, and organization names) in a raw, untranslated Urdu document.

“Voice of the Citizen” Through Social Media Data Mining

Srihari says she’s focused on the “voice of the citizen” in this project. “Some of the information is political and some of it is not,” she says, and despite the turmoil in the region, a lot of the social media chatter in Pakistan is about cricket.

Srihari presented her findings at a recent conference – "Blogs & Bullets: Social Media and the Struggle for Political Change" – at Stanford Universitiy. She says she became interested in Urdu because they were looking at blogs from different cultures. Noting that the advent of the Web has caused an explosion in online content in a variety of languages, Srihari says, “When you start looking at blogs in different cultures, you can really start to understand public sentiment and opinions.”

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Apple working on video ringtones

Patently Apple recently uncovered a patent filed by Apple that describes methods for creating video ringtones for telephonic iOS devices like the iPhone. The technology is designed to allow users to automatically combine sound and video from various sources, including iTunes and iMovie, to create custom audio-visual alerts for incoming phone calls.

Patently Apple describes multiple ways the patent pending feature could automatically combine audio and video to create custom visuals for each incoming call.

In a simple example, visuals displayed on the device would react to associated audio much like a visualizer in iTunes. In another example, a layered composite could be assembled from multiple video or photographic sources. These layers could be independently animated based on different characteristics in the audio track, such as its mix of high and low frequencies.

The visuals would not be limited to 2D content. Apple’s system could offer visual effects in 3D space, including movement, appearance, shape and differing camera angles.

The patent also describes a means for callers to send the “seed” information about a particular song or video. These caller “signatures” could further alter the visual experience for the recipient or offer dynamic links to relevant content for the receiver to check out later. Aside from offering a unique new method for verifying the identity of incoming callers, Patently Apple suggests this technology could bring social networking concepts to ringtones by allowing users to share their latest favorite songs and videos with the people they are calling.

The general concept of an animated ringtone is not new. App developers like iFoneTec already offer video ringtone software for the iPhone and Android platforms. (Note: iFoneTec’s iPhone app appears to require a jailbroken device.) Existing video ringtone solutions appear limited to playing the same video clip every time a call comes in from a specified contact. Apple’s proposed new technology seems to offer a more dynamic and extremely customizable experience that can be configured to some extent by both the caller and the receiver.

Of course, Apple often files patents for technologies that never find their way into shipping products. It’s unknown whether or not we’ll ever see Apple’s dynamically animated ringtones on the iPhone. The technology described in the patent would certainly showcase the media capabilities of the iPhone and offer a variety of new opportunities for users to express themselves.

Apple’s patent, credited to Brian McKnight and Michael Neuman, was originally filed in the third quarter of 2010.

Apple working on video ringtones originally appeared on TUAW on Mon, 07 Mar 2011 14:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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comScore: Android Passes iOS And RIM For U.S. Smartphone Subscriber Share

comScore’s monthly smartphone data is in and it looks like for the first time Android OS has surpassed both Apple’s iOS and RIM in terms of U.S. smartphone subscriber share. The data, which measured smartphone usage from October 201 until January of 2011, showed that 65.8 million people in the U.S. owned smartphones during period, which is up 8 percent from the preceding three month period. While Android passed iOS in terms of subscriber share in the previous period, this is the first time the Google-developed OS has unseated RIM from the number one spot.

Google’s Android platform led smartphone platforms for the first time in January with 31.2 percent market share; RIM ranked second with 30.4 percent market share, followed by Apple with 24.7 percent share. Microsoft followed with a 8 percent market share, with Palm taking 3.2 percent share.

In terms of total mobile device usage, 234 million Americans ages 13 and older used mobile devices for the period. With respect to manufacturers, Samsung ranked as the top OEM with 24.9 percent of U.S. mobile subscribers, up 0.7 percentage points from the three month period ending in October. LG ranked second with 20.8 percent share, followed by Motorola (16.5 percent), RIM (8.6 percent) and Apple (7 percent).

Mobile content usage continues to increase steadily amongst U.S. consumers. In January, 68.1 percent of U.S. mobile subscribers used text messaging on their mobile device, while browsers were used by 37.0 percent of mobile subscribers, which is an increase of 0.8 percentage points.

And 35.3 percent of the mobile audience used downloaded applications, representing an increase of 1.6 percentage points. Accessing of social networking sites or blogs increased 1.1 percentage points, representing 25.3 percent of mobile subscribers. Playing games represented 23.7 percent of the mobile audience, while listening to music represented 16.5 percent (up 1.1 percentage points).

While Android has been eating away at iOS market share, this month’s data shows that the OS is also taking some of RIM’s market share. comScore’s data represents one report in a sea of many similar findings that show that Android is growing fast. But a recent Nielsen report pointed out that because RIM and Apple create and sell their own smartphones with their operating systems, these companies are actually in a better position in the three-way race (in terms of device manfuacturers). Because Google licenses its OS to device manufacturers, the Android ecosystem is more fragmented.

While Android is looking strong, the race has not been won yet.

Information provided by CrunchBase

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