With the entire approved analytic process in a repeatable workflow organisations spend less time on repeating mundane tasks and process, and spend more time on valuable aspects of the analysis

In the world of data analysis it may be no coincidence that open source tools like the R statistical computing language have blossomed as analytics and big data have matured together.

Hadoop, Python There seems to be a special kind of magic between the curious minds of data analysts (with a small a as they may be line of business users that dont have a degree in statistics or a qualification in coding) and with new ways of exploring the world.

Open source software has proven itself to be a very useful way of rapidly finding quality insights out about the world when out to the challenging task of finding insights from the enormous volumes of data out there. Big data analytics provides an opportunity for open source data quality tools to deliver new insights.

>See also:Using data analytics to improve business processes and reduce waste

From a bottom-line focus, using open source solutions as part of the enterprise mix can help provide a cost-effective method to help get successful analytics projects off the ground.

Certainly, any business still using coding-intensive legacy architectures, or SAS solutions, will find themselves easily seduced the speed and versatility of modern products in the analytical toolkit.

Bringing these products and tools together can be complicated, but linking them together in one platform provides the fun and thrill for the analysts who want to use their favourite tools, and still maintain the governance, repeatability and reliability the business needs to really create a long-lived culture of analytics.

Its a plain fact that much of an analysts role, be they a specialist quant or a general business user, is more likely than not filled with the tedium of finding, cleaning, prepping, and cleansing data. By that stage theyve lost the enjoyment of what made the relationship with data special in the first place.

The trouble is that many legacy solutions cant adapt to the changing data landscape. Some were not designed to deal with the variety of data structured, unstructured, and semi-structured, or in the various types it is available from numerous applications and sources. This is why its sensible to allow for a flexible environment for analysts to take advantage of data across any system and in any format.

>See also:Data leader on the impact and necessity of data analytics

If this, the foundational element of the data journey, can be made as seamless and easy as possible, then the analytical detectives can be doing what they trained and are paid to do. Thats better for them, and its better for the business, as that passion and brain power is not atrophying with the tedious end of the mundane elements of data preparation.

Additionally, most data scientists today build predictive and machine learning models in open source programming languages and then need to deploy that code into different technology frameworks.

Its time consuming, error-prone and requires additional development resources often stalling data science projects altogether. Its important to pay attention to any roadblocks between data scientists and development teams by accelerating the model making and model deployment processes.

It can require considerable coding expertise to harness complex sets of open source tools, adding difficulty, not least because the skills are in high demand and fetch a premium on the market.

As a consequence code-free environments for analytics that simplify data access, preparation, analysis, and consumption are becoming a must in the modern enterprise.

A project manager should be able to quickly prepare, clean and combine data from any range of data sources. It should be a breeze to implement fuzzy matching techniques to improve the accuracy of results, and however the project is designed, as a matter of course it should reduce the dependency and reliance on data scientists and IT wherever possible. Its simply not sustainable to do this in any other way.

>See also:Machine learning and AI is changing how data science is leveraged

Following the data preparation and quality improvement, the next step involves taking that data and incorporating predictive or advanced analytics to make or to further improve business decisions. And in the modern, agile enterprise, this should mean doing this without having to write code if users dont wish to.

Once those elements are accounted for it should be a simple matter to build repeatable workflow processes that provides the business with greater data consistency and accuracy and result in tangible business benefits once the insights are acted upon.

With the entire approved analytic process in a repeatable workflow organisations spend less time on repeating mundane tasks and process, and spend more time on valuable aspects of the analysis. Analysts will enjoy themselves once more, following their curiosity and solving problems rather than administrating.

This is important. Todays data scientists are spending too much time building advanced models that never reach deployment. Gartner stated that many projects remain stuck at the pilot stage.

>See also:Is Hadoops position as the king of big data storage under threat?

Only 15% of businesses reported deploying their big data project to production in the Business Intelligence & Analytics Summit 2016 research. Yhat states that only 10% of predictive models actually get deployed. And according to TDWI, models can take an average of six to nine months to get deployed. Thats not a sustainable way of working.

Modelling tools need to be more accessible to accelerate deployment, and to save time and frustration. In part, its worth bringing joy back to data scientists and business users alike. With a wealth of data out there, its a good time to encourage and empower the people who love to solve complex business problems.

Sourced byMatthew Madden, director, Product Marketing at Alteryx

The UKs largest conference fortechleadership,TechLeadersSummit, returns on 14 September with 40+ top execs signed up to speak about the challenges and opportunities surrounding the most disruptive innovations facing the enterprise today.Secure your place at this prestigious summit byregisteringhere

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Open source and proprietary software solutions: the key for an analytic project - Information Age

The cloud neutralizes open sources free advantage, and community zealotry alone wont overcome that shift Thank you

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For a decade, theres a question that just wont go away: Is the cloud killing open source? It still strikes up some emotions.

Open source software has been the backbone of enterprise platforms for a long timeremember the LAMP stack of Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP/Perl? But consuming open source software via the cloud could change open sources enterprise footprint.

First of all, open sources no-cost attribute means less in the cloud. Public cloud providers will charge you for the time you use their cloud to access open source softwareor any software.

Thus, it doesnt really matter if you AWS Linux, Red Hat Linux, or closed-source platforms from Microsoft, because they are all free yet cost the same in cloud time charges for access. The same is true with the databases; theres not much different in your monthly cloud bill if you use open source databases versus closed source, or those that are native to a specific cloud such AWS Red Shift.

If there is not a dramatic cost advantage, most enterprises wont care about the platforms that they use in the long run, and that takes away one of open sources historic strengths.

Of course, in some enterprises, the use of open source is a religion. Ive had many clients that will use only open source solutions. One reason is belief that an open source community is the better locus for foundational technology: Not only is it not proprietary to a single company that could abuse that position, it gains from contributions of a wider set of talented people, stays more connected to the markets actual needs (being free of a single entitys commercial agenda), and can more quickly address any deficits (due to the wider community that can investigate its code).

Although I can see those advantages, at the end of the day, any technology has to succeed by its own intrinsic merits. Coming from a socially positive context is not enough merit; the technology itself needs to be best of breed to get and maintain broad usage, at any price. Now is the time for open source projects to double down on the functional advantages of their software, not rely so much on price and religiosity.

It will be an interesting next few years for open source. Although open source zealots in enterprises will run open source platform analogs in the cloud, and not diverge from their open source path, I believe that the majority of enterprises will move toward closed source technologies when doing so becomes the path of least resistance, given that the costs are about the same. To fend off closed-source options, open source technologies will simply have to be better.

David S. Linthicum is a consultant at Cloud Technology Partners and an internationally recognized industry expert and thought leader. Dave has authored 13 books on computing and also writes regularly for HPE Software's TechBeacon site.

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The cloud could drive open source out of the enterprise - InfoWorld

Facebook's decided to stick with its preferred version of the BSD license despite the Apache Foundation sin-binning it for any future projects.

The Foundation barred use of Facebook's BSD-plus-Patents license in July, placing it in the Category X it reserves for disallowed licenses.

Facebook's BSD+Patents license earned that black mark because the Foundation felt it includes a specification of a PATENTS file that passes along risk to downstream consumers of our software imbalanced in favor of the licensor, not the licensee, thereby violating our Apache legal policy of being a universal donor.

Apache's decision became a problem because Facebook's React UI-building JavaScript library has been widely adopted by projects that also code licensed in ways the Foundation approves. Developers are therefore faced with disentangling React if they want to stay on the right side of the T&Cs.

Developers who didn't fancy that work therefore kicked off a GitHub thread calling for Facebook to change React's licence.

But despite describing the situation developers face as painful, Facebook's engineering director Adam Wolff has explained that The Social Network won't be changing anything.

Wolff's asserts that Facebook adores open source and likes to give as good as it gets, but says As our business has become successful, we've become a larger target for meritless patent litigation that sucks up time and money.

Facebook could have walked away from open source, he says, but instead decided to add a clear patent grant when we release software under the 3-clause BSD license, creating what has come to be known as the BSD + Patents license. The patent grant says that if you're going to use the software we've released under it, you lose the patent license from us if you sue us for patent infringement.

Wolff says Facebook believes that if this license were widely adopted, it could actually reduce meritless litigation for all adopters, and we want to work with others to explore this possibility.

As Facebook likes its license and feels it is commercially necessary to keep The Social Network in the world of open source but out of legal strife, Wolff says the company won't change it. Discussions with Apache about a compromise have come up empty.

We recognize that we may lose some React community members because of this decision, Wolff writes. We are sorry for that, but we need to balance our desire to participate in open source with our desire to protect ourselves from costly litigation. We think changing our approach would inhibit our ability to continue releasing meaningful open source software and increase the amount of time and money we have to spend fighting meritless lawsuits.

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Here's Why We Need More Open Source Software For Buttplugs Motherboard Internet-connected sex toys have been on the market for a while now, but the software that operates these very personal devices remains mostly closed, meaning it's not shared with users in a way that allows them to tinker with it. In practice this ... and more »

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Here's Why We Need More Open Source Software For Buttplugs - Motherboard

Todays cars are as much defined by the power of their software as the power of their engines. Almost any car feature you can name is now digitized to provide drivers with easier operation and better information. Technological innovation is accelerating, enabling automobiles to monitor and adjust their position on the highway, alerting drivers if theyre drifting out of their lane, even automatically slowing down when they get too close to another car.

More and more vehicles are connected, equipped with Internet access, often combined with a wireless local area network to share that access with other devices inside as well as outside the vehicle. And whether were ready or not, well soon be sharing the roads with autonomous vehicles.

Driving the technology revolution in the automotive industry is software, and that software is built on a core of open source. Open source use is pervasive across every industry vertical, including the automotive industry. When it comes to software, every auto manufacturer wants to spend less time on what are becoming commodities such as the core operating system and components connecting the various pieces together and focus on features that will differentiate their brand. The open source model supports that objective by expediting every aspect of agile product development.

But just as lean manufacturing and ISO-9000 practices brought greater agility and quality to the automotive industry, visibility and control over open source will be essential to maintaining the security of automotive software applications.

When you put new technology into cars, you ran run into security challenges. For example:

Vehicle manufacturers need to adopt a cybersecurity approach that addresses not only obvious exposures in their cars software, but also the hidden vulnerabilities that could be introduced by open source components in that software.

As auto OEMs work with software providers, a growing set of open source components is making its way into automobile systems. Open source code is being channeled through countless supply chains in almost every part of the automotive ecosystem.

When a supplier or auto OEM is not aware all the open source in use in its products software, it cant defend against attacks targeting vulnerabilities in those open source components. Any organization leveraging connected car technology will need to examine the software eco-system it is using to deliver those features, and account for open source identification and management in its security program.

To make progress in defending against open source security threats and compliance risks, both auto OEMS and their suppliers must adopt open source management practices that:

FULLY INVENTORY OPEN SOURCE SOFTWARE: Organizations cannot defend against threats that they do not know exist. A full and accurate inventory (bill of materials) of the open source used in their applications is essential.

MAP OPEN SOURCE TO KNOWN SECURITY VULNERABILITIES: Public sources, such as the National Vulnerability Database provide information on publicly disclosed vulnerabilities in open source software. Organizations need to reference these sources to identify which of the open source components they use are vulnerable.

IDENTIFY LICENSE AND QUALITY RISKS: Failure to comply with open source licenses can put organizations at significant risk of litigation and compromise of IP. Likewise, use of out-of-date or poor quality components degrades the quality of applications that use them. These risks also need to be tracked and managed.

ENFORCE OPEN SOURCE RISK POLICIES: Many organizations lack even basic documentation and enforcement of open source policies that would help them mitigate risks. Manual policy reviews are a minimum requirement, but as software development becomes more automated so too must management of open source policies.

ALERT ON NEW SECURITY THREATS: With more than 3,500 new open source vulnerabilities discovered every year, the job of tracking and monitoring vulnerabilities does not end when applications leave development. Organizations need to continuously monitor for new threats as long as their applications remain in service.

As open source use continues to increase in the auto industry, effective management of open source security and license compliance risk is becoming increasingly important. By integrating risk management processes and automated solutions into their software supply chain, automakers, suppliers, and technology companies servicing the automotive industry can maximize the benefits of open source while effectively managing their risks.

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Safety, Security & Open Source in the Automotive Industry - TechSpective

As the UK governments car cybersec guidelines recognise, innovation may be outpacing security in cars. When you put new technology into cars, youll inevitably run into security challenges. For example:

Vehicle manufacturers need to adopt a cybersecurity approach that addresses not only obvious exposures in their cars software, but also the hidden vulnerabilities that could be introduced by open source components in that software.

Software Used in Autos is Built on a Core of Open Source

Open source use is pervasive across every industry vertical, including the automotive industry. A study conducted in early 2017 by Black Ducks Center for Open Source Research and Innovation (COSRI) examining findings from the anonymised data of more than 1,000 commercial applications found open source components in 96% of the applications scanned. On average, open source comprised 36% of the code base in these applications.

When it comes to software, every auto manufacturer and their suppliers want to spend less time on what are becoming commoditiessuch as the core operating system and components connecting the various pieces togetherand focus on features that will differentiate their brand. The open source model supports that objective by expediting every aspect of agile product development.

Open source software is not more secure nor less secure than proprietary software; its software, and therefore will have vulnerabilities. But the argument could be made that vulnerabilities in open source are more prone to attack since those vulnerabilities are often widely reported. Open source exploits are also often published simultaneously with the announcement of a vulnerability. With open source components making up as much as 90 percent or more of the average commercial application, open source is a rich target for hackers; a single exploit could compromise multiple software and applications, giving attackers the biggest bang for their hacking chops.

Whether open source or proprietary code, most known vulnerabilities also have patches available on the date of their disclosure. The open source community generally does a good job in discovering and reporting vulnerabilities. Over 3,600 open source vulnerabilities were reported in 2016 alone. But an alarming number of companies and individuals simply do not apply patches, sometimes due to lack of time, money, and resources or concerns that the patch might break a currently-working system.

In other cases, its a lack of insightpeople or organisations are simply unaware of a critical vulnerability or its patch until theyre under attack. Another reason of concern for use of open source in voting machines is, that unlike most proprietary software, open source has a pull support model. That is, you are responsible for keeping track of the open source you use, as well as monitoring for vulnerabilities and installing fixes and updates for the open source your voting machine might use. Unless an organisation is aware that a vulnerable open source component is in its software, its highly probable that that component will remain unpatched and open to exploit.

Just as lean manufacturing and ISO-9000 practices brought greater agility and quality to the automotive industry, visibility and control over open source will be essential to maintaining the security of automotive software applications.

Examining the Key Principles of Vehicle Cyber Security

The car cybersecurity guidelines follow good security practices, including executive support (Principle 1), risk assessments both internally and through the supply chain (Principle 2), and a plan for addressing vulnerabilities as they arise (Principle 3). It reflects its automotive and manufacturing focus most clearly, however, in Principle 6: the security of all software is managed throughout its lifetime.

To mass produce automobiles and maintain an accurate and responsive supply chain, a list of parts is required. The industry solved this over 100 years ago by adopting a bill of materials listing every part down to the individual screws and bolts. When a defective part was discovered, using the bill of materials made it simple to track where those parts were used and quickly remediate the issue. Principle 6 reimagines this for tracking and maintaining the hundreds of millions of lines of software in todays cars.

The Automotive Supply Chain Makes Tracking Code Difficult

Classically we think of software being created by internal development teams. But auto manufacturers rely on hundreds of independent vendors supplying hardware and software components to Tier 1 and 2 vendors as well as directly to OEMs.

The software from each of those vendors is likely to be a mix of custom code written by the vendor and third-party code, both proprietary and open source. With tens of millions of lines of code executing on a growing number of microprocessor-based electronic control units (ECUs) networked throughout the car, understanding exactly which open source components are part of the mix can be extremely difficult for the OEMs. When you add in the fact that over 3,000 open source vulnerabilities are reported every year, the security implications are disturbing.

Product Lifecycles Present Long-term Maintenance Challenges

The average cell phone has a life of 2-3 years, and receives regular operating systems updates and probably hundreds of app updates each year. Similarly, most laptops are replaced after a few years of use, and receive regular updates and patches, and will likely be replaced after 3-5 years. This is the typical lifecycle software vendors are used to addressing.

A modern car, however, is in design for years prior to production, and the average vehicle may be on the road for 10-15 years. Supporting software over that period of time will require a different thought process. Vendors (and open source communities) need to be considered in light of the operational risk they present. Questions vendors need to ask include:

When Car Safety Becomes a Function of Software, Software Security is Essential

Lets be clear. The software included in todays vehicles makes driving safer. Whether its collision avoidance or airbags, we have the benefit of sensors and software helping protect drivers and the general public. The terrorist truck attack in Berlins Christmas market last year could have been much worse, had the vehicles anti-collision software not stopped the truck.

The increased use of software and open source requires a new approach to product safety, and is captured well by the UK guidelines. When a supplier or auto OEM is not aware all the open source in use in its products software, it cant defend against attacks targeting vulnerabilities in those open source components. As open source use continues to increase in the auto industry, effective management of open source security and license compliance risk will become increasingly important.

To defend against open source security threats and compliance risks, both auto OEMS and their suppliers should adopt open source management practices that:

By integrating risk management processes and automated solutions into their software supply chain, automakers, suppliers, and technology companies servicing the automotive industry can maximise the benefits of open source while effectively managing their risks.

Mike Pittenger, Vice President Security Strategy, Black Duck Software

Image Credit: Gargantiopa / Shutterstock

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Innovation may be outpacing security in cars - ITProPortal

SUMMARY:

The UKs national synchrotron uses some pretty esoteric tools to get work done, but there may be room for cloud in future.

In a paper published in the EBioMedicine scientific journal this month, a group of scientists have revealed how leukaemia cells prevent themselves from being attacked by the human immune system. This discovery, they believe, could be an important step in the fight to develop new types of drugs for patients with acute myeloid leukaemia (AML), a kind of blood cancer that can often be fatal because of the shortcomings of current treatment strategies.

That the scientists were able to uncover exactly how AML cells evade attack by the immune cells that patrol our bodies owes much to work they conducted with the help of Diamond Light Source, the UKs national synchrotron.

Government-funded through the UKs Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) and also biomedical research charity the Wellcome Trust, the synchrotron at Diamond Light Source works as a giant microscope, harnessing the power of electrons to produce bright light that scientists can use to study anything from fossils and jet engine components to vaccines, viruses and historical works of art.

Access to the synchrotron is free at the point of access to researchers from both academia and industry, through a competitive application process. All results, meanwhile, must be placed in the public domain.

Its hard to imagine equipment more complex and specialized than the synchrotron, which is 10,000 times more powerful than a traditional microscope so it stands to reason that the technology infrastructure that enables scientists to conduct their experiments and make sense of results is highly complex and specialized, too.

The vast majority of it is open source, explains Andrew Richards, head of scientific computing at Diamond Light Source, which is based at the Harwell Science and Innovation Campus in Oxfordshire. In some cases, it comes in the form of enterprise distributions of open source technology, most notably RedHat Enterprise Linux (RHEL):

We go down that route because what we need is support. This is mission-critical infrastructure that our whole organization depends on so we need the confidence that we can get support when we need it.But some of what we do, were using open source software direct from the community because our work is so specialized that there arent really any commercial alternatives. The very bespoke nature of these software tools has developed around the needs and demands of the scientific user community.

A good example of this is EPICS (Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System), says Mark Basham, senior software scientist at Diamond. This is the result of an international open-source collaboration, primarily focused on automating the operations and controlling the movements of heavyweight scientific equipment such as telescopes and various types of particle accelerator, including synchrotrons. Diamond is one of the larger EPICS installations in the world and an active contributor to the software.

But since your average paleontologist, for example, doesnt want to deal with the command lines of a control system like EPICS, Diamonds data acquisition group has created an additional layer of software that sits between the end-user and the controls. This layer enables that end-user to sit down in front of screen, press a few buttons to have the system conduct an experiment on their behalf and show them the results. Here, Diamond uses OpenGDA, an open source framework for creating customized data acquisition software for science facilities. Its based on the Generic Data Acquisition (GDA) software developed at Diamond Light Source itself.

Finally, end users also need to be able to process and and visualize their data, and here, Diamond provides them with Dawn, an open source data analysis workbench. This allows them to continue to analyse their findings on their own hardware, long after theyve left Diamonds facility, where time and resources allotted to end-users are at a premium.

While much of this may seem pretty esoteric to the average corporate IT user, Andrew Richards still seems plenty of scope for using bog-standard cloud infrastructure for storage and processing in future at Diamond.

Right now, the organization is storing around 7 petabytes of data in a tape-based archive provided to it by its funder, the STFC but thats growing at 2 petabytes per year and is expected to be growing at 3 petabytes per year within a year or two. While this has proved to be the most cost-effective approach to date, Diamond is open to other approaches, Richards says:

Cloud has been considered and is being considered right now, as it happens. At the moment, when you look at the cost of doing some of this storage in the cloud, it can actually be pretty expensive. Providers make it look quite cost-effective on a per-terabyte basis, but we also need to consider the costs involved in getting data back out of the cloud when its needed. Those network egress charges can quickly stack up, but having said that, I feel like cloud providers like Amazon and Microsoft are starting to recognize the kinds of volumes that an organization like ours wants to store and are working to make cloud more viable for us. Its certainly something Im interested in exploring further.

A perhaps more pressing concern for Diamond is its compute needs. Here, cloud processing could be a real boon as a supplement to its own high-performance computing (HPC) environment, Richards says:

That would help when we have peak loads, for example, that perhaps we cant address with our own in-house systems. Or where we have commercial customers who dont really know upfront how much compute resource theyll need to solve their particular problem. This currently makes it quite challenging for us to know just how much on-premise infrastructure we should have and then, as a result, the cloud starts to look much more attractive for us, insofar as we could push some data, push some work, do some calculations in the cloud and then scale down our use of these resources when we dont need them. These more spikey workloads are where the cloud is looking more interesting right now.

Already this year, researchers have used Diamonds synchrotron to explore eco-friendly fuel cells, to research new preservation techniques for great artworks, and to investigate the structure and strength of human bones, as well as to make that groundbreaking leukaemia discovery. Its all important work, so theres good reason to hope that cloud providers will step up to the plate to help these efforts expand and diversify.

Image credit - Diamond Light Source

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Open source software gets scientific data to shine at Diamond Light Source - Diginomica

#Docker Inc., the company behind the popular #Open Source software and container platform Docker, has received another fresh capital this week. The San Francisco-based company has raised $75 million in its latest funding round, valuing the #Startup at around $1.3 billion.

According to Silicon Angle, the latest investment will help fuel the companys newest push in the computing market. The company plans to use the fresh capital to beef up its sales and marketing muscles.

The funding news follows a massive management shuffle, which reportedly involved former CEO of Concur Technologies Steve Singh and Dockers co-founder Solomon Hykes.

In the new management, Singh has taken the top post at Docker, replacing Dockers co-founder Ben Golub. Dockers co-founder Solomon Hykes has replaced Marc Verstane, who has stepped down from his role as Executive Vice President for Products. Additionally, the company also plans to appoint experts in operations and enterprise sales in the coming months.

For starter, Docker is an open source platform for distributed applications that allows software developers and system administrators to build and run distributed applications. With support from Docker Inc., companies can now shrink the development process from months to minutes, seamless move workloads between data centers and the cloud computing space.

The primary goal is to create software that can be moved and stored in the cloud and run anywhere regardless of the hardware and operating system (OS).

The open source container platform has been a huge success. The platform has been downloaded more than 12 billion times and used by big name companies, which include ADP, GE, PayPal, Intuit, Goldman Sachs, and Frances Societe Generale.

Founded in 2010 and based in San Francisco, California, Docker Inc. is the technology company behind the popular open source software container platform and the chief sponsor of the entire Docker ecosystem. The company was first started by Solomon Hykes in France as an internal project within the platform-as-a-service (PaaS) company dotCloud. The companys technology represents an evolution of dotClouds proprietary technology, which was built on Cloudlets open source project.

In September 2013, dotCloud announced it first technology partnership, with open source solutions provider Red Hat.Then, in October 2013, dotCloud was officially renamed to Docker Inc. The next month, the company announced another big partnership with Microsoft.

And in November 2014, Docker announced a new service for the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2).

The San Francisco-based startup has been growing fast. By 2015, the companys market value was estimated at over $1 billion, making it what the tech industry called a unicorn company.

Dockers popularity has gained lots of attention and buzz, especially in the venture capital world. The companys investors include some of the tech worlds most notable venture capital firms, which include AME Cloud Ventures, Ashvin Patel, Benchmark, Brainchild Holdings, Chris Sacca, Coatue Management, Eric Urhane, Goldman Sachs, Greylock Partners, Ignition Partners, Insight Venture Partners, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Northern Trust, Sequoia Capital, Kenny Van Zant, and Yahoos founder Jerry Yang.

Overall, the company has raised a total of $180.92 million in venture capital fund in its eight funding rounds. In April 2015, it received its biggest fundraising, a whopping $95 million, in its Series D funding round led by Insight Venture Partners.

In addition, Docker has also made several acquisitions to beef up its technology portfolio. These include cloud computing firm Orchard (2014), software testing platform Koality (2014), open source software SocketPlane (2015), container management Kitematic (2015), container technology firm Tutum (2015), cloud infrastructure firm Unikernel Systems (2016), container orchestration Conductant (2016), and storage platform Infinit (2016).

Currently, Docker competes against the likes of Mesosphere Inc. and the Google-led Kubernetes. The company hasnt provided much information about its latest funding round and market valuation.

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Startup funding: Open source software Docker raises fund to fuel its ... - Blasting News

If you're a small business looking to take the next step in your evolution, you may be looking at implementing a customer relationship management (or CRM) solution. But with enterprise-grade vendors like Oracle and Salesforce charging such a high premium for their services, how can smaller companies afford to get started with CRM software?

The answer lies in open source. As with many kinds of software, there are multiple vendors who provide open source CRM solutions that are completely free to use. They may have restrictions on them, such as limited features and support, but for small businesses looking to try out CRM, they can be an excellent starting point.

Like all open source software alternatives, each has its own advantages and disadvantages, and CRM software is no exception. The main benefit is that it's free, which makes it a great choice for businesses who can't necessarily afford a fully-fledged enterprise CRM package like Salesforce.

It also gets rid of some of the commitment risks of traditional software. In contrast to major vendor offerings, open source providers don't usually need customers to sign lengthy licensing agreements. You're free to trial it without the fear of being stuck with a package that you don't like for months, or even years.

Open source CRM software also has the benefit of being highly customisable. If your company has specific needs, then this type of software will allow you to tweak and refine your CRM platform until it meets those needs. Additionally, you can also tailor it to keep up with any changing market demands.

There are disadvantages too, however, which may put off some users. A common trade-off in the world of open source is that the freely available software has support which is either limited or expensive.

Compatability can be another issue as well. Since the software development will often feature multiple concurrent strands and forks, it can sometimes be hard to make sure your software is up to date, and also that it works with that belonging to your partners and customers.

Compared to larger rivals, an open source CRM package can suffer visually too. This may not seem too important, but the layout and user interface of the system is key in making sure your staff can use it. If they can't understand how to utilise the platform then they won't get the most out of it, meaning your business will be less efficient as a result.

The question of which open source CRM is best is a difficult one to answer, largely because the answer will vary from company to company. A CRM package that fits one company perfectly might be entirely wrong for your organisation.

Instead, you should focus on finding the best CRM software for you. Examine your business needs, and work out what exactly it is that you need a CRM to do. Here's some of the top capabilities you should be looking at when choosing a CRM package.

The first thing businesses should be looking for when choosing an open source CRM is how well it scales. You might only have a handful of people on your sales force right now, but you're going to want a CRM package that can grow with your business, which means looking at a package without hefty upgrade fees.

You should also take migration into account. It's well worth putting in a bit of extra legwork early on to make sure that if you do decide to move to one of the larger, business-class CRM solutions, you'll be able to do so with a minimum of hassle.

Most CRMs will perform equally well when it comes to basic functions, but where the real value lies for many businesses is in their integrations with other business tools. Modern CRMs will work seamlessly with software like MailChimp, Xero and Google's G Suite apps.

Linking all your tools together can have an immeasurable impact on speeding up your organisation's workflows. Do a full audit of what software is in use within your business, and then look for a CRM package that will directly integrate with as many of them as possible.

One of the benefits of using a CRM solution is that it allows businesses to make informed decisions based on concrete data. However, this only works if the CRM package in question allows the business to surface relevant insights.

Organisations should be on the lookout for software that contains strong reporting capabilities, good archiving and any other features that will make use of the large amount of data it harvests.

Support is the biggest real stumbling block for many open source CRMs. Support will frequently only be available to customers on a paid subscription plan, or will be provided by the community rather than an enterprise grade support team.

This can turn out to be an unexpected problem for unwary businesses. If there's no professional support structure to help when its CRM goes down, the unfortunate enterprise could be faced with days of downtime, if not longer.

While it's impossible to definitively state which CRM package is best (for the reasons stated above), we can narrow down some great options for specific tasks and applications, with the caveat that many others are available, so consider these simply as a starting point.

Odoo CRM offers great reporting options for businesses that are looking to derive the maximum amount of insight from their sales and workflow data. Forecasting is excellent, and reports are simple to generate.

Thanks to a simple, easy-to-use interface, Anteil CRM is an excellent choice for businesses that want to get started with their first CRM package. Navigation through the browser-based frontend is intuitive, and its lightweight nature means it shouldn't be too hard to set up.

Based on the popular SugarCRM platform, SuiteCRM is widely hailed as one of the most fully-featured and polished open source CRM packages around. It boasts a wide range of capabilities, modules and integrations, and is an excellent choice for experienced users.

vTiger is an incredibly flexible CRM offering, thanks to the ability to create modules from scratch with matching workflows. While it requires a fair degree of technical knowledge to perform some of the more advanced customisations, power users will find that they can shape it to suit all of their needs.

What sets Zurmo apart from rivals is that it's 'gamified', allowing users to earn scores, achievements and badges for completing certain tasks. The idea is to not only make the software fun, but also to help users become more proficient in its use by incentivising them to increase their skillset.

Image Source: Odoo

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The best open source CRM software | IT PRO - IT PRO

August 8, 2017 1:00 PM

Microsoft Office and other full-blown enterprise resource planning systems are expensive, but there are alternatives out there that tailor their services to small businesses. Using open source software may be the right fit for your business, and some are even free to use. Despite the clear financial advantage, there are a number of considerations to be made when deciding whether or not to make the jump, so here are a few to mull over while making your choice.

Look and feel of open source software

Perhaps the most obvious and noticeable consideration is that of the appearance and operability of open source software. Over the years, individuals have become quite accustomed to how big-ticket enterprise systems look and feel. Microsoft Office has become synonymous with the typical American corporation, and the first question you have to ask yourself is whether or not you and your employees are ready for lesser-known open source software that could be different. There will be training to consider, as well as a learning curve for most everyone involved, but once youve cleared those hurdles, the advantages will become crystal clear.

Considering the best of high-end ERP and open source

Some lucky small businesses do well enough to use elements of both the marquee enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems and open source software. Utilizing a bit of both can help you decide if transitioning to a full open source is the right choice for you, or if you would rather pick and choose which elements work best for your business. Even if you chose to maintain a closed source operating system, theres still plenty of open source software out there to compliment your systems, cutting your costs in the end. Many open source software programs are free to download and run, though they will not have the level of technical and user support that the bigger ERP systems enjoy. Still, for those who want that extra helping hand, many third-party companies offer their services to support these systems for low prices.

Which open source software programs to consider

If you have decided that open source is right for your business, then theres a plethora to choose from these days. It may take some trial and error, but once you find the right program, you will be good to go and can start watching your savings grow. For a comprehensive office suite, Apache OpenOffice is a highly-rated substitute for Microsoft Office that runs on Windows, macOS and Linux. For finance and accounting programs like Quicken, a great open source option is GnuCash, which also runs on Windows, macOS and Linux. Lastly, for an alternative to large, expensive ERPs, the popular ADempiere, which runs on Windows, macOS, Linux and Unix, can help your small business with things like material management, project management, as well as finance and human resources.

This article was written by Michael Ferro for CBS Small Business Pulse

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Company Solutions: Is Open Source Software Right For Your Small Business? - CBS Chicago