Tuesday - February 17, 2009

Open Source Business Opportunities

See the 10 Open Source Opportunities entry in CIO Minute.

The OS and Virtualization territory is already staked out.  Not sure this will be a real opportunity space.

Enterprise applications (CRM, ERP, BI) are scary.  Scary because these are purchased by CIO's.  CIO's are herd animals and -- of course -- an open source enterprise package will never be acceptable.  Reason: who do you sue?

Clearly, there's a lot of room to make money here by shoving SAP, Oracle and TriZetto Group aside.  I think that you can easy implement a simpler application than these legacy behemoths.

Technology (Mobile, VOIP, Security) This has a lot of room for growth.  It's enabling or foundational technology.  Lots of space here.

Tools and Browsers are totally crowded with freeware.  I'm not sure there's any money-making opportunity here.  ActiveState and WingWare are who you start competing against.  Then you've got to work against Oracle, IBM, the Eclipse Foundation, Sun's NetBeans.  Mozilla, Opera, etc.

Author: Steven Lott
Technorati Tags: OpenSource Business
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