Q3 Sales and Summer Heat

Well here it is August 1 and the first third of Q3 is under the belt. Ended nicely with some larger deals coming in at the last minute. August is always a challenge as half of Europe is on vacation and the other half is in vacation mode.

Recently ran across an interesting White Paper entitled the Open Source Barometer and published by Alfresco, the open source ECM application. We’re always looking for justifications for the large gap in open source adoption between the UK and the rest of Europe and this article alludes to:

“…The research also showed that the U.K. lags behind in the adoption of open source suggesting less government emphasis compared with other European countries such as France, Germany, Spain and Italy.” This very much mirrors are experience at Zend with working with the various European countries. Virtually everywhere except the UK, there are huge open source initiatives driven by the respective governments. They are few in the UK and despite a lot of talk, we see very little new initiatives. On the bright side, we do see some larger php projects driven by regional educational organizations using open source applications in e-learning and remote learning projects. These initiatives are to be encouraged.

Another interesting trend as cited in the White Paper refers to a trend we also see in that “there is an increasing trend for organizations to adopt a mixed stack, combining both open source and proprietary software.” This enables organizations to pick and choose among the best solutions available for the particular project. Thus we often see php projects being developed on Windows machines and then deployed on Linux servers using Apache, and maybe even using Oracle or MS databases. Essentially that is our model at Zend since our Studio and Platform are proprietary applications and used with open source php, Apache, MySql, various Linux distributions, etc.

May the Gods of Summer bring fortune to us in August.