CeBIT 2012: Commercial open source companies

The Open Source Park at CeBIT 2012 As in previous years, a number of commercial open source companies are present in Hall 2 at the CeBIT trade show, which is taking place in Hannover, Germany until 10 March. The stands range from small booths manned by just one or two people, such as that from EclipseSource, to huge stands that feature multiple large displays as well as areas for talks and demonstrations.

Two of the larger and more high-profile stands near the Open Source Forum belonged to messaging and collaboration specialist Zarafa and German solutions provider Univention. The two companies jointly announced an open source integration solution called Zarafa4UCS for connecting version 7.0 of the Zarafa Collaboration Platform with Univention Corporate Server (UCS) 3.0. Separately, Univention previewed integration with ownCloud file sharing and Zarafa demonstrated WebApp, its next generation web interface. Best known for its Nexenta Core Platform (NCP), enterprise storage specialist Nexenta Systems discussed the benefits of the ZFS filesystem and showed off its latest products.

Commercial open source companies

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Several other firms supporting and representing open source projects were located in the Open Source Park just next to the Open Source Project Lounge. Alfresco demonstrated its enterprise content management system (CMS) to onlookers, while OpenERP showed off the latest 6.1 release of its Enterprise Resource Planning business application suite, which has a new web client.

The majority of the other organisations represented in the Open Source Park are, unsurprisingly, German. These include NETWAYS, the Open Source Business Alliance, and document management system and enterprise content management specialist Agorum. FOSS Group, the Drupal-Initiative, who demonstrated the benefits of the Drupal CMS, and B1 Systems, which specialises in open source IT solutions and handed out weisswurst and pretzels to attendees, were among some of the other German firms. The Open Source Press promoted its German-language books on open source – the Munich-based publisher currently only offers two books in English: one on Debian and another on open source software and law.

However, not all of the commercial open source vendors were in Hall 2. The Joomla!, WordPress and Typo3 open source CMS vendors were all represented at German hosting provider Mittwald in Hall 6 (stand J11) – Drupal also had a presence there. Other companies there include the German branch of SugarCRM (Hall 6 E02) and Novell (Hall 12 D50).

See also:

• CeBIT 2012: the Open Source Project Lounge, a report from The H.
• Open Source at CeBIT 2011, a feature from The H.

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