Top 40 open source products for business and IT pros (Bossie 2009 winners)

Since 2007, each year InfoWorld's Bossie (Best of Open Source Software awards) will recognize a total of 40 best open source software from various categories for business and IT pros of the year.

The 2009 Bossie winners are...


Best of open source developer tools:

• BrowserShots service
  
• Drools BRMS
• Eclipse Web Services Tools
• Hadoop and Hive for distributed data processing
• jQuery JavaScript library
• Mono .Net platform
• NetBeans IDE for Java and dynamic languages
• OpenStreetMap mapping project
• PhoneGap framework for mobile application development
• WebKit browser rendering engine

Best of open source enterprise software:

• Compiere ERP systems
• Openbravo ERP systems
• Dimdim web conference software
• Drupal for content management
• Intalio for process management
• Jaspersoft for reporting and BI
• Pentaho for reporting and BI
• Magento for e-commerce
• Piwik for web analytics
• SugarCRM for sales and customer management
• WordPress blog publishing platform

Best of open source networking software:

• Cacti
• Nagios
• IPCop firewall
• Kamailio SIP proxy server
• KeePass password manager
• Openfiler SAN/NAS appliance
• OpenNMS enterprise monitoring system
• PacketFence network access control
• Puppet configuration management framework
• Untangle network security gateway

Best of open source platforms and middleware:

• Jitterbit data migration and integration
• Talend data migration and integration
• Mule service bus
• WSO2 modular SOA platform
• Nginx web server
• OpenVZ server virtualization platforms
• Xen server virtualization platforms
• VirtualBox desktop virtualization tool
• Turnkey Linux factory of software appliances

Beside the 40 Bossie winners, Infoworld also named the Top 10 Open Source Hall of Famers from the greatest open source software of all time. They are:

• Linux kernel
• GNU utilities and compilers
• Ubuntu
• The 3 BSDs (FreeBSD, OpenBSD & NetBSD)
• Samba
• MySQL
• BIND
• Sendmail
• OpenSSH and OpenSSL
• Apache

Beside that, Infoworld recognises there are a lot of great open source apps for Windows too, and they've picked the 10 best:

• FileZilla
• VirtualBox
• OpenOffice.org
• Firefox
• Paint.Net
• Media Player Classic
• TrueCrypt
• PDFCreator
• 7-Zip
• ClamWin

Click here for more details about the Infoworld Bossie 2009 awards.

A visit to Packet Hub, HQ of WIMAX provider Packet One

Being one of the contributors in a committee of a local business association, I am honoured to be invited by Michael Lai (赖敬达), CEO of Packet One, to visit their HQ building Packet Hub today.

I was really amazed by the presentations by Michael and his senior staff, which show that this young company has very clear and ambitous mission, vision, direction and goals.

Since the debut of their P1 W1MAX service in August 2008, which was just one year ago, the company has grown exponentially in terms of service coverage area, user base (now already reaches 100,000) as well as staff force (more than 600 now). Packet One is no doubt the pioneer and still the only WIMAX service provider in Malaysia, despite 4 WIMAX licenses have been awarded by MCMC several years ago.

Located at Jalan Templer next to the Federal Highway, the Packet Hub building implements some of the Google-like working environment which can especially attract the Gen-Y workers.

Near the entrance is a Paddock which showcase their products and services. Their customer service area is just next to the P1 Paddock.

They have modern looking meeting rooms named by countries with their presence, equipped with high tech meeting equipments and high quality chairs. They also have a nice well equipped gymnasium, a rest room with several massage chairs and a comfly gamers room. On the roof top of the building is an air garden with nice landscaping and a BBQ area. There is also a WIMAX base station on top of the building (in the photo).

Apparently Michael is a fan of What Would Google Do (WWGD)?, a book written by Jeff Jarvis. He shared with us about his business philosophy, his view of technology future particularly in the IP field, his ambition and market positioning of Packet One, and more. He talked about Business 2.0, a new term that I just know about today.

It seems that Green Packet has made a right choice to get Michael joining them to start up the P1 business. Michael has sound track record while he was with Celcom and later as CEO of TMNet before joining Packet One. Undeniably, he has always been very good in branding strategy all the way from his previous companies till now in P1.

Keeping employees engaged in tough times

In September 2009 edition of the Baseline Magazine, an article by Corinne Bernstein reviews the key attributes of how the best-of-the-best companies keep their employees engaged, especially when in tough times, which are:

• A compelling, positive vision with clear goals: essential for increasing morale, motivation and productivity.
• Communication—the right stuff at the right time: encourage employees to express opinions, and managers relay the organization’s perspective in a timely manner.
• Select the right people for the right job: hire the most qualified candidates for jobs, and promote qualified, well-trained people into management positions.
• Remember that we’re on the same team: value team work within and across departments.
• Cool stuff—continuous improvement and innovation: encourage and recognize employees to improve quality by creating new products, processes or services.
• Recognize and reward excellent performance: appropriately reward the highest achievers.
• Accountability counts: clearly define what is expected from employees, providing feedback on their performance and holding team members accountable to performance standards.
• Every employee learns and grows: provide good training programs that are relevant to both the workers’ and the organization’s success.
• Problems are no problem: identifies and handles problems early on.
• It’s all about the customer: place a high value on exceeding customer expectations.
  

If you are interested to read the full article, you can click here to download the softcopy version of Baselin Magazine September 2009 Edition. It is in Page 12.