Newsletter April 2010

Editorial

No crisis for Open Source

It is clear that in tough financial circumstances, organisations are turning to Linux and Open Source Software solutions at a growing pace. Linalis saw a growth in business in 2009 of 24% and this years first quarter order book has seen that growth rising. The majority of the growth is being seen in collaboration solutions, website developments and business intelligence solutions. This is being seen across all industry sectors, from not for profit membership organisations, the public sector, the banking industry and large multinational corporations. It is an exciting time; as more customers deploy enterprise class open source solutions, we are seeing larger stepped improvements in the products themselves which feeds the growth further.

As a company, Linalis is investing in it's resources and attracting seasoned professionals into it's team. We will also be launching several new initiatives for Membership based organisations for collaboration, and in rapid Business Intelligence deployment services. Please, watch this space, and continue to contact us if you have any suggestions for us.

Open Source BI is growing

According to a recent report from the Gartner institute, Open Source Business Intelligence tools are now mature enough to compete with proprietary solutions. Adoption of Open Source BI tools doubles every year, and should grow five fold before 2012. More information and recommandations are in the downloadable document on osbi.fr.

(Source and download: osbi.fr)

For more information on Open Source Business Intelligence, please contact us!

Linalis News

Relaunching Bank Thaler's website using Drupal

Bank Thaler, one of our long time clients, launched a new version of its website. The redesign was done by Linalis using the Drupal platform. Bank Thaler wished to migrate its website to a modern platform, improve its appearance and add some functionalities. Citing Patrice Berclaz, Director of Administration: "We particularly appreciated the great availability and the professionalism of the team during website development". All the details are in our success story (in French).

Pentaho seminar in Paris

On March 11^th, we organised a seminar in Paris jointly with Pentaho. As a Pentaho Gold Partner, we are helping Pentaho to grow in the French market. The event was a presentation and a demonstration of the possibilities of Pentaho for prospective clients. The seminar was a great success, with about 40 people attending and being introduced to an interactive demo and a detailed review of the Swissport case study. Our next seminar with Pentaho will take place in Geneva, on Thursday, May 27^th from 9:00 to 13:00. To register, please follow this link to RegOnline.

Pentaho training in India

On Pentaho request, we providid a customised training course in Chandighar, India, for the company Infosys. During 10 days, we trained 20 people on the Pentaho BI suite. For customised training courses on Pentaho or other application we support, please contact us.

New training material for LPI 201 / 202 courses

Concerning our popular LPI (Linux Professional Institute) training courses, we finally found training material updated to the new objectives for LPI 201 and LPI 202 certifications, that are issued by element k. We will soon plan a session of LPI 201 and LPI 202 courses, please contact us quickly so we can add you to the waiting list.

Upcoming practical workshops

Our one day practical workshops are a good way to get to know or to improve oneself on a given tool through concrete cases and personalised advice. Three sessions will take place in May in Geneva:

• How to build a website with Drupal - May 18^th
• How to install and administer a LAMP server - May 19^th
• How to virtualise an infrastructure with Xen - May 20^th

Please visit the planning to register. Do not hesitate to contact us should you need any further information or to request other workshops.

Last seats for the LPI 101 course in May

There still are a few seats left for our next LPI 101 - Introduction to Linux course, which will start on Thursday, May 6^th. For more information and to register, please consult the planning.

Welcoming a new employee

We are pleased to welcome Billo Sow as a Junior BI Consultant starting from March. Billo obtained a Master in computer science in Geneva in 2009 and a Master 2 in computing and business management in Lyon, where he worked with Mondrian. After a successful internship at Linalis, Billo joins our growing our Business Intelligence team and will work on projects for our clients, using the Pentaho BI Suite and Jaspersoft platforms.

Recruitment

We are looking for the following profiles for projects for our customers:

• Linux systems administrator - Geneva
• Pentaho Expert - Geneva
• Change manager / Project Coordinator - Geneva

To apply for one of these jobs or to get more information, please write to jobs@linalis.com .

Partners News

Red Hat: good financial results

As an emblematic Open Source company, Red Hat's financial results are a good indicator of the health in this industry sector. Results for fiscal year 2009 are good with a 15% growth since the previous year and a revenue of $748 million. As expected, servers and virtualisation are the biggest contributors to this growth.

(Source: zdnet.com)

Our services related to Red Hat

Pentaho secures $7million in funding

Pentaho just raised $7 million in funding, bringing it's total funding to $32 million. The money will be used to grow the network of partners and to make some acquisitions. The fact that an Open Source Business Intelligence company is able to raise more than $30 million in 5 years shows that investors believe in Pentaho's business model.

(Source: ostatic.com)

Our services related to Pentaho / Our Pentaho training courses

Novell rejects takeover bid, winner in SCO ruling

These last weeks have been action-packed for Novell. The company announced lacklustre financial results: 6% down in revenues since the previous year, but a growth of 6.4% for the Suse Linux market. After these results, Novell received a proposal of 2 billions dollars to acquire the company from Elliot Associates, a hedge funds firm and one of Novell's shareholders. Novell rejected the proposal, but announced it will explore various alternatives to enhance stockholder values.

(Sources: toolinux.org and novell.com)

Besides, the long trial (8 years) started by SCO about the propriety of UNIX source code has eventually ended. Novell is considered as the legal proprietary of UNIX. SCO first assigned IBM, then threatened Linux and other UNIX based systems (which include BSD, Solaris, AIX and HP-UX).

(Source: ostatic.com)

Our services related to Novell

Furthermore...

War on video formats

The HTML 5 standard allows, among other features, to play embedded vidéos directly in the browser, without using Flash or any external plugin. On the other hand it says nothing about the format that videos will have to use, one that should be supported everywhere. For now two formats are in competition: H264, more commonly used in the industrie, and OGG Theora, entirely free. Open Souce browsers such as Mozilla Firefox can't include H264 because of patents, and video broadcasters, such as Youtube, have to pay a license to use this format (which is likely to get costlier if H264 has a monopoly). In the end, half the browsers implements H264, the other half implements OGG Theora, and no consensus is in sight.

(Source: standblog.org)

OpenOffice.org 3.2

OpenOffice.org 3.2 is the first version labeled by Oracle instead of Sun Microsystems. It contains numerous improvements on performance and stability.

(Source: osnews.com)

Intel Moblin + Nokia Maemo = MeeGo

In a move to bring more competition to Google's Android system and Apple's iPhone OS, Intel and Nokia allies to jointly create an mobile operating system. Fusion between Intel's Moblin and Nokia's Maemo, the new system, called MeeGo, will support all kinds of devices, from netbooks to smartphone and televisions.

(Source: osnews.com)