I was tasked with providing commentary on our Media Round Up from September several weeks back, you can see I didn’t do such a good job getting this done. I had asked for this task because I wanted to take the opportunity to comment on some of the fantastic comments we received from the media recently. Starting with:

Opportunities in the impending tech fallout
by Dennis Howlett

My sense is they could be real winners as enterprise turns more seriously to their offerings as a way of getting what they want through supported lower cost models. For me, the current poster child isn’t MySQL (now owned by Sun) or Salesforce.com but MindTouch.

MindTouch is on a roll at the moment. They are hitting high download levels for their OSS product. The free wik.is site is getting a lot of attention in government and education while their supported model is generating decent revenue at departmental pricing. But what really sets MindTouch apart for me is the way they are positioning Deki as a way of providing the lightweight integration fabric many large enterprises can implement and from which they can derive genuine value. My colleague Oliver Marks has more to say about this.

And then again at ZDNet:

Sophisticated Customer Relationship Collaboration with MindTouch & SnapLogic
by Oliver Marks

In another sign of the continuing maturity of Enterprise 2.0 technologies, open source social enterprise collaboration vendor MindTouch and open source data integration framework company SnapLogic announce a new partnership today.

…Today’s announcement enables powerful Customer Relationship Management (CRM) support through MindTouch Deki Enterprise Server with SnapLogic Solution Packs for SugarCRM and Salesforce.com. MindTouch claim this approach will work with virtually any CRM system.

In plain English this enables greater team intelligence sharing around an enterprise’s CRM system though MindTouch’s collaborative interface. The above video demonstrates powerful use case, and illustrates the rapidly increasing power and credibility the SaaS space brings to the enterprise as I alluded to in yesterdays post.

Both Oliver and Dennis are no nonsense, to the point, brutally honest bloggers and industry experts that I have learned to respect a great deal. A write-up this glowing from these two, especially from curmudgeony Dennis, of MindTouch means a lot to me personally. I hope Dennis’ assessment of MindTouch is something we can live up to. Personally, I’m confident we can.

Coté of Redmonk, the most capable tech analyst firm on the planet in my opinion, had this to say:

Deki CRM - MindTouch and SnapLogic
by Michael Coté

The operative theory behind things like Deki CRM, then, is to light up that dark data. SnapLogic adaptors hope to make accessing that data easier and possible, and the Deki wiki hopes to provide and UI that finally lets users assemble that now lit data into something usable. And, even more contemporary, the idea is to this mashing up across the firewall, pulling and pushing data from cloud-bound services like SalesForce.

What I find interesting here is the focus of the packaging. It’s always tempting for a vendor to go out there and target everything - as both MindTouch and SnapLogic have done in the past - but narrowing down to something as specific as just SalesForce and SugarCRM can give a vendor the focus needed to explain just what a mashup is and then, if that works, pull customers and users through the thought exercise of generalizing that compositing across other data and process silos.

Our good friend Matt, a person who is regularly impossible to impress even though he is a friend and advisor, had the following to say:

MindTouch and SnapLogic partner to juice up your CRM application
by Matt Asay

My company uses SugarCRM, and the idea of connecting SugarCRM with our accounts payable system (through SnapLogic) and integrating the ability to take free-form wiki notes in SugarCRM’s set page structures made a lot of sense to me.

Suddenly my team would be able to see what our customers were doing after the sale: when they were invoiced and when they paid. We’d be able to take deeper notes on account activity. And we’d be able to see information in our CRM system that we’d never otherwise see or, at least, not in context.

Also, the following publications covered our announcement of the very innovative Deki for CRM (Systems Integrators take note of this product):

MindTouch Launches Deki for CRM - Wiki Collaboration Addon
by Allen Stern

MindTouch has announced the launch of Deki for CRM today at the Web 2.0 Expo in NYC. Deki for CRM combines the MindTouch Deki Enterprise Server and SnapLogic’s open source data integration framework.
The concept is relatively simple: CRM systems are limited in collaboration functionality. Deki for CRM hopes to change that by adding a Wiki to nearly everything inside of the CRM system.

MindTouch Partners to Bring Collaboration to CRM
by Barb Mosher

We know MindTouch for their open-source social enterprise collaboration platform Kilen Woods — the latest release just coming out late July. Now, they have come out with a new solution Deki for CRM, partnering with SnapLogic, a SaaS integration company.

MindTouch claims their new offering eases some of the issues related to using CRM applications by bringing better collaboration and additional intelligence.

MindTouch.com - Collaborate On Anything

Two brains are better than one. Take that concept and multiply it by every user
on the internet and you have the main idea behind wiki.mindtouch.com.
With this site, you’ll be able to collaborate on projects using this open-source platform. It will allow you to find people who are as capable as you to see a project through and collaborate with them.

It brings together every element needed to create a successful project into an easy to use platform, so you don’t have to go out of your way to find people who are interested in collaborating with you. Posting projects is really easy, and they are displayed in wiki style. Over all, this should allow you to make more money by allowing you to spread the work more efficiently.

Finally of note, I bumped into Peter Sayer at an open source conference in Paris at the end of September and we had a pleasant conversation about open source, business and software distribution.

Free software: It’s about the money
by Peter Sayer

Open-source software developers are seeing a lot of interest in their products in Europe — but it’s North American companies that are opening their checkbooks, said speakers at Paris Capitale du Libre, a conference organized by the Federation of Open Source Software Industry.

“Europe is two to three years ahead of North America in using open source, but two to three years behind in paying for it,” said Andrew Aitken, CEO of open-source strategy consultancy Olliance. At first glance, figures from Mindtouch, an open-source software developer, would seem to bear that out.

“Sixty percent of our distribution is in Europe, but 80 percent of our revenue is from the U.S.,” Mindtouch CEO Aaron Fulkerson said.