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June 11, 2005
Opportunity knocking: Open Source EAI
Matt Asay writes an article on how Open Source EAI may be the next Big Thing for venture capitalists to get involved in. A promising market - as he writes:
Outside the open source world, EAI (Enterprise Application Integration) is a massive market and, according to a Baseline Magazine survey/study, EAI is CIOs' top priority for 2005, with surveyed companies spending an average of $12.1 million on EAI this year.
Maybe we're further along in Europe but using projects like Apache Cocoon to integrate legacy systems, databases, ldap, web-services, existing Web based applications is like - well - our daily job. So, yes, I would agree that this is a growth-market and Open Source integration frameworks like Cocoon will play (are playing) an important role.
In fact I think the actual market may even be larger than just through "plain EAI". We are also seeing a growth in the deployment of portals built around the Cocoon portal framework. Again, the argument being that the framework allows me to combine EAI aspects with the portal paradigm. Moving even further "up", the next thing on the radar is using a framework like Cocoon to build what Gartner calls the "uberportal".
So in all I see plenty of opportunities for some interesting business plays in the coming months. Time to dust off the business plans.
Posted by Matthew at June 11, 2005 10:35 AM