I just returned from Solutions Linux 2010 in Paris, and I have some considerations on what I saw.

A lot of vendors is proposing similar solutions, for example as project leader of Spagic I was encircled by competitors working on the theme of Open Source SOA: there was PetalsLink with their Petals ESB solution, BonitaSoft with Bonita BPM solutions, just to make few names.

But also on Business Intelligence (we exposed also the solution SpagoBI) the history was exactly the same: a lot of competitors was very near to our stand, and in some cases I confess that I asked a demo for looking the competitor offer.

The problem is: how a customer can choose between all these different but similar solutions ?

One possible answer is looking the solutions at the technological level: this is not always possible because it requires to much time and too much technical skills.

In the case of Spagic, for example, I know without doubt that it’s the best technological solution for Open Source SOA in the world, because it’s based on the wonderful OSGi technology, it provides a user friendly BPMN editor for designing processes, a winsome monitoring console, and so on. But the problem is that when I talk to customers about all of these fantastic technologies, usually they know only 20% of the acronym that I use. But this is right, because the technology is “my problem”, not their problem: their choice should be based on others criteria such as

• Licenses availables (GPL, LGPL, commercial, ..)
• Support policies
• Maturity of the solution
• Availability if Enterprise Features (High Availability, Transaction Management, …)
• and obviously the functions available.

I hope to write next post returning from a conference in a nice place like Madrid, or New York

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