Appliances. The very word is emblematic of stability and strength. Think of the appliances in your kitchen. Unless you're particularly unlucky, 99.9% of the time your refrigerator, stove and dishwasher just work. You don't have to give it a second thought. When we talk about software appliances, we're talking about a similar stability.

Governance is currently a key topic for many IT functions. Its definition varies, but its key themes are true for all companies: effectiveness, efficiency, and reliability. Business value and risk mitigation are also at its center and represent a significant part of enterprise governance overall.

Efforts to modernize enterprise infrastructure have never been more complex. While the need is certainly there on multiple fronts - competitive edge, cost savings and new business initiatives, to name just a few - new hurdles seem to pop up no matter where an IT administrator might look. That includes not just management issues such as cap/ex costs and user resistance, but also an increasing pancake stack of integration layers within and among applications.

When it comes to Content Management Solutions (CMS), 'one size' does not fit all. When considering open source CMS for a real-world client experience, it's necessary to focus on the project needs, evaluate various CMS solutions in the context of these project needs, and to explore experiences with the strengths and weaknesses of the solutions.

Within Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and Customer Relationship Management (CRM), many companies have enjoyed a blossoming of open source software. By harnessing the collective wisdom, experiences, expertise, and requirements, the model has ensured that needs have been rapidly met while the open source code has provided the wanted flexibility and low cost. Everything made possible through the Internet, which has enabled easy zero-cost distribution and improved global collaboration. By leveraging large user communities the software products have grown fast and made it possible for open source companies to challenge major proprietary vendors.

Companies are finding it increasingly difficult to manage their enterprise data centers as they become highly complex, expensive to build out, and difficult to reconfigure as needs change. In an effort to address these challenges, many IT professionals are turning to virtualization technologies.

Since the beginning of the software industry, nearly every software company in the world has followed the same business model: its own employees develop the software, which is closely held intellectual property, the software is delivered to clients in binary form, and users run the licensed software on their own computers. Today, this model has been challenged by a new paradigm: open source. Developed and maintained by volunteers across the world, distributed to users at no cost, and available as source code, open source software is radically different from its proprietary counterpart. Each of the new characteristics of open source software forces organizations to develop new ways of thinking about how they procure, implement, test, and deploy it.

A quick Google search of 'enterprise Open Source' returns over 1.5 million results. There are Web sites devoted to the topic; there are dedicated conferences and trade shows, and even a fairly large number of books. There's even a magazine - the one now in your hands! - devoted entirely to the subject of enterprise Open Source. Most of these sources discuss using Open Source applications and infrastructure in one's business, and tacitly assume that this defines enterprise Open Source. This implied definition falls short of what I think of when envisioning an 'Open Source enterprise application' however.

Great ideas often come from the most commonplace occurrences. Take the story of Sir Issac Newton's 'discovery' of gravity. According to the legend, he was sitting under an apple tree minding his own business when - bonk! - an apple dropped onto his head, and suddenly all the complex mathematical formulae he'd been considering became crystal clear. It's what's known as an 'Aha!' moment.

The acronym ISV stands for Independent Software Vendor. Historically, independence was important to protect customers from the proprietary lock-in associated with third-party components such as hardware or system software. A greater choice of interoperable components gave customers greater flexibility to procure and assemble a system that met their needs. Microsoft alleviated some of this concern with the Windows platform because customers could always choose multiple hardware providers when selecting applications that ran on Windows. Of course, an application that only runs on Windows isn't exactly an 'independent' application, but customers seem to accept hardware independence as sufficient freedom. (More on Microsoft and Windows later.)

Technology companies have been taking a beating lately because of their efforts in China. Google and Yahoo are torn between the evil of government censorship and the prospect of doing business with the world's fastest-growing economy. Microsoft, Adobe, and content providers like the American movie studios face serious problems with piracy. A recent report by the China-Britain Business Council stated that only one in four people in China has purchased software legally.