Europe's antitrust chief Neelie Kroes, who has now taken on the role of open standards evangelist, gave a speech at OpenForum Europe the other day recommending that business and government adopt 'open standards.' 'Open standards' in Neelie's mouth is code for 'open source' or at least 'not Microsoft.'

Likewise Software announced that it has been named as category award-winning finalist in the second annual Red Hat Innovation Awards. Red Hat selected six finalists in the second annual Red Hat Innovation Awards, designed to recognize the outstanding use, innovation and extension of Red Hat solutions by customers, partners and the open source community. One Red Hat Innovator of the Year will be selected from the six finalists during the Red Hat Summit, taking place June 18-20, 2008 at the Hynes Convention Center in Boston, Mass.

SNORT creator Sourcefire, one of the few publicly owned open source companies, has rejected an unsolicited $7.50-a-share offer, a total of roughly $187.4 million cash, from privately held Barracuda Networks, claiming it undervalues the enterprise security company despite the 13% premium. Sourcefire, worth 18 bucks a share shortly after it went public last March, recently found a new CEO.

EnterpriseDB co-founder and CEO Andy Astor has stepped aside so Ed Boyajian, brought in from Red Hat, can take the four-year-old company to the proverbial next level, they said. Boyajian has been running Red Hat's North American sales under one title or another for the last six years and he's at EnterpriseDB to repeat the experience Red Hat Enterprise Linux has had during that time.

Hybrid applications made up of proprietary, open source and third-party components are the result of today's fast-paced and complex software development landscape. Applications developed within the last five years - whether internal or external - are at least 50% open source software (OSS) and third-party components.

PrismTech announced that the two open-source middleware communities are merging their CORBA Component Model (CCM) initiatives, underpinning the company's OpenFusion CCM offering. The Distributed Object Computing (DOC) Group and the OW2 Consortium - with support and contribution from PrismTech - are combining their efforts to advance the development and deployment of CCM technology.

Last summer, a group of technical experts from various open source companies came together under the banner of the Open Solutions Alliance, rolled out an enterprise-class application, and demonstrated the power of collaboration with the launch of the Common Customer View project, an interoperability project that integrates data from diverse front-office, back-office, and planning applications.

The Group discussed open source trends in systems management. Panel participants discussed both the benefits and precautions to take when investigating open source management software. Nora Denzel recently retired from Hewlett Packard as the senior vice president and general manager of HP's over one-billion dollar software division. At HP, Denzel led one of the most dramatic turn-arounds in the software industry by reinvigorating HP?s OpenView and OpenCall software product lines through both internal product development and the successful integration of over eight acquisitions. During her tenure as HP?s software chief, software sales more than doubled the bottom line improved by over 72%. She has been named as one of the top 20 'Storage Movers and Shakers' by Storage, Inc. magazine and one of the most powerful people in networking by Network World magazine.

In corporate environments, being able to integrate with existing systems is of extreme importance. Due to its nature, the open source development methodology forces software developers to be prepared to interoperate and integrate with whatever is already there. This is a big difference from the more traditional black box software mentality, and a huge benefit for enterprise customers. In this session, Hippo CTO Arjé Cahn will introduce Hippo CMS, an Open Source Enterprise Content Management system, and dive into the details of fitting a CMS into your environment.

The success of open source software has been placing pressure on the business models of proprietary software vendors. In response, many software vendors have shifted from a paid-for license model to an open source business model. This presentation will explore the emerging trend of proprietary software vendors transitioning to an open source business model - the elimination of software licensing fees, source-code transparency, and a reliance on services as the revenue engine. It will cover the impact on software vendors and end users alike, and will include best practices from a number of companies that have already made the transition, including failed attempts.

Today's identity management systems help organizations gain control over identity information in the enterprise, however, these systems are silos - and despite industry standards, there is very little interoperability. The Bandit project provides open-source identity services that reduce the challenges of identity silos to provide a consistent approach to identity management for users and administrators, regardless of underlying systems. To continue this evolution in open-source, Bandit has partnered with the Higgins project to deliver an open-source identity system that is interoperable with Windows CardSpace. This session will demo this development milestone and explain its significance in the identity community.

While enterprise open source vendors continue to debate the definition of 'open,' customers are listening. Not because they care as much about what open source business model a particular vendor uses but because our debates give them reason to be confused and to consider the FUD that is pushed into the marketplace. The Open Solutions Alliance is a nonprofit vendor neutral organization that exists for one purpose: to address CIOs most pressing issue today - interoperability among open solutions. While the customers have been listening to us, the OSA has been listening very intently to them. This session will discuss what CIOs are looking for in open solutions vendors and how they expect it to be delivered based on real discussions and work sessions.

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.

ILOG announced ILOG JViews 8, the latest version of ILOG?s award-winning Java-based visualization suite that enhances the creation of Rich Internet Applications (RIA) and desktop applications for supervision and monitoring. ILOG JViews 8.1 introduces a new presentation layer for the Eclipse platform and dramatic performance improvements for both desktop and Web applications to enhance the user experience of the most demanding applications.

Sun Microsystems, Inc and the NetBeans community announced the availability of the award-winning NetBeans 6.0 Integrated Development Environment (IDE). NetBeans 6.0 IDE extends support beyond Java by providing a rich set of features for C/C++, JavaScript and the Ruby language, including Ruby on Rails - further enhancing developer productivity with multiple languages and ease of use.

Open source has made significant inroads into middleware deployments in the enterprise. More and more, open source is being used to deliver the benefits of SOA and open source to the enterprise. This session explores where open source is getting the most traction in SOA deployments and illustrates this by describing some of the customer SOA solutions the speaker sees at Red Hat.

Today's Web service providers must understand Quality of Service, filtering techniques and implement QOS and access list filters on their networks. A proper QOS and filtering design helps to avoid network bottlenecks caused by worm and virus infections, sudden spikes in traffic, broadband users, file sharing, and other network conditions. Service providers can use QOS and filtering techniques to align network usage with business policies and requirements, all while still serving customers and supporting their own back office needs. This presentation covers the key concepts of quality of service and access-list filtering using open source tools. The presentation includes an explanation of filtering using Linux's iptables tool and standard queuing methods as defined in the Differentiated Services RFC as well as applications of these methods through generic case studies.

SOA is becoming the prevailing choice for IT enterprises and the success of this transition to an SOA is based on quality of the SOA governance solution. This session will highlight why SOA governance is crucial for the successful transition to SOA. It will also discuss how to build policy enforcement contracts that can customize how service consumers and producers are able interact with existing enterprise services. The session will explore how enterprise architects and developers can build and leverage an SOA governance strategy in order to manage, share, and enforce policies around the key service artifacts across the enterprise. It will show how to effectively manage the design, execution, and management aspects of the governance infrastructure. Michael will focus on tips, best practices, and strategies on how to develop policy enforcement contracts that can be decorated across internal or external services in the enterprise enhancing the value of the SOA.

According to Gartner, 80 percent of data transfer is done via FTP. A time-consuming and unreliable process born from the mainframe, FTP regularly impacts e-commerce and supply chain orders and processes, unnecessarily disrupting business and jeopardizing revenue. ESB alleviates the latency of batch data processing, eliminates data transfer inefficiencies, and is reliable even in the 'chattiest' networks. There will also be discussion of how enterprises can best leverage the benefits of ESB within their SOA strategy.

This session will dive straight into the middle of a real-world open source SOA implementations, showing how all the facets of how the SOA Big Rules are attained within the solution. This will cover an in-depth walkthrough, by example and demos, of: How to implement large XML Schema-driven document/literal Web services using partly Java EE 5 and partly J2EE 1.4; How security is enabled through certificate-based authentication with WS-Security; How the services are orchestrated with WS-BPEL; and how JSR-168 portlets leverage the end-user experience and how these are exposed using WSRP. The solution is based strictly on open source software and a guide for picking the right frameworks and the right products in the myriad of these will be addressed as well. Prerequisites: Knowledge of Java technology, IDEs, XML, and an interest in SOA.

Apache Tuscany provides an open source services infrastructure for building SOA. It's based on the widely supported Service Component Architecture (SCA) specification. With the Tuscany implementation of SCA, application developers can easily create or reuse services in different languages (BPEL, Java or various scripting languages) and assemble and deploy them in a distributed environment. This session will introduce SCA and explain how this open source implementation of SCA will simplify the building of SOA solutions.

The two most powerful forces shaping enterprise software today are software as a service (SaaS) and open source software (OSS). Previously separate, they are now converging into a powerful 'SaaS + OSS' model destined to become the dominant business model for enterprise software. Using case studies, the session will review how vendors can use this model to scale rapidly, use capital efficiently, and acquire customers for a low marginal cost. The presentation will also address how the model delivers unprecedented value to end-customers through lower total cost of ownership, higher quality, faster deployments, improved support, enhanced collaboration, and greater transparency.

OASIS (Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards, http://www.oas is-open.org) is a member-led, international, non-profit standards consortium focused on global e-business. OASIS drives the development, convergence, and adoption of e-business standards. It was founded in 1993 and now operates with over 500 member organizations and over 5,000 participants in over 80 countries. There are over 60 OASIS Technical Committees producing royalty-free and RAND standards. The open OASIS technical process is expressly designed to promote industry consensus and unite disparate efforts. OASIS cooperates with over 50 other standards and industry organizations to reduce duplication and promote interoperability for OASIS Standards. This presentation will give an update on the latest OASIS standards relevant to the SOA community and discuss the correlation between open standards and open source.

Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 have brought IT organizations a set of capabilities to better meet the demands of business users. However, IT needs to be proactive and build processes to enable agility and creativity, and deploy these assets with appropriate enterprise-level control. What level of performance, control, compliance will ensure team success? And how can you reduce costs and development times for better enterprise value?

Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 have brought IT organizations a set of capabilities to better meet the demands of business users. However, IT needs to be proactive and build processes to enable agility and creativity, and deploy these assets with appropriate enterprise-level control. What level of performance, control, compliance will ensure team success? And how can you reduce costs and development times for better enterprise value?

In keeping with the longstanding SYS-CON tradition of being at the very forefront of software development with all its online and offline resources, SYS-CON Media & Events jointly today announced a double whammy, launching both 'Open Web Developer's Journal' (htt p://openweb.sys-con.com) and 'Open Web Developer Summit' (http://openweb.s ys-con.com) - to be held for the first time in New York City April 21-22, 2008.

eRacks Open Source Systems announced eRacks Hosting, a new division that will consolidate its dedicated hosting and colocation services. The eRacks Hosting facilities occupy racks in multiple Tier 1 datacenters in Silicon Valley, California, where the Internet backbone and peering are ranked among the top in the world.

Spring Source, formerly known as Interface21, a provider of open source software for building and deploying mission-critical enterprise applications, announced the release of version 2.5 of the Spring Framework. With a focus on delivering enhanced annotation options, this latest release completes Spring 2.0's mission of providing the most flexible, most comprehensive configuration model for both Java 1.4 and Java 5.

In another trip down the rabbit hole to where things are odd indeed, SpikeSource, Kim Polese's open source stack operation, is going to certify all of its SpikeIgnited open source applications on Windows. In concert with Microsoft, it says. SpikeIgnited includes BI, ECM, collaboration, e-mail, CRM and web content management software, the kind of stuff that Microsoft supplies.