OPEN WORLD FORUM PRESENTS OPEN INNOVATION AWARDS TO FIVE GROUND- BREAKING OPEN SOURCE START-UPS

At the recent Open World Forum, five of the world’s most promising start-ups focused on Open Source were recognized for their highly original projects in terms of innovation, quality of execution and potential for value creation.

Paris, 29 October 2009. As part of the final round-up from this year’s Open World Forum – the most important international convention dedicated to exploring the technological, economic and social impact of open technologies today announces the results of its annual open innovation awards, dedicated to Open Source start- ups.

As part of the Forum, an ‘Open Innovation Summit’ effectively gave 20 particularly promising international start- ups the opportunity to present their projects to major systems integrators and venture capital investors. The international jury, consisting of well-known and respected personalities, chose five of these companies to receive an award recognizing their vision, the quality of their corporate projects and their prospects for future development. The five winners of the Open World Forum Open Innovation Awards 2009 are: Bonita Soft: Created in 2009 by Miguel Valdes, Rodrigue Le Gall and Charles Souillard, BonitaSoft is the first provider of Open Source business process management (BPM) software. The Bonita solution has been downloaded more than 140,000 times to date, by companies and organizations worldwide. BonitaSoft will democratize the use of BPM in companies of all sizes with an intuitive and powerful solution at an optimum cost. BonitaSoft is a partner of Talend and Bull and is an active member of the OW2 consortium. BonitaSoft is offering an Open Source solution that is easy to implement, with a cost of acquisition and maintenance ten times less than that of the traditional software providers. http://www.bonitasoft.com

Kaltura is to video management what Firefox is to browsers, MySQL to databases, or WordPress to blogging: a FREE and flexible alternative to proprietary solutions. Kaltura’s platform allows any website to upload, encode, publish, syndicate, monetize, and analyze video. Its Open Source framework allows webmasters to significantly save time and money when developing and deploying rich-media applications, whether those are intended for video, audio or photo sharing, for education, healthcare, enterprise collaboration, productivity, security, or e- commerce. Wherever and whenever video and rich-media can be used, the Kaltura platform increases flexibility and reduces development times and total-cost-of-ownership. http://corp.kaltura.com

ScaleDB provides a plug-in storage engine for MySQL that enables it to work like Oracle RAC. ScaleDB turns MySQL into a shared-disk clustered database. All database nodes in the cluster are masters with full read/write access to the entire database. If one database node fails, the others simply keep running, providing enterprise- class high-availability. There is no need to partition your data, as you would with MySQL or a typical database.

You don’t need slaves and replication either. As a result, it is easy to set-up and maintain. Cloud computing companies promote dynamic scalability, where your cluster grows or shrinks based on demand. The database is where dynamic scalability breaks down…until now. With ScaleDB you can scale up/down the number of servers in your cluster as your needs warrant. Cloud companies are particularly interested in reselling ScaleDB to their customers because it enables them to virtualize the database layer to better utilize their infrastructure, scale dynamically, reduce maintenance and increase profits. http://www.scaledb.com

Sonar Source: The company has committed itself to execute a mission: to make source code quality management accessible to everyone. To succeed in that mission SonarSource leads the development of the Sonar platform and makes sure it gets massively adopted. Sonar is the ‘one stop shop‘ for everything related to source code quality. SonarSource has chosen a fairly unique business model: offering a high quality platform, that is free, Open Source (LGPL v3) and highly extensible, that totally fulfils the needs of development teams.

http://www.sonarsource.com

Ulteo’s mission is to become within five years one of the global leaders in the enterprise virtual desktop space, by building and delivering Open Source, best-in-class enterprise virtual desktop solutions that can fit into most small and large information systems and generate the best ROI on the market. Its product, the Open Virtual Desktop (OVD), is available in dual licenses: GPL2 (free to use by anybody) and a commercial license for organizations that need the benefits of a typical commercial license, via our Ulteo Enterprise Subscription Plans.

http://www.ulteo.com

The jury for the Open World Forum Innovation Awards 2009 was chaired jointly by Jean-Marie Chauvet of LC Capital and Stefane Fermigier, of Nuxeo, Chairman of the Open Software Group at the European competitive cluster SYSTEM@TIC.

The other members of the jury were:

- Andrew Aitken, Founder, Olliance

- Jean-François Caenen, Chief Technology Officer, Capgemini

- Roberto Galoppini, Consultant and blogger, international expert in Open Source

- Serges Goldstein, Director of Partnerships, Ingres

- Jean-Noël Olivier, Senior Manager, Accenture

- Bruno Pinna, Director of Marketing and Strategy, Bull

- Alain Revah, Analyst, Five Venture

- Mark Shuttleworth, Founder, Canonical

- Mark Taylor, CEO, Sirius IT

The Open Innovation Awards were organized as part of the Open World Forum by the European competitiveness cluster system@tic, with the support of the regional development agency for the Paris Ile de France region.

About the Open World Forum

Established in 2008, the Open World Forum is the leading international convention dedicated to exploring the technological, economic and social impact of open technologies. A key meeting point for exchanging ideas, with over 140 prestigious speakers from 20 countries, an international audience of 1,200 delegates, plenary sessions, linked events and business meetings, OWF offers a unique opportunity to find out more about the latest trends and innovations in open technologies and open innovation. The event makes a vital contribution to building the digital future, through innovation awards and a unique forward-looking initiative: the ‘2020 FLOSS Roadmap’. It also enables senior executives from business, politicians, technology experts and investors from six continents to meet and exchange ideas. The Forum is organized by the European competitiveness clusters System@tic and Cap Digital, and the QualiPSo consortium, in partnership with the largest international communities including the Linux, Eclipse and Apache Foundations, the OW2 Consortium and the Open Solutions Alliance. For more information, please visit: http://www.openworldforum.org