Simula Labs bundles open source software and services for enterprise consumption.
Part incubator, part commercial services provider, Simula Labs this week is set to debut a bundle of software and services that industry watchers say could help enterprise IT shops shore up their open source deployments.
The company is combining three open source software products with deployment, engineering, support and maintenance services to create its CoRE (Community-oriented, Real-time Engineering) Network platform.
“Open source applications need a vendor in the middle between the developers and the end users,” says Winston Damarillo, Simula’s CEO. “We can provide that backplane, that assurance layer to make investing in open source a viable option at the enterprise level.”
Simula’s heritage is in open source. The company served as an incubator for such open source vendors as LogicBlaze. Damarillo also founded Gluecode Software, which IBM acquired last year for its stack of open source application middleware.
CoRE includes LogicBlaze’s FUSE platform, which combines an enterprise service bus (ESB), messaging platform, service registry and business process engine. CoRE also bundles Maestro open source application development software from another Simula start-up, Mergere. The third primary CoRE element is LiveTribe systems-monitoring and management software, an open source alternative to such products as BMC Performance Manager and CA Unicenter.
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All the basic elements of CoRE come from The Apache Software Foundation. In addition, CoRE customers can work with Simula to integrate other open source projects, Damarillo says.
Michael Goulde, a senior analyst with Forrester Research, says Simula is responding to what the research firm sees as a top concern among enterprise IT buyers: open source reliability.
“Customers thinking about adopting – and some already adopting – open source are always concerned with where they will get support and who will provide maintenance,” Goulde says. “Many fear development will end on the software and they will be left stuck.” Simula is in a good position to provide open source resources in a standardized, consistent manner, he says.
Reliability was a priority when the National Institutes of Health decided to give cancer research and treatment centers access to its resources via an open source ESB, says Charles Griffin, who works with systems integrator Ekagra Software and serves as a technical manager for NIH in Bethesda, Md.
Simula’s quarterly software releases, service-level agreement (SLA) guarantees and access to development staff helped win over Griffin. “They have merged open source applications with continuous development and production support, and SLA guarantees, which was the one thing holding our clients back from open source,” Griffin says.
CoRE is available on a per-server or site-based subscription model. The company says it has 20 contracted customers with deals averaging $80,000.
