More good news for the open source community just in: an analysis of its enterprise customers by OpenLogic found that for 2007 as a whole, the use of open source among enterprise customers is up 26% year-on-year. Enterprises on average used a whopping 94 different open source packages last year, compared to 75 in 2006…

In articles past, we have examined both the up-and-coming open source projects to watch, and which open source applications you simply cannot live without. But where does this leave the enterprise user? Often times, the need of the enterprise user differs from that of the home-office/small-office worker.

Global Server Load Balancing is the automatic routing of users to the nearest / fastest server to them based on their source IP. Typically a GSLB solution requires expensive application switches at each site, and additional software licenses that run into the thousands of dollars.

This is a review of a relatively new resource, called Open Source in the Enterprise (OSIE) by Bernard Golden. The report's raison d'être is to help companies to decide if open source applications are right for their enterprise, and if so, how to implement it intelligently.

News that the Italian Corte dei Conti is adopting Red Hat Enterprise Linux is interesting. Even more so when you consider the role the Corte dei Conti plays and recent complaints regarding the apparent re-allocation of state funds previously committed to open source development.

It has been a big summer for enterprise-oriented, online, open source directories (or repositories or marketplaces). Three companies recently launched new and very different Web-based services designed to provide enterprises and coders with a central access point for a wide range of open source software and resources.

Sun Microsystems has launched OpenSSO Enterprise, the replacement for its previous single sign-on offering, Sun Java System Access Manager 7.0. OpenSSO Enterprise incorporates not only identity and access management, but federation and secure web services.

News earlier this week that IBM is buying French business rules player Ilog for $340m has once again shone a spotlight on this relative backwater of enterprise technology.

Increasingly, news organizations are learning that using a content management system (CMS) designed from a "Web first, print/broadcast second" perspective can streamline operations and provide greater flexibility. As I wrote earlier, there are several good open-source CMS options for news and community sites.