A new research report from the New York-based 451 Group has found that the ‘Big Four’ systems management vendors — BMC, HP, IBM and CA — are “ripe for a shake-up from open source systems management players.”

"Acer Inc. did not install the Ubuntu Linux distribution on a batch of Aspire notebooks for sale in Singapore, but the company is installing a different version of the open-source operating system on some notebooks, local dealers said."

Mandriva has released a beta version of their business based desktops in Mandriva Corporate Desktop (MCD) 4.0. Mandriva, on the heels of trying to gain popularity in the office environment has released a desktop that can rival its opponents like the Micorsoft sponsored Suse Linux Enterprise Desktop (SLED) and RedHat's Fedora desktop.

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.

Now that anyone who wants to have an online presence via blogs or websites already has it, companies are offering all kinds of simple and cost-effective solutions. After all, while the number of customers may not grow so rapidly going forward, the needs of existing customers will definitely multiply as they use more and more storage space and bandwidth.

The open source collaborative software platform, Mindquarry, earlier this week launched the beta of its hosted collaborative service, Mindquarry GO.

allocPSA (http://www.allocpsa.org/) is an open source, on-line (ie, web-based) Professional Services Automation system. allocPSA provides a suite of integrated applications designed for organisations which provide services to clients.