50 Open Source Replacements for Really Expensive Software

Posted on by Teddy Nee

The “Great Recession” has businesses and consumers alike looking for ways to cut costs. That includes looking for cheaper alternatives to expensive software.

Accounting: TurboCASH, Phreebooks

Business Intelligence: Jaspersoft, Pentaho, Palo BI Suite, JMagallanes, OpenReports

Business Process Management: ProcessMaker

CAD: BRL-CAD, Archimedes

Customer Relationship Management: Sugar Community Edition

Database: MySQL, Firebird, Kexi

Desktop Publishing: Scribus

E-mail/Collaboration/Groupware:  Zimbra

Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP): OpenERP, Openbravo, ADempiere

Gateway Security Appliances: Endian Firewall Community, Untangle

Graphics/Drawing: Dia, Gimp, Inkscape, Paint.Net

Office Productivity: OpenOffice.org, KOffice, NeoOffice, Oracle OpenOffice

Operating System: Red Hat, SUSE, Ubuntu, Debian

PDF Tools: PDFCreator

Point of Sale: Openbravo POS, Lemon POS

Project Management: OpenProj, GanttProject

Speech Recognition: Simon

Video Tools: Blender, Cinelerra, OpenShot Video Editor, Kdenlive, CineFX, Avidemux

Web Application Tools:  Open BlueDragon

Web Site Authoring: Kompozer, NVU, Bluefish, SeaMonkey

If you have any question or opinion, feel free to send us a messageor leave your comments below

Reference: 50 Open Source Replacements for Really Expensive Software

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Cloud Database for Dummies (Free E-Book)

Posted on by Joseph Chen

Building a Database in the Cloud? E-Book Explains How.

It’s free for download as long as you have a free Oracle account.

Clear and concise, practical, filled with time-saving tips—the reviews are in on Building a Database Cloud for Dummies.

This quick-reference guide, organized into six short chapters and supplemented with helpful illustrations, provides a clear overview of the cloud and step-by-step instructions on deploying database as a service. Download the complimentary e-book today and learn how to:

Build a vision and business case for the cloud

Operate and deploy a database in the private cloud

Maximize success, with a list of the top 10 things to consider when starting

Cloud Database

Cloud database allow businesses to drive down costs while increasing business agility and IT performance. See for yourself how to save money, simplify management, and improve resource efficiency with a database cloud.

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Financing the Supply Chain with Big Data

Posted on by Teddy Nee

To many, supply chain finance still leans primarily on approved invoices and credit. And yet, over the past 15 years, there’s been a complete transformation in the way financial processes are handled within the supply chain. Fifteen years ago, letters of credit predominated the payment interactions between buyers, suppliers and financial institutions. Financing was arduous and expensive. Today, online, cloud-based platforms are revolutionizing both payment and financing.

Data is the driver. Today, we have unprecedented visibility into all the transactions and interactions that take place in the supply chain. The cloud, as a central information hub, not only can host these interactions and provide a real-time picture of them, but it can also keep long-term records.

This gives financial institutions what they always wanted—a better way to assess risk.

Big Data Financing

Credit rating was historically the key factor for financial providers to assess risk. In many cases, it’s the buyer’s credit rating that counts most, even when the supplier is the one receiving the financing. The problem with credit rating, though, is that it depends on a lot of factors, not just on how reliable a supplier is in delivering goods or how reliable a buyer is in paying on time.

But as far as risk assessment goes, proven transaction history is what lenders prefer to set their decisions and rates upon. But for the longest time, financial providers didn’t have a good way to assess risk independently of credit rating. Now, thanks to big data, they do.

Read more at Financing the Supply Chain with Big Data

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Leverage cloud financial intelligence systems with AWS

Posted on by Teddy Nee

Leverage cloud financial intelligence systems with AWS

The use of cloud financial intelligence systems, typically from cloud financial management system providers, offers insights into cloud usage. Cloud financial management providers, such as Cloud Cruiser and others, can tell you how effective the cloud platforms are in delivery of services. This includes how each service tracks back to cloud resources that support the services, as well as who is consuming the services and by how much.

However, the true value of these systems is not the simple operational cost data that they are able to gather and report on — it’s the ability to leverage deeper analytics to determine usage patterns, and how those patterns will behave over time. This means you have the ability to better understand how your AWS instances (and other cloud services) were put to use in the past, and more importantly, how they will be leveraged in the future, including the ability to properly estimate cloud resource utilization in the context of complex and widely distributed architectures.

It’s all about the ability to make the most out of data from multiple components of the architecture, not just AWS. Most enterprises that deploy cloud-based systems do so using either public and private clouds within a multi-cloud architecture, which may also be mixed with traditional (or legacy) systems. This makes the financial tracking much more complex, but also much more valuable.

For example, a production management system may leverage core storage services from AWS, session management services from their OpenStack private cloud and core database services using a traditional Oracle database running in their data center. Thus, the cloud financial management system needs to gather information for many different system components, including the private and public clouds , as well as the local database. System owners can use this information to determine the amount of resources consumed, as well as patterns of consumption over time. They have a complete picture as to how a holistic system is functioning, including cloud and non-cloud components.

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FusionOps Unveils LiveAnalytics for Supply Chain Data

Posted on by Teddy Nee

FusionOps Unveils LiveAnalytics for Supply Chain Data

FusionOps, a supply chain analytics company that provides a cloud-based business intelligence (BI) application, has launched LiveAnalytics for supply chain data. LiveAnalytics uses images and live metrics to create infographics for supply chain processes and workflows.

The FusionOps application allows businesses to create new analytics from scratch. In addition, the application offers thousands of configurable analytics, metrics and tickers, FusionOps said.

LiveAnalytics leverages FusionOps’ interactive, root-cause analysis across the supply chain. FusionOps said LiveAnalytics users can visualize changes in their supply chains in real-time and evaluate data from all functional areas to become more efficient.

Some of LiveAnalytics’ features include:

Alerts – When alerts are triggered, users are notified via email about supply chain events in real-time.

Key performance indicator (KPI) dictionary – The new KPI dictionary explains pre-built and company-specific metrics.

Personalized navigation – Users can access thousands of dashboards, KPIs and reports directly from LiveAnalytics’ main navigation and “Favorites” menus.

Thanks for reading this article. Welcome to leave a comment below or send us a message if you have any opinions.