By now, few people in the IT industry would dispute the benefits that the open source development model brings to businesses: flexibility and to some extent security, though it isn’t always the cheaper option if you do your TCO (total cost of ownership) sums.

The best open source software, notably the LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP) stack, is commonly used by enterprises large and small, with many businesses running mission-critical applications such as sales transactions on Linux.

Yet, the merits of open source software should not be judged based on its “open source” label. While there are a handful of stars like the LAMP stack, there are thousands out there that will never gain the prominence of Linux and remain difficult to use and maintain.

It’s taken four years.

Four years to get the Wi-Fi 802.11n specifications finally agreed upon. Four years ago, Airgo Networks (now part of Qualcomm) was a trailblazer in MIMO (Multiple Input Multiple Output), which is the technology behind 802.11n. By using multiple antennas in MIMO, the data throughput and range can be increased.

I remember that 802.11n — then in its draft incarnation — was one of the freshest news to hit the scene four years back when I was still a trade journalist.

Fast forward to today. What was supposed to be a two-year ratification process took four, and 802.11n was finally officially ratified this year in September 2009. Ratification means that if your device is labeled 802.11n compliant, it will work with any other 802.11n device, regardless of vendor.

Aruba Networks AP-105 for US$695

All of this is history. Except that I got reminded about this when I met Aruba Networks last week at a press event, where they were in town to tout their newest enterprise 802.11n access point device: The AP-105, which is going for US$695 (S$962).

After four years since its inception, Project Fusion, Oracle’s next generation suite of enterprise applications will finally be ready to enterprises in 2010.

At the closing keynote of this year’s Openworld conference which saw about 50,000 attendees throng the city of San Francisco, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison said the code base for the Fusion applications is ready, and customers have begun testing the products.

According to Ellison, Oracle will continue to support J.D Edwards and PeopleSoft applications under its Applications Unlimited program, along with its lifetime support policy.

The first version of the brand new Fusion Applications, built from the ground-up with its own technologies and those acquired from other companies, will include Financial Management, Human Capital Management, Sales and Marketing, Supply Chain Management, Project Portfolio Management, Procurement Management as well as Governance, Risk and Compliance.

With more workers Twittering and connecting with one another through Facebook and other social networking sites, it is hardly surprising that enterprise technology vendors are starting to notice the potential of social media in business applications.

I caught up with Anthony Lye, Oracle’s senior vice president for CRM products who shared about the company’s Social CRM products that integrates the social networks of sales reps into existing CRM systems. The portfolio comprises the Oracle Sales Prospector, Sales Campaign and Sales Library, which allows sales reps to share information with one another, seek out sales leads by combining external information sources with internal customer data, as well as manage sales campaigns.

“Customers want to talk to other customers and these conversations are happening in Facebook and other social media,” Lye said during a media briefing at Oracle Openworld 2009. “It’s important for enterprises to listen to these conversations and take action.”

What social CRM does is to expose the structure of customer relationships within the CRM system through conversations. “For example, if I sell to telco A, can I see what telco B, C and D are buying, because people usually buy what others are buying.”

Techgoondu caught up with Ron Weiss, Oracle’s director of product management, on the business value of Exadata, which combines storage, Oracle database and servers in a single hardware appliance. Oracle claims that this set-up improves database performance, particularly in datawarehousing and online transaction processing where on-the-fly responses to database queries are paramount.

In this video, Weiss also shared his views on the upcoming “Exadata killer”, dubbed the DB2 Pure Scale by IBM, which also happens to be a Gold sponsor of this year’s Openworld confab.

In the world of enterprise technology that has become dominated by an increasingly smaller pool of players, company leaders often swing between taking potshots at their rivals and singing praises next.

When Sun Microsystems’ co-founder Scott McNealy slammed Oracle for its software pricing policy in 2004, he probably would not have known that five years later, his legacy now lies in the hands of Oracle, the enterprise software behemoth that has now cast its sight on IBM with the Oracle-Sun merger.

During the Oracle Openworld opening keynote, which was clearly aimed at reassuring Sun customers over the future of their investments, McNealy expressed confidence that Oracle would take care of his legacy. “Our technology will find a nice home,” he said, adding that Oracle will continue to innovate on the Sparc and Solaris more than what Sun is doing now.

Oracle CEO Larry Ellison and Sun’s Scott McNealy are expected to take the stage at the opening keynote of Oracle’s annual business technology conference. Those who are closely following the developments of the deal, including the European Union’s investigation over the competition concerns and Oracle’s roadmap for Sun’s products, will be watching the two industry bigwigs closely as they shed more light on their union.

Techgoondu will be livecasting the Ellison-McNealy keynote from the Moscone Center in San Francisco on Monday, Oct 12 at 8.45am SGT. Check out out Ustream channel at http://www.ustream.tv/channel/techgoondu, or watch the embedded stream here:

Last week, the European Commission announced that it will launch an in-depth investigation under the EU Merger Regulation over Oracle’s impending acquisition of Sun Microsystems. The controversial move, which has caused a stir among industry watchers, could potentially derail the deal.

Already, IBM and HP have been riding on the uncertainty over the Oracle-Sun deal with campaigns to win over Sun customers. Their efforts are bearing fruit: Sun’s second quarter server revenues falling 37 percent to US$981 million compared to a year ago – the steepest decline among major vendors according to market numbers from analyst company IDC.

The rationale for the EC’s investigation stems from its initial market investigation, which “indicated that the proposed acquisition would raise serious doubts as to its compatibility with the [EU] Single Market because of competition concerns on the market for databases.”

Last week, the open source community was abuzz with conversations on Microsoft’s contribution of 20,000 lines of code to the Linux kernel. While some are skeptical over the software giant’s move to get its code into the Linux kernel, others, including Linus Torvalds, welcomed Microsoft’s contribution just like the code from anyone else in the community.

The code, which includes three Linux device drivers, will enhance the performance of the Linux operating system when virtualized on Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V or Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V. On July 20, the code was been submitted by Microsoft to the Linux kernel community for inclusion in the Linux tree.

Look into the world’s tech crystal ball and you’ll see only clouds. Even with my limited divination skills, this trend isn’t hard to spot.

For the past year or so, many tech vendors — e.g. IBM, Microsoft, Oracle — are jumping on and touting clouds as the next big thing. Now Cisco is taking up the banner charge and announcing their strategy and intent to attack this space.

At a telepresence media/analyst session held yesterday at Cisco offices in Asia and US, Cisco’s CTO Padmasree Warrior and senior VP of the software group Doug Dennerline fielded questions on Cisco’s push into clouds.

Firstly, definitions. The over-hyped, fuzzy phrase “clouds” can mean wildly different things to different people, and I have gone off on rants before on what exactly do you mean when you talk about clouds. At least Cisco defined what exactly cloud computing means to them, and here’s their verbatim definition: