Introducing CodeGlide, a New Open Source Mashup and Data Integration Company

Economic downturn or no, the open source data integration market remains active. In late January, Talend announced a $12 million C round of financing. Over the past two years, the company's open source data integration solution has been downloaded 3.3 million times, and the company now boasts hundreds of customers. Other vendors in the market, such as SnapLogic, continue to add connectors and develop their capabilities.

And now comes a new vendor to the scene: CodeGlide, an open source company with a broad business application platform and big ambitions. I spoke recently with Mauro DeGennaro, CodeGlide's co-founder and Vice President of Software Development. He filled me on the company's approach, offerings, and direction.

CodeGlide was founded in May 2007. The company's goal is to offer a comprehensive suite of open source business applications, including:

• Fusion, an open source data integration platform for building mashups
  
• SnapCRM, an open source CRM suite (with a provocative title, since the company competes against SnapLogic)
  
• Rendezvous, an open source collaboration suite, which offers calendaring, document management, and project management features
  

These three platforms are available in an Enterprise Suite bundle, which is the company's most popular download.

Speaking of downloads, CodeGlide seems to be off to a fast start. The company's Web site came on line on January 15. I spoke to Mauro about a week ago, and already the company had racked up 11,000 downloads of its software. Through its partners, the company has sold its Professional Edition to six different companies.

Partners are also lending their expertise to help the company develop other applications, including an E-learning application, an ERP application, and a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) offering that will compete against Coghead", LongJump, and other PaaS solution providers.

CodeGlide has a core development team of ten programmers, who are augmented by free-lancers and sub-companies that offer domain expertise in areas such as ERP. Business people and design experts design new features, which the developers then build. Of course, being an open source company, CodeGlide can expect to receive further enhancements and features from its open source community, as well. The company is small, but global: development is based in Argentina, Q.A. in India, sales in Europe and the U.S.

The CodeGlide Approach

CodeGlide's goal is to offer open source business solutions for the SMB market. It wants to make mashups and data integration solutions available to developers without advanced programming skills and even to business people. Accordingly, the company offers a visual tool for building mashups and creating widgets. For example, using Fusion, it's possible to construct a mashup that reads two Excel files and extracts data for a Sales report. A customer is using the product to read VoIP usage reports for billing. You can watch a video of that mashup being built here.

To keep development simple and straightforward, the company has developed a high-level scripting language, X#. The CodeGlide platform converts X# to Java. Of course, creating a new scripting language is risky: anything new or different can be a barrier to adoption. But if the scripting language really is both powerful and simple, and if the design tools minimize even the exposure to X#, CodeGlide may find that its reach really does extend to less technical users, who may have shunned mashups and Web 2.0 development until now.

To build mashups, users drag connectors and logical functions onto a design pane. Right-clicking on a connector or function opens a dialog box for configuring it. To select content or check for conditional status, developers use a filter function. There's also a foreach component for processing input items in turn.

As far as data integration goes, the company boasts an extensive set of connectors, including connectors for popular databases, including MySQL, Oracle, PostgreSQL, and DB2; common file types, such Excel; email services, such as POP3 and IMAP; and Web services, including WSDL-based SOAP services. A "screen-scraper" connector enables developers to access content displayed on Web pages.

Overall, it's a broad feature set for a young company. CodeGlide software is licensed under GLPv3. The Professional Edition of the Fusion mashup and data integration platform is available for $10,000, which is a one-time fee. DeGennaro points out that this price is far below the price of other mashup platforms, such as JackBe.

Low price. Lots of features. Big plans. CodeGlide could do well in an IT environment where business are looking for lots of bang for their buck.