Other

3D Modeling, Rendering & Animation

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Software	Consider as Alternative to	Comments	Real-World Use
Blender	3ds Max Cinema 4D LightWave 3D	Comparable to commercial software, used to render production quality scenes and animations.	Feature films have used Blender for support, animation and effects. Referenceref TV commercials. Referenceref

Desktop

Assistive Technologies

Software	Consider as Alternative to	Comments	Real-World Use
NonVisual Desktop Access (NVDA)	Dragon JAWS WindowsEyes Voice Over	Screen reader for Windows, providing feedback through synthetic speech and Braille. Supports over 20 languages. Integrates with Internet Explorer, Outlook Express, Microsoft Word and Excel, LibreOffice and OpenOffice, Thunderbird and Firefox. Protocols supported include WAI-ARIA for web applications, Microsoft Active Accessibility.	NVDA has received significant global recognition and awards. Yahoo! Uses NVDA for testing and demonstration. Referencesref

Operation System

Backup

Software	Consider as Alternative to	Comments	Real-World Use
Amanda, Bacula	NetVault Backup	Amanda and Bacula are compatible across Linux, Unix, MacOS and Windows systems.	Corporate and public sector testimonials for large scale deployments including Belgian Government backing up 30TB.ref

Web

Blog Engine

Software	Consider as Alternative to	Comments	Real-World Use
Wordpress		Leading blog engine with rich functionality. Users benefit from large pool of community developed extensions.	Microsoft Live Spaces migrates to Wordpress blog engine. Referenceref

Business Apps

Business Intelligence (BI)

Software	Consider as Alternative to	Comments	Real-World Use
Pentaho BI Suite	Oracle, IBM, Informatica	Includes ETL, OLAP, reporting, dashboards, workflow and data mining capability. Integrates with Hadoop for large scale data analysis.	Customers include Camden Borough, US Naval Air Systems Command, Harris Computer Systems, Sun Microsystems, Specsavers, NHS Islington, Brussels Airport, Norways TV2. Referenceref

Business Process Modeling

Software	Consider as Alternative to	Comments	Real-World Use
Activi BPM, Intalio BPM

Other

CAD

Software	Consider as Alternative to	Comments	Real-World Use
QCad	AutoCAD	Simple CAD application uses AutoCAD DXF common file format. Windows installer available.

Network

Certificate Authorities

Software	Consider as Alternative to	Comments	Real-World Use
CA-Cert

Cloud

Cloud Infrastructure

Software	Consider as Alternative to	Comments	Real-World Use
Open Stack	Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, VMWare, Citrix	Emerging standard with significant multi-vendor backing providing assurance against single-vendor lockin and failure. Primarily developed by NASA and Rackspace, now backed by AMD, Intel, Dell, Citrix, Cisco, Canonical, NTT and over 60 other organizations. Provides virtual machine management (OpenStack Compute) and storage (OpenStack Storage). Supports Xen, KVM, Qemu and Microsoft Hyper-V hypervisors. Supports the open virtual machine format, OVF, supported by Dell, Microsoft, Xensource, VMware, Redhat, IBM and Oracle.	Over 60 significant organizations backing OpenStack. Referenceref NASA production use of OpenStack components. Tier 1 ISP using OpenStack object storage. Referenceref
Eucalyptus, Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud	Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, VMWare, Citrix	Early re-implementation of the industry leading Amazon EC2 and S3 services for managing virtual machines. Now forms part of commercialized cloud management offerings, including Canonical’s Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud Services. Allows deployment , management and dynamic scaling of private and hybrid clouds (overflow capacity to public clouds, e.g. Amazon) Supports Xen, KVM hypervisors	Puma.com and related sites use Eucalyptus. Referenceref
OpenNebula	Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, VMWare, Citrix	Interoperates with Amazon EC2, ElasticHosts Users manage via Amazon AWS compliant APIs Allows deployment , management and dynamic scaling of private and hybrid clouds (overflow capacity to public clouds, eg Amazon) Supports Xen, KVM and VMware hypervisors	OpenNebula is used by CERN which peaked at 16,000 virtual machines managing 400,000 jobs. Referencesrefandref

App Development

Code Repository and Version Control

Software	Consider as Alternative to	Comments	Real-World Use
Git, Subversion	Visual Sourcesafe, Rational Team Concert, Perforce	Git is the leading distributed version control system. Support non-linear development, cryptographic authentication of histories, and is suited to the largest developments.	One of the world’s largest and most distributed developments, the Linux kernel, is managed by git.

Web

Content Management System (CMS)

Software	Consider as Alternative to	Comments	Real-World Use
Alfresco	Morello, Vignette/Opentext, Interwoven/Autonomy	Includes web authoring, workflow and publishing.	Fox Broadcasting Company public site Fox.com is supported by Alfresco. Referenceref
Drupal WordPress Joomla Plone	Morello, Vignette/Opentext, Interwoven/Autonomy	Includes mature web publishing, blogs, content syndication, discussion forums, and large pool of community developed extensions. Plone is particularly suited to more complex applications, workflows. It also has a strong security record. Plone’s interface confirms to accessibility standard WCAG-AAA higher than most competitors. Plone has strengths in standards conformance, access control, internationalization, and security.	Whitehouse.gov website uses Drupal. Reference http://nyti.ms/3NmpYO Very large number of Plone customers include Brazilian Government, Norwegian Archive, Kent Connects and Kent CC, Scottish National Party, Warwickshire Police, UK MoD Defense Academy, NASAScience, Keble Oxford and Bristol University, NHS Networks. Referenceref Plone is also used by the FBI, US Dept. of Energy, European Environment Agency, United Nations, . Referenceref

Other

Course Management

Software	Consider as Alternative to	Comments	Real-World Use
Moodle		Learning management system for course creators and administrators.	Moodle has significant use in the education sector, including Open University, Australian National University, London School of Economics. Referenceref

Business Apps

Customer Relationship Management

Software	Consider as Alternative to	Comments	Real-World Use
SugarCRM	Microsoft Dynamics, SageCRM, Salesforce	SugarCRM is a commercially successful CRM system providing sales-force automation, marketing campaign management, customer support, mobile device CRM and reporting. In 2011, SugarCRM joined the IBM Global Alliance Portfolio for cloud solutions.	SugfarCRM customers from comms, financial, healthcare, public , professional services, manufacturing, technology and retail sectors include uzo (Portugal’s largest telecoms provider), One Financial, HealthScreen (replacing Siebel),State of Oregon, InterAct (public safety and security), Thomas Cook, ThyssenKrupp, Avis, General Motors . Referenceref

Data Integration

Software	Consider as Alternative to	Comments	Real-World Use
Talend	IBM, Oracle, Software AG, Tibco, Progress, Informatica, Mulesoft	Mature data integration tools covering file migrations, data warehousing, ETL, master data management, data quality profiling. Application integration and ESB functions. Integration with Hadoop aims at “big data” analysis. Talend is one of the largest companies with an open source business model.	Customers include ebay, Deutsche Post, Allianz, ING, Alcatel-Lucent, AOL, BNP Paribas, Orange, Virgin Mobile, Sony, SNCF, Land Registry, UNHCR. Referencerefandref

Other

Data Mining

Software	Consider as Alternative to	Comments	Real-World Use
RapidMiner	SPSS, SAS PASW, SAS Enterprise Miner, MATLAB, Oracle DM, , Excel	Leading data mining and exploration toolkit, providing access to proven tools, such as WEKA, through a graphical user interface. Includes text mining capability.	Dnuggets leading professional newsletter for data mining sector poll shows RapidMiner as most used tool. Referenceref

Operation System

Desktop Operating System

Software	Consider as Alternative to	Comments	Real-World Use
RedHat Desktop / Workstation Linux Canonical Ubuntu CentOs Linux Novell SUSE Linux	Microsoft Windows XP, Vista, 7	Alternative desktops are likely to be successful when their role or use is known to not require Microsoft applications. Examples are contact centre desktops with access to a web based application.	220,000 Canonical Ubuntu desktops deployed in Andalusia, Spain.ref

Other

Diagramming

Software	Consider as Alternative to	Comments	Real-World Use
Dia	Microsoft Visio	Support for open standard formats such as EPS and SVG. Installers for Windows are available.

Databases

Distributed Large Storage

Software	Consider as Alternative to	Comments	Real-World Use
Hadoop HBase, Cassandra Redis NoSQL	Google MapReduce Google BigTable	Hadoop is the leading platform for petabyte scale distributed data storage and processing. It is designed to detect and manage failures in commodity compute nodes, thus not relying on expensive high-availability hardware. Compatible with MapReduce APIs. During 2001, several commercial offering provide support around Hadoop components, or Hadoop-like components, including from EMC, Oracle and IBM. HBase is modelled after Google’s distributed database BigTable. Cassandra developed and open sourced by Facebook provides faster large storage balanced by “eventual consistency”. It follows the NoSQL concept. The multi-master architecture has no single points of failure, and zero-downtime failed node replacement. Designed for highly consistent durable storage through data centre failures. Redis NoSQL store is governed by VMWare	Hadoop is used by leading large scale operations including Amazon/A9 product search, Adobe, AOL, Baidu at 3000TB/week, Ebay 532 node cluster and 5.3PB, Facebook 1100-node cluster 12PB data, Hulu media service, IBM Blue Cloud Computing, Last.fm, LinkedIn, New York Times, Microsoft Powerset, Rackspace, Twitter, Yahoo with more than 40,000 nodes.ref Adobe, Powerset, Stumbleupon, Yahoo!, Twitter, and Facebook use HBase.ref Users of Cassandra for large data stores include Cisco WebEX, Digg, Facebook, Rackspace, Twitter.ref and ref

Business Apps

Document Management System

Software	Consider as Alternative to	Comments	Real-World Use
Alfresco	Mircrosoft Sharepoint, Opentext, Filenet, Documentum	Alfresco is CMIS 1.0 compliant.	Cisco Internet Business Solutions Group. Referenceref French Air Force document information system. Referenceref

Records Management (EDRM)

Software	Consider as Alternative to	Comments	Real-World Use
Alfresco	Mircrosoft Sharepoint, Documentum, Meridio, TRIM, Objective.	CMIS 1.0 and DoD 5015.02 certifications. Implements Sharepoint protocol to act as substitute backend.	Islington Council. Referenceref EADS 20,000 paper files. Referenceref

Desktop

E-Mail Labeling

Software	Consider as Alternative to	Comments	Real-World Use
Outlook plugin for email labeling from The National Archives	Boldon James	Outlook plugin is developed by The National Archives	The National Archives

Business Apps

E-mail Server

Software	Consider as Alternative to	Comments	Real-World Use
Zimbra Zarafa	Microsoft Exchange Server	Zimbra was acquired by VMWare. It offers email, calendar, global address lists and collaboration. It interoperates through open standards with a range of clients. Zarafa aims to replace Exchange and integrates with MS Outlook. Provides webmail service with Outlook look and feel. Supports ActiveSync devices and Blackberry Enterprise Server. Integrates with SugarCRM, Alfresco ECM and OpenERP. Supports mail search, hierarchical storage and archiving.	Zimbra is used by NTT, Purdue University, Comcast, US Defense Department, Bechtel and Raytheon. Referenceref Zarafa customers include health sector, local authorities, retail and manufacturing and education. Examples are Sixt, Brabantia, and Finnish municipality. Referencerefandref

Desktop

Encryption

Software	Consider as Alternative to	Comments	Real-World Use
GnuPG/GPG	Symantec / PGP Corporation products	There are several implementations of the OpenPGP standard RFC4880. GnuPG is an open source implementation and Windows interfaces are available.

Business Apps

Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP)

Software	Consider as Alternative to	Comments	Real-World Use
OpenERP Openbravo	SAP, Oracle, Microsoft Dynamics, PeopleSoft, SAGE, SAP	Open ERP is commercially developed and supported. Modular capabilities include sales, CRM, project management, stock management, accounting and human resources. Also provides vertical industry specific applications over OpenERP. OpenBravo is commercially developed and supported. Includes finance and accounting, sales, purchasing, inventory, procurement, manufacturing, projects, and business intelligence.	OpenERP customers include La Poste, Veolia, Danone, Oracle. Referenceref OpenBravo 3 times winner of Infoworld software awards. Referenceref Open bravo customers include BBVA, Coapte French healthcare, Basque City Hall. Referenceref

Web

Flash Media Player

Software	Consider as Alternative to	Comments	Real-World Use
JWFlashplayer Flowplayer	Adobe Flash Player	JWFlashplayer is compatible with media sources hosted by CDNs such as Amazon CloudFront and Akamai. JWFlashplayer also supports HTML5 playback, avoiding the requirement for Flash. This makes it compatible with non-Flash devices such as the iPhone and iPad.	JWFlashplayer users include Whitehouse, Thomson Reuters, Avis, AT&T, Harvard, Intel and Nasdaq. Referenceref

Business Apps

Human Resources (HR)

Software	Consider as Alternative to	Comments	Real-World Use
OrangeHRM	Oracle, SAP	OrangeHRM is a corporately developed HR management system that covers leaving, joining, time management, recruitment, performance, expenses, leave, reporting. There are delivery partners across the globe.	Customers include Landmark property management . Referenceref

Middleware

Identity and Access Management

Software	Consider as Alternative to	Comments	Real-World Use
Gluu Server WSO2 Identity Server Keycloak FreeIPA	Oracle Access Manager IBM Tivoli CA Siteminder Ping Federate NetIQ Identity Manager		Enable organizational single sign-on, web and API access management, and centralized authentication and authorization.

Other

Image & Photo Manipulation

Software	Consider as Alternative to	Comments	Real-World Use
GIMP	Adobe Photoshop	GIMP is a very capable image editor and for many use cases can be used instead of proprietary software. Installers for Windows are available.

App Servers

Java

Software	Consider as Alternative to	Comments	Real-World Use
Redhat JBoss Sun / Oracle Glassfish Apache Tomcat Apache Geronimo	IBM Websphere Oracle / BEA Weblogic	JBoss implements the Java EE 6 stack. Fully featured, it supports clustering, failover, load balancing and the range of EE components including JMS, JAAS, JSP and JDBC. Glassfish supports Java EE 6 specification and is known for scalability and speed. Supports clustering and load balancing. Apache Tomcat is a popular and proven servlet container implementing the Java Servlet and JSP specifications. It is known to be embedded in commercial products. Apache Geronimo is a full Java EE suite, currently implements Java EE 5 specification.	Testimonials for Glassfish include social networking sites, technology consultancies, software vendors, Peugeot Citroen, US health network, Suncorp insurance. Referenceref Siemens uses large scale physical mail processing system using JBOSS Application Server, processing 700,000 mail items per hour, with 99.8% availability.Reference http://red.ht/sjAsYb New York Stock Exchange Euronext uses JBOSS platform. Reference http://red.ht/ugXJX1 JBOSS Application Server use quoted by RedHat with the following: (i) Autotrader in the UK currently runs its high volume website and over 120 applications on JBoss Application platform, (ii) UFI / Learndirect runs online education courses and advice sessions for up to 2 million users using JBoss technology, (iii) Siemens have built a high volume, highly performant and highly available (99.8%) mail sorting application for up to 700,000 pieces of mail per hour. Reference http://red.ht/seYxXk

Network

Mail Transport

Software	Consider as Alternative to	Comments	Real-World Use
Sendmail Qmail	Microsoft Exchange	Sendmail has been powering email globally since the early 80s.

Desktop

Media Player

Software	Consider as Alternative to	Comments	Real-World Use
VLC, Openshot	Quicktime, Adobe products

Middleware

Message Bus

Software	Consider as Alternative to	Comments	Real-World Use
RabbitMQ JBOSS	IBM MQ BEA Weblogic	AMPQ is the establishing open standard for Message Queue technologies. RabbitMQ is a leading implementation. RabbitMQ can be supported by a VMWare company.	RabbitMQ is used by NASA for their cloud platform, and by the BBC for its newsfeeds. Referenceref

Network

Network Attached Storage

Software	Consider as Alternative to	Comments	Real-World Use
FreeNAS	NetAPP	Provides common storage and filer services through software, but without the high performance and expensive hardware. For small scale requirements. Services include CIFS, NFS, iSCSI, FTP.

Network Monitoring

Software	Consider as Alternative to	Comments	Real-World Use
Nagios, other OpenNMS Zabbix Hyperic HQ GroundWork ZenOSS	BMC, CA, Orion IBM Tivoli, HP OpenView	Nagios has heritage in many ISPs. Often used with the ganglia graphing system. OpenNMS is a scalable enterprise class network monitoring system. Integrates with service management Request Tracker. Hyperic acquired by VMware also supports monitoring of virtualized infrastructure. Zabbixcis a mature monitoring framework with agents for many operating systems and software stacks. ZenOSS is a leading network monitoring system, deployed to 35,000 customers across 35 countries	Nagios provides monitoring for the Wikipedia infrastructure. Referenceref Zabbix is used by large organisations such as DEAC IT services across four continents, leading Polish telecoms Netia monitoring 20,000 parameters, NTT Comms, large Brazilian energy company PetroBras. Referenceref ZenOSS is used by Rackspace, LinkedIn, VMWare, Motorola, Los Alamos, LexisNexis, Deutsche Bank, US Army, Broadcom, Telstra, CapGemini. Referenceref

Network Scanner

Software	Consider as Alternative to	Comments	Real-World Use
Wireshark

Network Services

Software	Consider as Alternative to	Comments	Real-World Use
Vyatta	Cisco Integrated Services Routers, Cisco ASA security appliances	Provides network services and applications based on open source core and software, including routing, VPN. Commercial support available. Considered cheaper than incumbents Similar interface to Juniper JUNOS and Cisco IOS, as well as graphical interface.	Customers include Toyota, CBS, CSC, EMC, Dell, Nokia, VMWare, Rackspace, FranceTelecom, US Homeland Security, US Justice Department. Referenceref

Desktop

Office Applications

Software	Consider as Alternative to	Comments	Real-World Use
Libre Office / OpenOffice	Microsoft Office	LibreOffice is community developed and has significant development partners and momentum. OpenOffice is governed by Oracle, which was originally developed by Sun as StarOffice. The interoperability gap between LibeOffice and Microsoft Office is continuously being narrowed.	OpenOffice has significant use in some sectors across the world including, Birmingham City, French National Assembly, City of Vienna, 50,000 Brazil Federal desktop. Referenceref IBM’s corporate Symphony office suite is based on OpenOffice.

PDF Creation

Software	Consider as Alternative to	Comments	Real-World Use
PDFCreator	Adobe Acrobat	Creation of PDFs from any Windows application that can print. Provides more control over PDF creation than alternative “print to file” solutions. Features include digital signing, PDF/A archives, merging PDFs and encryption. Runs on terminal servers.

Business Apps

Intranet, Portal, and Collaboration

Software	Consider as Alternative to	Comments	Real-World Use
Alfresco Liferay WordPress Drupal	Mircrosoft Sharepoint, OpenText Vignette, Oracle WebCenter	Alfresco founded by co-founder of Documentum and former COO of Business Objects. Liferay is a leading enterprise portal server. It provides functions and portlets for content management, blogs, instant messaging, SSO, message boards, calendar mail, polls, image gallery, tagging, knowledge base, asset publishing and publishing workflow. It is JSR168 compliant.	Alfresco - 30,000 public user capacity at AQA - Assessment and Qualification Alliance. Referenceref Alfresco - Islington Council. Referenceref Alfresco - University of Westminster Intranet. Referenceref Liferay clients include Cisco, T-Mobile, Societe Generale, Barclays,French MoD, Lufthansa, Vodafone, Allianz, . Referenceref

Other

Programming & IDE

Software	Consider as Alternative to	Comments	Real-World Use
Eclipse KDevelop Notepad++	Microsoft Visual Studio

Desktop

Project Managment

Software	Consider as Alternative to	Comments	Real-World Use
Project.net	Microsoft Project	Project.net is an an enterprise scale project management application	Project.net is listed in Gartner Magic Quadrant for IT Project and Portfolio Management Applciations. Referenceref Customers include FT Services, Genesys Conferencing, City of San Francisco, Trak, Penn State University. Referenceref

Databases

Relational Databases

Software	Consider as Alternative to	Comments	Real-World Use
MySQL	Microsoft SQL Server Oracle DB IBM DB2	General purpose, long established and proven. Component of established LAMP pattern stack, supporting many common patterns including Joomla, Wordpress, Drupal. Optimised for read speed. Historically not designed to be feature rich.	Some of the largest and user intensive online services use Mysql, including Google, Facebook, FLickr, Wikipedia, Nokia, Youtube.ref Other users providing studies and testimonials include NASA, UN FAO, US Navy, Whitehouse.gov, New Zealand Ministry of Justice, Ericsson, Cable and Wireless, Nokia.ref
PostgreSQL	Microsoft SQL Server Oracle DB IBM DB2	Long established and proven. Historically developed for feature completeness to compete with commercial databases. Features include streaming replication, triggers, table partitioning and stored procedures resembling Oracle’s PL/SQL. EnterpriseDB variant aims to replace Oracle database.	Large data oriented services use PostgreSQL including Yahoo!, MySpace, Sony Online, Skype, International Space Station. Unmodified PostgreSQL scaling to petabytes.ref 2011 UK Police Crime Map site uses postgresql database. At peak demand was 220,000 requests/second.

Operation System

Remote Desktop Access Clients

Software	Consider as Alternative to	Comments	Real-World Use
rdesktop RealVNC, TightVNC, UltraVNC VirtualBox	Citrix ICA	Rdesktop is a client for Microsoft’s RDP protocol. VNC servers and clients enable platform independent remote desktop use. Handshaking allows interoperability between different VNC implementations. Most clients will fall back to the common RDP protocol for accessing remote desktops virtual or physical.

Web

Reverse Proxy

Software	Consider as Alternative to	Comments	Real-World Use
Squid, Varnish	F5 BIG IP, McAfee Web Gateway, Zeus		Squid cache supports the global Wikipedia and Flickr sites. Referenceref

Business Apps

Search Engine

Software	Consider as Alternative to	Comments	Real-World Use
Lucene / Solr Xapian	Microsoft FAST Exalead Autonomy IDOL	Lucene/Solr is a functionally capable and scalable search engine. Can index PDF, HTML, Microsoft Word and ODF formats, amongst others. Lucene/Solr’s strength is in its performance and scalability. It also provides features normally only found in the most expensive search engines.	Lucene provides search capability for Wikipedia. Referenceref High traffic public websites that use Solr/Lucene include AOL, whitehouse.gov, AT&T, Ticketmaster, The Guardian, Netflix, news.com, dig, NASA PDS, eBuyer.com. Other users include Goldman Sachs, Disney, Apple, Cisco, NASA NEBULA, MTV. Referenceref

Operation System

Server

Software	Consider as Alternative to	Comments	Real-World Use
RedHat Enterprise Linux Canonical Ubuntu Server CentOs Linux Novell SUSE Linux	Microsoft Windows Server UNIX - Sun Solaris, IBM AIX, HP UX	General purpose Unix-like operating system with proven higher performance, availability and security record. Enterprise Linux distributions are tested more than cutting edge distributions aimed at developers or home use. CentOS is a rebuilt from RedHat enterprise versions of the source code but without Redhat trademarks, and usable without commercial support subscription costs.	London Stock Exchange has moved from a Microsoft .Netref based infrastructure to a Novell Linux based infrastructure to improve speed and stability.ref Linux powers the global Wikipedia site. CentOS is used by the Mexican Federal Power Commission.ref Netcraft Survey March 2011 shows top 5 most reliable web hosting providers run Linux.ref
FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD	Microsoft Windows Server UNIX - Sun Solaris, IBM AIX, HP UX	General purpose Unix-like operating system with proven performance, availability and security record. BSDs have a particular record in internet and network services, and underly many commercial network products. FreeBSD is considered stable and reliable and powers some of in internet’s busiest sites, including for a while Microsoft’s Hotmail.ref	Force10 routers and switches have an OS based on NetBSD.ref FreeBSD used in products from major companies including Apple, Blue Coat, Citrix, Ironport, Juniper. McAfee and NetApp.ref FreeBSD powers busy sites including Yahoo!ref

Middleware

Service Bus

Software	Consider as Alternative to	Comments	Real-World Use
WSO2 Carbon JBOSS	IBM, Oracle	Java OSGi	Leading Danish bank uses JBOSS ESB for mission critical applications. Reference http://red.ht/uZ6qUI

SOA

Software	Consider as Alternative to	Comments	Real-World Use
JBOSS	BEA Aqualogic IBM ESB, IBM EII		IBM reference: Camden Council used JBOSS created a single view of the citizen to reduce avoidable contact with the contact centre and improve the citizen experience. Reference http://red.ht/ueg4sz

Other

Statistical and Graphical Analysis

Software	Consider as Alternative to	Comments	Real-World Use
GNU R	S/S-plus, SAS, SPSS	GNU R is the leading and mature statistics and numerical computing system. It is now the established lead in academia and increasingly in industry, displacing commercial products.	Gnu R is becoming the defacto statistical programming environment, as evidenced by subject texts and its use in universities.

Network

Telephony VOIP

Software	Consider as Alternative to	Comments	Real-World Use
Asterisk	Cisco Unified Communications Manager	Asterisk is a mature software PBX, covering PSTN and VoIP services. Features include voicemail, conference calling, and automatic call distribution. Protocols supported include SIP, MGCP, H323. Asterisk is known to support commercial PBX products.	Customers of services based on Atserisk include US Army, Symbian Foundation, La Poste, University of Pennsylvania. Referenceref

Other

Vector Drawing

Software	Consider as Alternative to	Comments	Real-World Use
Inkscape	Adobe Illustrator

Operation System

Virtual Desktop Infrastructure

Software	Consider as Alternative to	Comments	Real-World Use
SPICE	Citrix	KVM with SPICE will become the strategic enterprise grade VDI offering from RedHat

Virtualization

Software	Consider as Alternative to	Comments	Real-World Use
Linux KVM Xen	VMWare vSphere / ESX / Server	KVM is rapidly gaining industry support as the leading alternative to the incumbent virtualization platforms. The Open virtualization Alliance which aims to promote KVM over VMWare has more than 160 members including iBM, Redhat, Intel, HP and BMC. Xen pioneered virtualization but is considered to overtaken by KVM based platforms. Citrix offers commercial support for Xen based virtualization.	IBM uses KVM as basis for it’s IaaS cloud platform.ref KVM leads other virtualization technologies in SPEC benchmarks.ref and ref
Virtualbox	VMWare Workstation, Parallels for desktop	Desktop virtualization, developed by Sun, now managed by Oracle. Supports features comparable to commercial software including device passthrough. Compatible with a Vmware (vmdk), Microsoft (vhd) and Open virtualization Format (OVF) virtual machine images. Light client only software is ideal for development and testing environments.	Oracle’s VDI enterprise product is based on Virtualbox.ref

Web

Web Analytics

Software	Consider as Alternative to	Comments	Real-World Use
Open Web Analytics (OWA) Piwik		OWA is a leading web analytics with support for bespoke sites and integration into WordPress, Drupaland MediaWiki. Offers campaign tracking and user in-page tracing. Piwik aims to clone Google Analytics.

App Development

Web Application Development

Software	Consider as Alternative to	Comments	Real-World Use
PHP, Zend Framework Ruby on Rails	Microsoft ASP.Net	Very common component of the LAMP pattern. (Linux Apache, MySQL, PHP) Zend Framework provides additional libraries and components for developers. Ruby on Rails is a very popular MVC web application framework	Real world uses by Cisco WebEx, NYSE Euronext, Fox Interactive Media, Fiat Group, IBM R&D Labs, Mcafee. Referenceref Ruby on Rails is used at the core of Gov.uk, UK's government portal.Referenceref

Desktop

Web Browser

Software	Consider as Alternative to	Comments	Real-World Use
Firefox, Chrome	Microsoft Internet Explorer	Firefox, which grew out of the Mozilla/Netscape efforts, became the leading browser noted for it’s standards compliance. Recently during 2011, Google’s Chrome browser was measured to be on track to become the leading browser. Historically, Internet Explorer has been considered by many not be as standards compliant as alternative browsers. It’s use of ActiveX as a mechanism has led some to consider it to have a greater attack surface. It is best practice for web developers to test against a range of browsers, with IE-only support considered bad practice.	Guardian reports that in Europe Firefox has overtaken Internet Explorer as most widely used browser. Referenceref 2011 IE has only 38.9% user share, trends show Chrome will become dominant browser soon.ref

Web

Web Server

Software	Consider as Alternative to	Comments	Real-World Use
Apache web server	Microsoft IIS	Apache is the web server behind the majority of internet websites, and has been dominant for 15 years.	Netcraft survey April 2011 shows 61% of internet websites hosted by Apache, compared to 18% by Microsoft IIS. Apache serves the global Wikipedia site. Referenceref
Lighttpd, nginx, Cherokee	Microsoft IIS	High performance alternatives to Apache. Designed for performance and scalability, not for a wide range of functionality. Nginx and Cherokee have built in media streaming capability to serve you-tube like capability.	Netcraft survey April 2011 shows 6.5% of the million most active sites served by nginx. Lighttpd serves static content for Wikipedia. Referenceref Lighttpd is used by Youtube, Sourceforge and torrent sites facing more than 1000 hits per second. Referenceref

Wiki

Software	Consider as Alternative to	Comments	Real-World Use
MediaWiki, tikiwiki		MediaWiki is the leading wiki engine.	MediaWiki is the software behind global scale WikiPedia. Referenceref

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