Today Sun has announced a new partnership program around Glassfish, which is their open source Java application server (the only one that Marc Fleury once said "has managed to mount serious competition to JBoss"). Funambol is one of the partners in the program.
I am very pleased about the announcement because Sun came and asked us to join them, which I found flattering (I know, I have a thing for people asking me, when they are a million times bigger than us ;-)
I believe Funambol on Glassfish (and maybe OpenSolaris) could be a killer offering for enterprises. Any enterprise I know needs mobile email for all their employees. It can't be limited to BlackBerries for the CEO and sales people. Mobility is key to increase productivity (and make your employees workaholic ;-)
With Glassfish and Funambol Community Edition (powered underneath by the Sun open source MySQL database), you have a free and open solution that you can plug into your Exchange, Domino or open source email server (much better...). You do not have to pay anything and you have an enormous community to support you.
And if you need support from Funambol, we'll send you to one of our partners. As you know, we are not making money on enterprise deployments. We do not upsell our community. It is free as in free beer, unless you host it for consumers.
Sun is making all the right moves in open source. They have a very smart CEO and Simon Phipps, Chief of Open Source, a phenomenal individual. Add to it Marten Mickos, one of the brightest minds in open source and you might have a multi-billion open source company. I am definitely cheering for them.
