InfoWorld: Why do people need an open source infrastructure company like SpikeSource?

Polese: It fundamentally boils down to the challenges around interoperability. One of the biggest challenges that we find enterprises have and companies of all sizes [have when] they're using open source is keeping all of the moving parts working together on a continual basis. [These are] the "what-works-with-what" problems, which [are] compounded when you have dozens of components in a stack. This is very typical for an enterprise that's running open source applications. And those components are changing on an ongoing basis, whether it's updates, patches, new features, security vulnerabilities.

To give you some numbers, in 2005 alone there were 490 combinations of PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor) Apache and MySQL that were released. And then if you add 21 releases of OpenLDAP, you get over 10,000 combinations just for that one subset of the stack. And if you multiply that by Linux kernel versions and updates and distributions and then add patches on top of that, it becomes a very complex problem. There's a lot of overhead involved in managing open source infrastructure. It's the ongoing patch management, life cycle management that becomes the cost, frankly, and it adds risk [and] overhead to enterprises that are using open source.

InfoWorld: Could you discuss briefly the type of services you provide for open source users?

Polese: We provide, first of all, the stacks themselves for free for download from our site, so you can choose a variety of different components. We certify over 100 components across six operating systems, six language runtimes, and have tested very large combinations of those components. So you can download the stacks for free.