Polese: We don't do that ourselves, but we are partnered with the leading companies. We have, for example, a relationship with Black Duck. We created an integration between our asset management tool, called the Spike Asset Manager. Together with Black Duck, we integrated that with their licensed calculator that basically reports on what the open source licenses are that are related to those components. So it's a very natural marriage of the two companies' products and services.

InfoWorld: What's the installed base of SpikeSource?

Polese: We're not yet talking about the numbers of customers at this point. You can expect to see some announcements over the next several months about additional customers. A bank based in London was one of our first customers. Another customer is Business Objects, an ISV in this case, that's using SpikeSource to basically standardize on a common stack so their customer base has been moved to an open source environment. So I can't give you numbers right now of customers, but I can tell you that the pipeline is big, the demand is strong, and we're [closing] business every day.

InfoWorld: Are there any parallels between SpikeSource and your previous venture, Marimba?

Polese: Well I think [there is] one very, very strong parallel, and one of the things that attracted me to this company is this model of SaaS. And specifically, in the case of Marimba, it was a licensed model that we were using, so we were delivering our product in the form of software -- the free software product management environment that companies could run behind their firewall. In this case, we're actually delivering the updates over the Net as a service, but the common theme is making it much easier and cheaper to run complex software within the enterprise. So removing cost and complexity [from] software lifecycle management, that's definitely a common theme between the two companies.