Game changer?

Discovered today that Spikesource has closed a Series B round of financing for $24M. They’ve shifted their “open source stack certification and indeminification” focus to a new one: Business Ready Open Source Solutions (for small to midsize businesses).

Their new focus is one that I cheer, especially since upon leaving Lawson Software last December this was a need I saw crying to be filled and strongly considering pulling together the resources to fill it. With the stellar Spikesource board (including former Oracle Pres/COO, Ray Lane, and former Sun CTO, Bill Joy) and management team of veterans, this is a group that will fulfill that mission in spades.

They’ve basically taken the sweet-spot of applications (Drupal content management; SugarCRM; email, business intelligence and more) and have put ’em in a box selling, servicing and supporting them through a channel of resellers.

This is a big deal development since, as you probably know, open source software has been the bastard child in business due to a lack of a support infrastructure. Could be a game changer.