It’s a name you’ll have to try hard to read with a straight face, and it’s also one that shows that all the good names have been taken. The company’s now calling itself DevZuz, which combines Developer with Zuz, the Swahili term for innovation. And the company also claims that, through the sale of LogicBlaze to Iona, plus money left over from its string of open source product companies like Mergere (which provides a piece of application life cycle management), and some new money, the company has a war chest of $9 million to invest in its new direction.
Its new business, which is called the Community-oriented Real Time network (CoRE), is supposed to help customers manage their open source components, and to help alert partner companies to do bug fixes according to service level agreements that they may have with paid subscribers.
Winston Damarillo, head of DevZuz, said the new direction will require more of a consultative sale, in that the company was no longer selling products per se. Open source is at a different stage than when Simula labs started, he said, adding, Instead of pushing new open source technologies to Global 200 customers those customers are saying they need better support.
DevZuz is tracking roughly 17,000-odd open source components in its database, validating ownership, and has a partnership with Black Duck that provides information on applicable licensing. And for now, it has a support contract with IBM to channel bug notifications for WebSphere CE. In case you’re wondering, WebSphere CE is the old Gluecode open source Java appserver product that Gluecode, the predecessor of Simula, sold to IBM a couple years ago.
