Cyn.in the Mumbai based Enterprise 2.0 collaboration company (profiled on Webyantra in Sep’06 ) has launched its platforms in two new avataars. Cyn.in V2 is now being offered in an on premise model packaged as what the company is calling a “software appliance“. Additionally Cyn.in V2 community edition is being released under the GNU GPL v3 license- it is full featured, free to download, use, hack and customize. It may be recalled that Cyn.in V1 is a SAAS platform and the new version is based on feedback from its users asking for a variant that could be installed behind corporate firewalls.
So what exactly is a software appliance? According to the company, a software appliance is a software application combined with just enough operating system (JeOS) for it to run optimally on industry standard hardware (typically a server). Accordingly the cyn.in software appliance integrates the application, its software dependencies, the application and the database servers, and even a fine tuned, hardened Operating system, into an easy to use, portable, live updatatable software appliance. This can run on most industry leading appliance virtual machine platforms, such as VM Ware, XenSource, Microsoft VHD or can be directly installed on a standard bare metal server.
Key features for this appliance include
– Collaborative applications like Wikis, Blogs, File Repositories, Calendars etc
– Enterprise class Content Management capabilities with customizable workflows, version control etc
– XML & Open standards based APIs for extensibility and integration into existing systems
Cyn.in is pitching its product as a direct competitor to other enterprise level collaboration solutions like Microsoft Sharepoint, Atlassian Confluence, Jive Clearspace, Knowledge Tree, Social Text, Alfresco etc. Check out the product comparison chart below.
The appliance is available in two editions – Enterprise (costs $6250 annually) & Small business (costs 1950$ annually). The SAAS edition (priced at $8/user/month) continues as before. Check out the comparison chart between diff Cyn.in versions.
Cyn.in looks like an ambitious product. It certainly has some innovative things going for it, though I feel it might be a victim of featuritis.
FWIW, that feature comparison is comedy and impossible for them to keep correct or up to date.
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Sam,
I agree with you on the feature chart. I think thats the way they are always made… they all suffer from selective amnesia… often hiding more than they show
They cyn.in) just released twitter type microblogging tool.