The recent wave of vertical integration among enterprise IT vendors appears headed for another crest: There are reports in The Wall Street Journal and elsewhere that Novell is preparing to split itself in two, selling its SUSE Linux operations to a strategic buyer and the balance of its properties to a private equity investor.

The most likely suitor for SUSE Linux appears to be VMware, which has been busily amassing middleware and application acquisitions such as Zimbra and SpringSource to layer on top of its virtualization stack. While the rumor that some tech titan might add an enterprise Linux distribution to its holdings is always within earshot, a VMware/SUSE pairing makes particular sense.

Despite its stack-building efforts, VMware has been without an operating system layer. But in recent months, VMware has cozied up to SUSE, with deals around bundling SUSE Linux with vSphere and building virtual appliances atop Novell’s Linux platform.

More than just adding new product pieces, a SUSE pickup would leave VMware better equipped to compete with and interoperate with its chief virtualization rivals. Novell’s SUSE virtualization solutions are based on Xen, which powers the products of Citrix, Amazon, Oracle and others; SUSE’s engineers are no strangers to the KVM and libvirt technologies that drive Red Hat’s virtualization products; and SUSE has maintained a considerable effort around interoperability with Microsoft’s Hyper-V products.

If Novell’s SUSE holdings include its open-source .NET implementation, Mono, that piece could provide an additional plank in VMware’s competitive platform.

While it’s easy to get carried away thinking about the potential synergies that major acquisitions might bring, for enterprise IT customers, the sort of vertical integration that Oracle and VMware have pursued must be greeted with some measure of concern. With consolidation comes the specter of reduced competition, and, potentially, loss of focus, as large organizations work to digest their acquisitions.

With regard to a potential VMware/SUSE matchup, the good news for enterprises is that the virtualization, operating system and middleware layers in play are matched with a certain amount of standardization, which is bolstered in places by solid open-source reference implementations. This standardization promises to preserve play among the layers, and make the specter of vertical integration less ominous.

This dynamic, whereby vertical integration exists alongside enough standardization to allow customers to choose among the layers, is reflected in the cover story of Monday’s eWEEK print issue. In it, Wayne Rash examines the ways in which enterprises are achieving unified communications success without swallowing entire unified product stacks from their UC providers.

As with the stack layers in play in a potential VMware/SUSE matchup, standardization and a demand for interoperability in the UC landscape work as a balance against vendor inclinations to differentiate themselves into silos. Of course, neither product space is an interoperability nirvana, but offerings from each class are delivering real results for customers, and that’s what’s most important.

Google announced Aug. 4 its intention to kill off its Wave project before the end of this year, citing poor user uptake. Out in the twitterverse (or at least the bit of it that I follow), the move has been met with broad approval, even rejoicing — which I don’t quite understand. If you don’t like Wave, don’t use it, right?

I saw promise in Wave — at least in the technology behind Wave, although I was never quite satisfied with the way that Google implemented it. From the first time I saw it, at a pre-release demo at Google’s San Francisco campus less than one year ago, Wave has looked like an in-development project, something on the road to being a product, but clearly not yet there.

For instance, one of the most frequently cited use cases for Wave was as a sort of e-mail/instant messaging replacement, which didn’t sound bad — I know that my e-mail is severely overloaded, and could use a next-gen upgrade. The trouble was that Google left us without any e-mail-to-Wave migration or integration path — if the thing was to supplant e-mail, just how was that supposed to work?

Another problem with Wave, specifically as an e-mail and IM replacement, is that where I can choose from many different e-mail servers, hosted by many different providers and in many different ways, there was only Google’s Wave. While the bits behind Wave are open source, Google might have attracted more Wave uptake if it had released a reference implementation of the Wave server for the community to take up, hack on and combine with other projects.

When I left that Wave demo a year ago, I was brimming with ideas for a Wavey future. I reached back into my notes to pull out this idea, for a Wave-powered forum software project:

Forums can be great for finding support — answers to all sorts of questions — but as they grow, they can be very difficult to digest and to participate in. If an answer has been found, it could be in the middle of a 7 page thread, with the pages before dealing with refining the question and so on, and the latter pages dealing with additional questions from people for whom the fix didn’t work.

The info in the forms has real value, great value, but it needs curation, needs pruning, it needs to start small, with a question, and grow as more information comes in, and as people suggest potential fixes, and so on, and then shrink as the answer and the question are both well defined, and maybe grow again as new wrinkles emerge, or as new people maybe ask a variation on that question, and then shrink, etc.

And then there’s the question of people asking questions that have been answered elsewhere, which is a sort of pollution of the forums, and other people simply telling them to search the forums, which is also forum pollution.

In our wavy example, it could be ok to have people ask their redundant questions, maybe in a special wave for that purpose, and bots sitting in the wave could reply suggesting (via search) waves where those questions maybe have been answered. The questions could time out (another bot could handle this) and you’d lose that pollution, and the guys telling people to search would have been replaced by the auto searches.

I can’t say that I’ve been a heavy–or even moderate–user of Wave, but we did try a few things with the service, like using Wave+embedding for a couple of event liveblogs. Also, the labs guys and I fired up a Wave to brainstorm about eWEEK’s 2011 edit calendar (see pic, above).

The open-source licensing and the pledge from Google to integrate some Wavy bits into its other apps mean that we haven’t necessarily seen the last of Wave, and I’m glad of that. I do wish, however, that Google had given this innovation more of an opportunity to succeed.

Over the past year or so, there’s been a lot of discussion in open source software circles around so-called open core software business models, in which the “core” of a product is freely available under an open source license, typically with a “community edition” label, while some amount of features are withheld from the free version and made available in one or more proprietary licensed “enterprise editions.”

The specific features that an open core vendor holds back depend on the product, but the typical definition is that if you’re an enterprise running the application in a production setting, you’ll want the enterprise edition.

The open core vendors say, more or less, “We believe in the value of open source, but this code doesn’t write itself, and we’re trying to make some money here. This open core deal is our game plan for paying our costs and making that money.”

The open core detractors say, more or less, “Part-way open source isn’t open source at all. You’re enticing customers with open source branding, only to pull a bait and switch with your lame crippleware.”

Now, I’m a pretty big fan of open source software — I can’t tell you off hand how the system I’m running scores on the Virtual Richard M. Stallman test (there doesn’t appear to be a vrms package available for Fedora 13), but with the exception of some codecs, hardware driver blobs, and Web-based applications, my home and work computers run open source software, from the core to the edge.

And not only am I a fan of the software itself, but I’m a fan of the open source model. I think it’s a great way to get things done. Openness means that a solution to the problem at hand could come from anywhere. For instance, I don’t know who’s responsible for writing the drivers that have turned the Linux-incompatible multifunction printer I bought four years ago (foolishly, without researching it first) into a Linux-compatible MFP, but since the Web site of my printer’s maker remains silent on Linux support, I’m pretty sure it wasn’t them.

It’s due in part to that open source fandom, and part to the enterprise products focus that comes with working for eWEEK so long that I have a tough time getting upset at the open core vendors. Enterprise software can be very cool, but very expensive. In nearly all cases, enterprise applications could be of use to many more organizations than can afford to buy them. The applications that have been popping up under open core licensing schemes have the promise of expanding access to worthwhile enterprise technologies to many more organizations.

Now, if the community version of an application doesn’t do everything that the enterprise edition does, does that make the community option “crippleware?” I’d say that depends on what you’re looking to do with the software.

Several months ago I reviewed an open core application, Talend Open Studio, which I’ve since used in a couple of small projects–for which, incidentally, my budget was zero. Call it crippleware if you like, but it worked for me.

There’s nothing strange about any open source software company presenting customers with the “free for enthusiasts, developers or small projects, but if you’re using it in production, you’re really going to want to get the paid version” line of marketing. Isn’t that exactly how Red Hat’s sales pitch goes?

I don’t mean to equate Red Hat with these open core vendors–the fact that Red Hat makes all of its works available under a free software license, thereby opening the door for clone challengers like CentOS and Oracle Unbreakable Linux, is a major differentiator, and a big reason why Red Hat looms so large in the industry.

The bigger reason why Red Hat looms large is that Red Hat’s software solves organizations’ problems, and this is the best way to judge the open core vendors. Is the community edition too crippled to be useful? Then I won’t use it, and I won’t recommend it. It’s not as though there’s a shortage of lousy, overpromise/underdeliver software out there.

As long as the software that an open core vendor labels as open source is indeed open source, I don’t have a problem with open core. My rule of thumb for whether something is open source goes something like this: “if I can’t fork your code into a new product and compete with you, it isn’t open.”

Particularly in product classes where there’s no inexpensive or open source option at all, an offering that combines an open core with an optional closed crust is certainly better than nothing. At best, this software can put enterprise technologies within reach for more organizations.

At worst, we can all ignore it.