Open-Xchange received $9 million funding. "Open-Xchange combines e-mail, appointment, contact and task management with document management", which makes it a competitor of Ms Exchange and Sharepoint.

EngineYard, the Ruby applications hosting company, (on top of the $3.5M earlier this year).

Engine Yard is also sponsoring the development of Merb, a ruby web development framework, and rubinius, a ruby implementation.

Of course, Engine Yard also hosts Ruby on Rails applications

OpenBravo, producer of an ERP solution and a POS solution (from the acquisition of LibrePOS), announced it secured $12M in funding. Partners in this round include the GIMV, "the largest investment company in Belgium".

SugarCRM, maker of the namesake opensource CRM application (although lots of features are only available to paying customers), just got additional funding to boost international expansion. ITs CEO wants to lead it to an IPO within two years, although the acquisition spree of open source companies could change plans, as it did with Mysql.

Although SugarCRM seems to be growing healthily, with a cash flow positive quarter, it "has secured $14.5 million of a $20 million Series D round". Even with a plunge in Q4 2007, funding is still available for open source companies.

Matthew Aslett from The 451 Group notes that funding in Open Source companies plunged in the last quarter of 2007: 74% down on a year-to-year basis! This results in a full year decline of 40.7% compared to 2006, which reached a peak. It is suspected that investors are looking for exit strategies before investing. Which doesn't mean getting funding is impossible, as illustrated by Acquia.