Category: Open Source

Gartner Portals, Content, and Collaboration Conference: Day 3 Notes

Planning for Five Major Mutually Reinforcing Discontinuities

This discussion was about how the following five things affect vendors and the IT landscape:

  • SAAS
  • Global Class [Infrastructure]
  • Open Source
  • Web 2.0
  • Consumerization

SAAS

  • Vendors are scrambling to figure out how to fit into the new model.
  • They should be looking at it as a deployment and financing option but most aren’t.
  • Requires a different business relationship: Service levels, vendor is responsible for functionality (rather than customer)
  • Easy for customers to experiment with
  • Never-ending payments
  • Security, integration concerns
  • Big plays: Team collaboration, web conferencing, eLearning

Global Class [Infrastructure]

  • Extremely loosely-coupled
  • REST/POX (Plain Old XML)
  • Assumes that security threats are everywhere
  • Does not assume any particular platform, OS, or browser
  • At the current rate of scale-out, by 2010, 30% of the world’s servers will be in the Googleplex

Open Source

  • Not just about acquisition cost. Pay attention to TCO.
  • Impact of open source is understated. (The presenter meant it was understated in the market as a whole, but I’d say it was also understated by Gartner and at this conference, specifically. Maybe they were holding out for the Gartner Open Source conference later in the week?)
  • No throat to choke (I’d say this is true only for non-commercial open source projects).
  • Study shows that if open source databases were bought like licensed software, they’d have 40% of the relational database market
  • Bottom line: What is your risk profile? (I thought this was a little much).

The Web 2.0 and Consumerization discussions were essentially repeats of prior sessions. Digital Immigrants/Digital Natives, Directors vs. Leaders, “Get a MySpace for your place”, etc., etc.

On innovation

  • Innovation occurs in the hands of the users so let the users go
  • Failure breeds success
  • “Democratizing Innovation”, by Eric Von Hippel (I found a free PDF of his book at http://web.mit.edu/evhippel/www/democ.htm)

Why Your Intranet Should be More Like the Internet

“The workplace should work like a machine, but adapt like a marketplace.”

On “Knowledge Management”: The internet is already solving the problem of content classification/organization and expertise location. Why not use these tools internally?

According to a Gartner study, the most often deployed (> 50% of orgs) social software types are currently: Email, IM, Web Conferencing, and Team Workspace. Less often are: Wikis/Blogs, RSS, Expertise Location, Social Tags/Bookmarks. (It is interesting to note, however, that most of the conference presentations treated “Wikis/Blogs” as almost passe, saying, “Most of you are already experimenting with these technologies internally”)

Social software functionality can be grouped into technologies that help:

  • Create
  • Organize
  • Find
  • Interact

Gartner is preparing its Magic Quadrant for Social Software. No one’s in the Magic Quadrant yet. The categories of vendors will likely be:

  • Social Software Suites
  • Wiki-centric
  • Blog-centric
  • Discussion-centric
  • Specialists

Critical functionality for social software deployments in the enterprise:

  • Open (from a technical perspective and from a “who can use it” perspective) and easy-to-use
  • Expose connections through bookmarks/tags
  • Provide a bridge to email
  • Focus on people first. Identify evangelists. Appeal to self-interests
  • Provide initial structure but be flexible and don’t overdo it
  • Lead by example, reward participants with attention

MySQL use expanding within Sabre

MySQL Profits From Open Source. Linux is still the most famous open-source app, but database software using the same model is getting some play. MySQL is giving established software firms a run for their money. By Joanna Glasner. [Wired News]

From the article…

While open-source applications are most closely associated with poorly funded startups, MySQL’s customer list also includes large firms. Its current users include Yahoo, Google, Caterpillar, UPS and travel reservation processor Sabre Holdings, which began a significant shift to MySQL in July.

“While we can definitely show cost reductions in the millions of dollars, it’s not simply a matter of licensing costs,” said Alan Walker, vice president of Sabre Labs, the research-and-development arm of Sabre Holdings. Claiming to process 40 percent of the world’s travel reservations, Sabre Holdings began using MySQL on a discount-fare search feature, Walker said, and now plans to expand its use throughout the company.

Go, MySQL, go!

Open Source meets the Open Ocean

Open Source meets the Open Ocean. Even the lobster fishermen get it…

Seafaring the Smart Way. The mariner’s life has always been fraught with danger, especially in the treacherous North Atlantic. This will never change, but ‘smart buoys’ — which contain information about sea conditions — can buy a sailor valuable time. Michelle Delio reports from Portland, Maine. [Wired News]

Now, if only we could drop a couple of those buoys in Lake Lewisville, we’d be all set.

Open Source Moves Beyond Software

Open Source Moves Beyond Software. Open source is doing for mass innovation what the assembly line did for mass production. The era when collaboration replaces the corporation is coming. By Thomas Goetz from Wired magazine…The Internet is open source’s great enabler, the communications tool that makes massive decentralized projects possible. Intellectual property, on the other hand, is open source’s nemesis: a legal regime that has become so stifling and restrictive that thousands of free-thinking programmers, scientists, designers, engineers, and scholars are desperate to find new ways to create.[Wired News]

MySQL Makes Push Into the Enterprise

MySQL Makes Push Into the Enterprise. MySQL AB launched its first-ever users’ conference with a bang when it released source code for Version 5 of its open-source database…

The Uppsala, Sweden, company considers this major release to be its first serious push into the enterprise market, given the database’s new features, which include stored procedures, triggers, core SQL-99 features, foreign keys for MyISAM with cascading Delete, cursor support, multimaster replication and online backup, full sub-queries (Match, For all/Any/Some), OLAP functions for data warehousing, and a more scalable thread/connection manager.

[Technology News from eWEEK and Ziff Davis]