The JBGeorge Tech Blog

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Last week I had the pleasure to head (back) to San Francisco to spend a few days with other open source believers at this year’s Open Source Business Conference.  I was there on behalf of Dell, the company I work for.

Here are some of my thoughts from the sessions / keynotes I sat in on this past week.

• Jim Whitehurst of Red Hat spoke at a keynote and highlighted how the innovation that will be built on IaaS is where the revolution will reside, and that the role vendors will play in this new open source friendly enterprise will focus more on support and services.
    
• There was a great open source panel with personnel from Yahoo, Warner Music, Blackduck, Acquia, and NorthBridge that talked through real use cases at Yahoo and Warner, plus feedback on their annual open source survey which talked through the rise of open source adoption in the enterprise, how quality and cost is driving that, and how many companies are viewing open source software as a starting point for projects now, rather than an alternative option.
    
• HP’s Biri Singh talked through their cloud strategy including their tiered strategy of Iaas + ecosystem + marketplace.  Turns out they’re using quite a bit of open source as they are building out their public cloud  with focus on web services at scale.
    
• A panel on “Amazon vs the world”, panelists from Canonical , Eucalyptus, and Citrix talked about open private cloud with the backdrop of Amazon’s dominance as a public cloud provider.  AWS API compatibility came up a lot, as well as the need to productize open source technologies more.  Some opportunities that were highlighted included the need to have vendors who know more than just software, but also the “wiring” of actual working systems, and the importance of staying open as we are just starting to see adoption by the enterprise.
    
• CloudScaling hosted a great session on why open cloud is winning – how internet companies drove cloud technologies and how they were built with open source, the differences between the “Enterprise IT cloud” and the “Next Gen IT cloud”, and how “no lock-in” + flexibility + scale are the key tenets of open cloud.
    

Obviously there was a lot more at the event that I was not able to get to – You can check out a few of the presentation slides at https://www.eiseverywhere.com/ehome/31601/50199/?& 

If you were out there last week, be sure to leave a comment with your thoughts.

I enjoyed the few days out there – looking forward to the next open source event – likely in San Fran again. 🙂

Until next time,

JBGeorge
@jbgeorge