One of the things that Gartner did very well at this conference is they blended heavy duty research and analysis with good examples to illustrate the trends.  They had a good balance of analysts presenting as well as panels that let open source gurus, customers and vendors discuss the issues.  And for the most part, the panels were not scripted affairs, they allowed the moderator to pursue interesting lines of discussion and take questions from the audience. 

A few of the presentations also used short case studies on companies to show how they have been successful with open source.  Ray Valdes cited a number of examples in his presentation such as:

• Sabre Holdings reduced their TCO by over 40% by …

Gartner, the largest and most influential of the IT analyst firms that provides advice and guidance to large corporate users (and vendors) of technology has gotten the open source religion.  Today they kicked off their first Open Source Summit, a 3 day conference in Orlando, which follows their well established application development and integration conference.  The open source section has over 200 attendees which is very respectable for a first time effort, especially since it's a essentially an "add-on."  Gartner has also ramped up the publication of research reports on open source adoption in IT with several recent publications and more than 30 new reports ones planned in the next year.  They are also planning two more stand-alone conferences in the next year.  Clearly, there's interest not only at Gartner but among Gartner's customers, who are typically among the more conservative IT shops. 

The Open …

Larry Augustin, founder and chairman of VA Software, has written a very clear editorial at sandhill.com on why applications are the next wave in Open Source adoption.  Augustin has a strong background in open source from his Linux days and is involved in several open source application companies.  Clearly with the amount of VC investment going to open source startups ($400 million in 50 startups over the last 18 months) there are others also placing bets in this area. 

While VCs have been known to overinvest in speculative areas (and that's an understatement!) you have to wonder what is driving the investment.  Augustin goes through a well thought out investment thesis to describe what he believes will separate the winners from the losers.  While Augustin may not be completely unbiased …

Stephen O'Grady, analyst and co-founder of RedMonk, is a guy who clearly understands both the existing IT industry and the impact of open source.  I've had the pleasure of getting to know Stephen over a few years and while I have not always agreed with all of his analysis, I always respect that he has done his homework to understand the real issues.  While many of the larger analyst firms in the industry have a reputation for staying at the 50,000 foot level, RedMonk dives down to a much deeper level. 

Stephen's blog, tecosystems, is a good place to get familiar with Stephen's thinking.  He's recently written about the changing landscape in the database industry as a result of open source technology.  His analysis is …

I'm typing this story from a latop that costs somewhere north of $1500.  And that's just for the hardware.  By the time you pay the Windows and Office tax, it's probably closer to $2,000.  (Ok, I know David Axmark is on me to use OpenOffice more and I probably should do that.)  To me, it's a minor inconvenience to have to pay for Microsoft Office just because everyone else uses it and it's one less hassle in terms of converting documents.  But it's not life or death for me.  But for millions of kids in Cambodia and other third world countries, you could well make the argument.

Nicholas Negroponte, the founding chairman of MIT's prestigious Media Lab, has spearheaded an effort to deliver a $100 laptop computer that could help drive education and economic development in third world countries.  Not surprisingly, the laptop foregoes expensive hardware and …

There are two essays by MySQL CEO Marten Mickos this week, both in the form of a question.  Marten has a curious way of provoking people which is to ask the hard questions and let people draw their own conclusions.  You may agree or disagree, but you'll end up thinking about the issues.  Anyways, not to sound like I'm sucking up, but I thought these were both interesting. 

• Always-On: Will they all go open source?
• European Business Forum: Is europe losing its edge?

We're coming into the home stretch in Florian Mueller's long standing campaign against software patents.  Florian, who has been a tireless campaigner with the www.nosoftwarepatents.com web site, helped ensure a defensive victory against software patents in Europe earlier this year.  Although there were a couple of times when even Florian was pessimistic, there is no doubt that his insight, efforts and perseverance helped bring things to a success.  Recently, Florian (and the nosoftwarepatents.com campaign) were recognized as one of the most influential individuals in the EV50 from …

Alfresco, one of the most impressive open source software companies to emerge this year, has now released their open source content management system. This is no simple web management system, but a full blown enterprise content management (ECM) system built on top of a very scalable open source stack that uses the Java Tomcat or JBoss server and MySQL. 

John Newton, the visionary behind Alfresco, was a co-founder of Documentum and he's assembled a team of content management gurus who have built an exceedingly easy-to-use and extensible system.  Having used a few proprietary content management systems in the past, I was blown away with how elegant Alfresco is. 

It will be interesting to see how Alfresco evolves. So far they appear to be doing everything right.  Already they are getting a tremendous number of downloads from corporate customers and integrators …

Matt Asay and the OSBC team put on a great conference in Boston the last two days.  I was skeptical that there would be enough people to warrant an east coast venue, but there were more than 400 people including a range of new emerging technology companies, investors, CIOs and IP lawyers.  (Unabashed lawyer joke: Remember, every healthy ecosystem has parasites!) 

There were three parallel tracks during most of the time (Emerging Trends, IT Executive, Intellectual Property) so it was sometimes tough chosing which sessions to attend.  There were also lots of impromptu meetings with various MySQL partners like Alfresco, SugarCRM, JasperSoft, Pentaho, Intel, JBoss, Zimbra, Zend and others and sometimes that got in the way of a session I really wanted to attend.  And it probably would have been rude to leave the panel I was moderating in order to check out the email session on the CIO track. 

Thanks to all …

Matt Asay and the OSBC team put on a great conference in Boston the last two days.  I was skeptical that there would be enough people to warrant an east coast venue, but there were more than 400 people including a range of new emerging technology companies, investors, CIOs and IP lawyers.  (Unabashed lawyer joke: Remember, every healthy ecosystem has parasites!) 

There were three parallel tracks during most of the time (Emerging Trends, IT Executive, Intellectual Property) so it was sometimes tough chosing which sessions to attend.  There were also lots of impromptu meetings with various MySQL partners like Alfresco, SugarCRM, JasperSoft, Pentaho, Intel, JBoss, Zimbra, Zend and others and sometimes that got in the way of a session I really wanted to attend.  And it probably would have been rude to leave the panel I was moderating in order to check out the email session on the CIO track. 

Thanks to all …