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OSSPAC: Notes from the Keynotes II
Following on from yesterday’s Keynotes at the Open Source Singapore Pacific-Asia Conference (OSSPAC), both Sun and Oracle stepped up to the podium to talk about their efforts in the Open Source world with the message that the global economic crisis will be good for Open Source.
SUN Keynote: Open Source Software has Changed the World. The World just doesn’t know it yet.
Roman Tuma, Managing Director of Software at Sun Microsystems opened today’s session with an insightful look at the world of Open Source according to Sun. He was a last minute replacement for Kevin Norlin.
Sun has been supporting Open Source for many years now, and has contributed several leading technologies such as Glassfish, MySQL, OpenOffice which are widely used around the world. With the global economy in trouble, companies are starting to look at how to do more with less. CIO/CTOs are continuing to be squeezed to lower cost, pushing budgets into maintaining existing system, leaving no room for innovation.
Roman shared that Open Source can play a big part in reducing operating cost in non-mission critical systems. He does not expect CIOs to totally move out of propietary systems, but open-source solutions can be leveraged in less critical and more departmental systems.
Open source has matured to the point where people are now asking “How do I…” instead of “should I or should I not…” Although open source solutions are free, people should recognize that projects will not automatically move because of it, business plans are still needed, to justify the usage of open source solutions and to realize the ROI of adopting such solutions.
Oracle Keynote: How Linux & Open Source Virtualization power the Oracle Corporation
The last keynote of the conference was by Oracle’s Senior Director for Linux & Open Source Technolog Sales, Shane Owenby. His presentation explores the way Oracle’s Open Source strategy has resulted in an organisation that is itself a model case study to the possibilities of using Open Source within a large multinational corporation.
Underlying this strategy is Oracles’s Unbreakable Linux and Oracle VM. With them, Oracle drives 4 key divisions – Oracle IT, Oracle Development, Oracle on Demand and Oracle University. Through this, Shane shares a number of important take homes. He noted that the 10% of the non-linux servers accounts for 90% of the whole organisation’s support and maintenance cost.
The consolidation and standardization, using virtualization, has achieve an increase in profitability and growth to the company. Savings in power consumption was an key component to lowering operating costs.
Shane also reiterated Roman’s point that the global economy will drive organisation to adopt alternative solutions. Oracle and open source are well position for it.
In: News · Tagged with: conference, open source, osspac