Curtain Raiser

LinuxAsia 2007: Before the event

The fourth edition of LinuxAsia beckons. This year the focus is going to be on showcasing 20 globally recognised OSS projects. By Faiz Askari

The fourth edition of LinuxAsia 2007, India’s premier Open Source conference and expo will be held at India Habitat Centre, New Delhi from January 31 to February 2, 2007. This year’s hot topics are expected to be the Microsoft-Novell alliance and Oracle announcing its own Linux distro and offering support for the same at half the price that Red Hat charges. Also expected are announcements vis-a-vis some interesting Linux deployments in India.

The conference will discuss trends in Open Source technology and its impact upon the field of education. Leaders and experts of the open source community from India and abroad will attend the event. Over 1,200 delegates are expected at the conference this year. The event will provide a platform for promoting open source driven innovation so that India can showcase 20 globally recognised OSS projects. Talking about the Indian OSS market, industry pundits believe that Linux is the fastest growing OS in this market.

This year’s event will highlight two areas where Linux is popular—the embedded domain and high performance computing. In both these areas, industry is showing good adoption and interest in open source platforms. Introducing a focused schedule, the event has been broken into two tracks, Technology.innovation@Industry.in and CXO Summit.

The first one will focus on the technology track that aims to help implementers and developers. The CXO Summit is a one day customer track where all stakeholders will converge and chart the ‘open road’ ahead. It is expected that 600 technologists—technical managers, project leads and engineers—will attend the conference and 280 executives, decision makers from the large enterprise and SME sectors will be present. However, organisers are also expecting 200 policy makers—technocrats from government, PSU and the education sector. Apart from this, around 150 IT entrepreneurs will also attend this event.

LinuxAsia has brought together decision markers under a single roof for the past three years to help raise the bar when it comes to Linux and open source deployments in the country. Events such as LinuxAsia also emphasise how companies are deriving business benefits from Open Source software.

A patron from the event’s inception, Novell believes that such events provide an excellent platform for the growth of the Open Source market in India. Discussing the company’s from this year’s event, Sandeep Menon, director sales, Linux (west) Asia business, Novell says, “Novell is looking forward to LinuxAsia 2007 as a melting pot of interests from the India Linux Community. This is one occasion where we can meet developers, users, CXOs, evangelists, vendors and partners under one roof. We also see it as a great platform for conveying the latest and the best on SuSE Linux to a wide ranging audience at one place.”

Expressing his views about the upcoming event’s focus, Faisal Paul, country manager, HPC & Linux, HP India Sales Pvt Ltd says, “The focus of the event will primarily be to provide the business community key insights into the work of the Open Source developer communities. This forum also provides a much needed opportunity for Linux solution providers to showcase their solutions to potential customers.”

Paul further adds, “We are bound to witness interesting and innovative Linux solutions catering to companies across industry verticalsespecially to Government, Public Sector and High Performance Computing users.”

Menon predicts, “We believe that interoperability—purist notions have to give way for co-existence in customer scenarios—as well as significant technological trends such as virtualisation and enterprise security will be hot topics. As always, desktop Linux is likely to garner popular interest, especially given the huge strides it has made over the last year.”

Novell says that Linux is now ready for a much broader role within the enterprise, and that it not only meets customer needs but that it can also interoperate and co-exist with legacy technologies.

Paul adds, “The core message is that Linux is here to stay and is making continuous inroads into mainstream and mission-critical areas.”

Menon hopes that the Open Source community looks forward to this event as an occasion when the activist, the businessman and the technologist, all converge and add their diverse perspectives to a vibrant exchange of ideas and opinions. This is the only event that brings them together, as opposed to niche events that each group otherwise runs regularly.

Many in the industry say that LinuxAsia 2007 is a flagship event in terms of building a bridge between business and the developer community. It will provide the necessary showcase to demonstrate cutting edge Linux solutions for widening applications across industries.

Organisers are expecting the event to be a huge success as it was in preceding years. Software solution providers, organisations dealing in PCs and servers, IT Infrastructure solution providers, training service providers and other IT consultancy services are expected to participate in the event.

Novell will be highlighting its desktop product and capabilities such as application security and virtualisation on the server front as well as some of its newly designed services offerings around Linux. HP is planning to showcase some of its Linux offerings in this space, at the show. It will also actively participate in various technology and industry tracks at the event.

Spread over the three days, the conference will have customer sessions, technology sessions and networking events. As part of the paid conference it will draw a qualified and focused audience of decision makers from industry, government and education. The Expo will draw a large number of technologists, customers, and prospects having interest in Linux and open source solutions. The event will also focus on accelerating the adoption of Linux and Open Source software. This will be done by highlighting the advantages, sharing success stories, and discussing strategies on how CXOs can gain advantage from both worlds—Open Source and Proprietary. Like previous year, it will provide a platform where other organisations with OSS-related agendas can hold their own sub-events and network with the entire community.

Linux Asia 2007 is going to be a gathering that will make an impact on the Indian IT industry. This podium is going to convey a strong message for Linux.