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Event
CTO Summit
The CTO Summit held as part of the OSIW in Bangalore focused
on bringing together luminaries associated with the Open Source community. Panel
discussions and presentations focusing around bringing innovation in the open
source space marked the day long summit reports Abhinav Singh
Klaus Knopper, creator of the Knoppix Live CD advised open source developers
to keep everything as simple as possible for users |
Rohit Kumar Rai, Manager-Platform Strategy, Microsoft India stated that
interoperability is important for customers |
The audience was engrossed in sessions at the Tata Auditorium at the Indian
Institute of Science, Bangalore. |
David Axmark, co-founder of MySQL talked about MySQL’s growth and
its acquisition by Sun Microsystems |
Brian Behlendorf, Co-Founder, Apache and CollabNet, Inc delivered the
keynote address at the CTO Summit |
LinuxAsia’s biggest event; Linux & Open Source has
adopted a new name—Open Source India Week 2008 (OSIW). The five-day, three-city
event came to Bangalore on 11-12th February 2008. Among the various conference
and expos, the OSIW was marked by the CTO Summit which was held at Taj Westend
Hotel in Bangalore with its theme being ‘Business and Economics of Open
Source’ and it brought together specialists, chief technology officers
and vendor representatives who sat together to discuss the growth of open source
and the innovations happening around it. The OSIW was organized by the Forum
for Open Source Innovation in India (FOSII). At the event it was stressed that
the open source community should popularize the concept and initiate innovative
projects around open source in order to involve more developers.
The event had multiple sponsors—naukri.com and Microsoft
were Diamond Sponsors. Red Hat was the Platinum sponsor and the Interoperability
portion was sponsored by Novell. Intel was a Silver sponsor, the Open Source
database sponsor was Ingres Corporation and the FOSS India Award Sponsor was
the National Resource Center For Free/Open Source Software. The event drew around
60-70 CTOs.
The event kicked off with the keynote address by Brian Behlendorf,
Co-Founder, Apache and CollabNet, Inc who mentioned that open source as a business
had initially struggled as a concept but was now becoming popular and Linux
had grown as a business. He said that any successful Open Source project requires
an ecosystem of supporting commercial efforts. He stressed on the role of the
Open Source community around any project and how it played an important role
in the success of said project. Giving an example, Behlendorf cited the Subversion
project, which began in 2000 with the participation of many active developers.
The project aimed at the creation of services around software engineering using
open source tools. Behlendorf also mentioned that open source software was being
increasingly used for offering Software as a Service (SaaS) by many companies
as it gave them greater flexibility in handling operations.
Among other conferences held at OSIW was an interesting panel
discussion that focused on ‘Open Source Powered Virtualization’ and
was represented by folks from Novell, Red Hat, Microsoft and Intel. Pallavi
Kathuria, Director-Server Business Group, Microsoft Corporation India Pvt Ltd
said, “There was increasing customer pressure towards interoperability
as the customers are demanding that both Linux and Windows work together without
business disruption in their IT set-up.” She added that Microsoft’s
agreement with Novell was a step in that direction. Kathuria further said that
cross platform virtualization should reduce complexities and virtualization
should be holistic including servers, infrastructure, applications and desktops.
Jagadish Babu, Asia Pacific Regional Engineering Manager, Intel Technology
India Pvt, pointed out that Intel has been trying to propagate virtualization.
For instance Intel had brought virtualization to the server environment. Babu
explained that Intel’s Virtualization Technology facilitated virtualization
at the processor level and that Intel was involved in the Xen open source project
and that Xen has been optimized for Intel’s Virtualization Technology.
Sandeep Menon, Country Head, Novell India, mentioned that
virtualization started off as an elite technology but it had started to see
some degree of commoditization. He said that virtualized technology had evolved
to manage multiple different distributions. Menon mentioned Novell’s joint
interoperability initiative with Microsoft, which had facilitated Windows Server
to run with native performance on SUSE Linux.
Rajeshwar Singh, Manager of Global Professional Services,
Red Hat India, said that as the workload on back-end systems was increasing
tremendously, virtualization can play an effective role in simplifying IT infrastructure
to free staff and reduce the cost of operation. He mentioned that with the launch
of RHEL 5 (Red Hat Enterprise Linux), the company had taken a data-centric approach.
Another panel discussion was on ‘What’s happening
in India’ with regard to the development of applications around Open Source
marked the CTO Summit. It was discussed how TCS had done a lot of work on developing
Indian language software using open source. During the discussion Vivek Bhatnagar,
Country Director and Global Alliances, Ingres Corporation said that although
the use of open source database management had been prevalent in non-mission
critical areas, it has now entered mission critical areas as well. He referred
to Ingres’ customer, Barclays Bank that is running its branch offices and
call center operations using the Ingres Database, which is based on open source.
It was pointed out during this panel discussion that by 2010 nearly 80% of commercial
software will be based on open source and that the media can play an effective
role in growing the entire ecosystem around open source. It was also pointed
out that government needed to formalize some steps to encourage open source.
Pallavi Kathuria, Director-Server Business Group, Microsoft Corporation
India said that customers want interoperability between Windows and Linux
in their IT set-ups |
Rajeshwar Singh, Manager of Global Professional Services, Red Hat India
said that virtualization can simplify IT infrastructure and reduce the
cost of operation |
Panelists debated on ‘Open Source Powered Virtualization’ |
Delegates visited Novell's stall which was part of the exhibition at IISc,
Bangalore |
Jagadish Babu, Asia Pacific Regional Engineering Manager, Intel Technology
India conveyed that Intel has introduced virtualization at server processor
level |
Curious onlookers at the Red Hat and Ingress stalls at the IISc, Bangalore
exhibition |
Another panel discussion focusing on the topic ‘Opportunity
in the Mobile Devices space’ also had interesting insights around it. Narendra
Bhandari, Director-Asia Pacific–DRD SSG, Intel Technology India Pvt. Ltd,
explained, that it is important to deliver uncompromising wireless Internet
to make the concept of mobile Internet popular and Internet experiences through
the mobile devices should not be compromised. During the panel discussion it
was discussed that for a mobile platform there were a mix of proprietary and
open source platforms and the objective of open source vendors should be to
build a complete stack of mobile platforms. It was noted during the discussion
that the issue of fragmentation of platforms around mobile devices was real.
It was summarized that the opportunity of open source around mobile devices
was tremendous and that open source developers needed to join hands together
in order to work on open source platforms in the mobile device space.
| OSIW’s ‘The TECHZONE’ expo held at
the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bangalore saw Klaus Knopper, creator
of Knoppix Live CD give a talk. He said that the reason for people sticking
with proprietary software was simply due to their being habituated to it.
Knopper added that although proprietary software was established on the
desktop it could not deliver even half of what open source 3D desktops could.
He stressed on the need for open source developers to keep everything as
simple as possible for users.
Rohit Kumar Rai, Manager-Platform Strategy, Microsoft
India, mentioned Microsoft’s alliance with Novell and how interoperability
between proprietary and open platforms is important for customers. He
also talked about Microsoft’s Shared Source initiative, which was
launched with an aim to share the source code, as some of its strategic
customers had demanded it. These included government and military customers
who wanted access to Microsoft’s source code for strategic purposes.
He also talked about the Windows NT kernel, which is available for academic
purposes, letting students view and tinker with the source code.
Additionally there were also various exhibition
stalls, which were set-up at the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore
by Novell, Microsoft, Ingres, Intel and Red Hat. There were also stalls
from Linux Learning Center and Tehelka. Novell’s stall showcased
SUSE Linux Enterprise 10 Service Pack, whereas the Microsoft stall displayed
Windows Server 2008 and its virtualization technology and how it was placed
along with Novell.
The Ingres stall highlighted its flagship open
source database ‘Ingres’. The Intel stall aimed at explaining
how an open source platform can help in developing software solutions.
The Red Hat stall had a bunch of ISVs including 3i Infotech Limited and
Virinchi Technologies Limited who showcased the solutions that they had
developed on Red Hat Linux.
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The CTO Summit was concluded with an address by David Axmark, co-founder of
MySQL, who in his speech traced MySQL’s growth till its acquisition by
Sun Microsystems for $1 billion. Axmark said that MySQL being an open source
database has got better all the time. He added that he was personally happy
with the acquisition of MySQL by Sun Microsystems as the latter was investing
heavily into open source and had many products developed that are based on open
source—OpenOffice, OpenSolaris and Java.
abhinav.singh@expressindia.com
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