Event

CXOSummit, Mumbai

With open source increasingly making inroads into day-to-day business applications, the need to adopt a more collaborative approach was focused upon. By Nivedan Prakash

The keynote address by Open Source luminary, Brian Behlendorf, Founder-Collabnet and Director-Mozilla Foundation was about ‘what being an open source business really means’, Behlendorf said that successful open source projects require an ecosystem of supporting commercial efforts and there is a need to bridge the layers between users and developers. He also focused on the kind of ecosystem that the community would want to build for open source. Behlendorf said, “There is a thin line between what one gives away and what one can sell and there is a new role for software businesses, wherein you need to be a representative of one’s customers to the developer community. Besides, today you need to look software as a subscription service.”

F C Kohli, Ex-Deputy Chairman, TCS and better known as the ‘Father of the Indian Software Industry’, talked about what open source could do for India and how IT could be utilized for bettering the growth prospects of any country. Kohli pointed out that we need to use IT in all spheres, be it government sector, defense, education and several other fields. Besides, we need to have software in Indian languages too. As far as open source is concerned, Kohli stated that open source increases collaboration and is definitely going to bring about a sea change in the engineering discipline. He advocated the conversion of small shops into convenient and personalized stores with the help of IT.

The other eminent speaker, Prof. D B Phatak, Chair Professor, Kanwal Rekhi School of IT, IIT Bombay, gave his point of view on why open source makes sense for the Indian firms. Phatak said, “Although open source’s advantages are well known, the business support for open source is not adequate and it has not been widely adopted by Indian firms. Today insurance companies have started using Linux and even e-governance has adopted open source. We need to derive a complete solution set that can be architected to make open source a viable option for the Indian firms.”

Prof. D B Phatak, Chair Professor, Kanwal Rekhi School of IT, IIT Bombay spoke on open source adaptability in the context of India Inc	F C Kohli, Ex-Deputy Chairman, TCS addressed the IT issues where the country was lacking
Brian Behlendorf, Founder - Collabnet and Director – Mozilla Foundation spoke about the open source ecosystem	(L to R) : Sandeep Menon, Head – Novell, Rajeshwar Singh, Manager – Global Professional Services, Red Hat, Radhesh Balakrishnan, Director – Platform Strategy, Microsoft India, addressed the issue of virtualization technology

The CXO Summit, an exclusive feature of the events at Mumbai, saw the top IT decision makers from the industry gather to provide a forum for users, creating a platform for the yet-to-try open source prospects to get a realistic picture of challenges and opportunities that open source presents. The panel for the Summit included Radhesh Balakrishnan, Director-Platform Strategy, Microsoft India, Rajeshwar Singh, Manager-Global Professional Services, Red Hat, and Sandeep Menon, Head-Novell. These speakers shared the best practices related to open source powered virtualization and how open source can empower virtualization.

Speaking on the occasion, Menon said that virtualization has been an elite technology and today para-virtualization is becoming free of cost and has replaced full virtualization. Virtualization is a proven IT technique that pools and shares resources to reduce costs and optimize utilization, even under changing demands. It can dramatically reduce purchase, provisioning and maintenance costs by consolidating business applications and services to run on a limited number of highly scalable and reliable enterprise-class servers. It allows you to freely migrate virtual machines as needed to make the most efficient use of compute resources, even as your requirements change from day to day.

Balakrishnan further commented that virtualization in an IT environment is essentially the isolation of one computing resource from the others. You need to think of virtualization as a complete toolset instead of just a way to reduce physical servers; and a holistic view will help maximize the benefits derived from this technology. Originally focused on consolidating resources in the data center, virtualization now has applications across the IT spectrum. An infrastructure built with well-managed virtualization will result in lower costs, higher service levels, and greater agility.

The OSIW had been put together by the Forum for Open Source Innovation in India (FOSII) and is supported through sponsorships by Microsoft, Novell, Red Hat, NRCFoss, Intel, Naukri.com and others. The FOSII is a body that aims to accelerate the adoption of open source by fostering innovation and development within the country. Set up by a group of individuals from the Linux/open source community, its membership comprises senior industry professionals, technology journalists, enthusiasts, media-persons and others from the open source community.

Speaking on Microsoft’s involvement with the OSIW, Balakrishnan, said, “We believe multiple platforms can and will continue to co-exist, and that customers will choose those options or combinations of options that suit their needs best. We believe that we should be able to deliver seamless experiences even in heterogeneous scenarios. So we engage with the open source community through industry collaboration as well as open source development, i.e. promoting interoperability with open source software through engagements organized by the Microsoft Open Source Software Lab and on the Microsoft Community Website, Port25. During OSIW we intend to share our progress on this journey and further work on enhancing our collaboration with the community in India.”

nivedan.prakash@expressindia.com