Event

CXOSummit, Delhi

CXOSummit saw a number of CIOs seeking to understand the nitty-gritties of OSS and how they can benefit from the same, report Varun Aggarwal and Neeraj Gandhi.

The CXO Summit 2008 held in New Delhi this year, saw discussions around open source and its benefits. Speakers also tried to clarify any misconceptions that CIOs have about open source.

The keynote address by David Axmark, the co-founder of MySQL, Axmark, showed how a small organization of developers built one of the most popular software applications and how they built a robust business model over the freely available MySQL code.

He said, “MySQL has succeeded since it was successful in identifying the common problem that persisted. We built our software, which was easy to work with different databases and also worked over the Web. In addition our storage engine infrastructure was our USP.”

He mentioned that free databases get better all the time and that there are advantages of OSS in terms of database. These include:

• Good bug reports since bugs get fixed.
• Faster feedback
• Small features that really matter often get added
• It offers freedom and independence
• There is lot of testing done for all code
• Lots of ecosystem code get written by the community
• No software patents needed
• Security issues on OSS get verified easily

The next presenter was Satya Satyamoorthy, Principal Evangelist, APAC, JBoss who made a presentation on “Business Ready Open Source- simply the better choice for enterprises”.

Satyamoorthy said, “Open source is simply business ready. Companies out there are waiting to take their whole business on open source. It gives them the freedom to do whatever you want. Open Source is better software, offers better service and is better value.”

Elaborating on the point of ‘better software’, Satyamoorthy said “The open source community provides peer review. This helps in identifying the loopholes in the existing software like security concerns. Loopholes once identified the can be rectified easily.”

As a Better Service: OSS offers transparency. Thanks to the community, developers know where they are placed in terms of product development.

Better value: OSS is safe and secure, even big banks are using it, and it is scalable too.

“OSS is enterprise ready, is business agile and is ready for CIOs to bet on. Also for any closed sourced product that is available, there is an OSS also,” he added.

Satya Satyamoorthy, Principal Evangelist, APAC, JBoss, a division of Red Hat stressed that open source software is business ready and that CIOs can bet on it	David Axmark, Co-Founder, MySQL demonstrating how a successful business model can be built around open source giving MySQL as an example
Apoorva Shah, Novell India discussing how open source can be leveraged to harness the benefits of virtualization	C Umashankar, IAS, MD ELCOT talking about how the Tamil Nadu government has built an entire ecosystem around open source saying ‘no’ to proprietary software

Virtualization

In a panel discussion on virtualization, Pallavi Kathuria- Director, Server Business, Microsoft spoke on the cross platform virtualization solution from Microsoft and Novell. “It was in November when Microsoft collaborated with Novell. According to the tech agreement the companies will focus on four areas—virtualization, standards-based management, document format compatibility, directory and identity federation.”

She then went on to discuss the benefits of virtualization. She mentioned that CIOs have approached Microsoft saying that their hardware is not being used fully utilized and that increasing power costs have become a major concern. Quoting an Accenture study she added that 70% of the IT spend is utilized for managing present IT equipment and that only 30% is left for investing on new IT infrastructure. The ideal situation she said should be the other way round.

Satish Mohan from Red Hat added, “Before approaching virtualization, efficient planning needs to be done—what to virtualize, how to do it, what platform to be used, would this platform create an integrated ecosystem, storage, OS etc.”

Apoorva Shah from Novell India said, “Virtualization is not new and it has been there since 1985 when IBM did it on its mainframes. The questions that persist are how do we leverage OSS to bring the benefits of virtualization, how do we make virtualization as a part of the operating system to simplify IT.”

He added, “The whole idea around virtualization is how do we leverage IT infrastructure in a better way. Each organization today is facing this challenge of how to leverage the IT infrastructure and technology to its benefits.”

Virtualization brings logic to the physical server stack. It supports server consolidation, business continuity management, test and development and data center dynamism. One should think of a holistic and cohesive virtualization strategy from the desktop to data center.

OSS for mobile computing

Talking about mobile computing, Valsa Williams, Asia Strategy Manager for Linux and Open Source, Intel SSG said, “There are different projects that we have undertaken at Intel, some are low power, virtualization, parallelism, graphics wireless and Linux kernel program. We found that that Linux is the most viable solution for mobile Internet devices, and we are using open source approach to build an ecosystem for mobile devices. The project that revolves around this concept is Moblin.org”

Satyamoorthy further talked about a JBoss initiative called Mobiants for supporting mobile communication platform. It is based on open source software. Mobiants is essentially an open source implementation of JSLEE which in time would be hosted on a Java server.

Presenting a success story of Electronics Corporation of Tamil Nadu, Uma Shankar, IAS, MD, ELCOT said, “The entire ecosystem at ELCOT is built around OSS. A product that does not support Open Source is immediately discarded. It was in May 2006 when ELCOT adopted OSS. We have a mainframe powered by Suse Linux.”

He was rather critical of proprietary software and said that no commercial software is being used in the government sector in Tamil Nadu. ELCOT provides training to the employees to make them comfortable with the OSS interface. Proprietary software is a strict no at ELCOT.

Some of the open source software that has been developed for the government includes: Anywhere property registration software, Old age pension software with a public interface, office file management software, and a Web-based land recovery administration software, etc.

Umashankar also demonstrated a software for the disabled called Orca, which is based on Ubuntu. It is a free open source software that was made by ELCOT. Orca is a text to voice software developed for people who are visually impaired.

Sudev Barar of Nuchem shared his personal experience as to how OSS has enabled his company to break even and how OSS is a business enabler. “We used the OSS model and thin client architecture to set up our model that ensured complete freedom from expensive software and hardware cycles of upgrades,” he said.

He then explained how Nuchem has succeeded in cutting down the IT cost drastically by using OSS. For 20 users the company bought machines priced at Rs 20,000 each the cost equates to Rs. 4 lakh. They then took Rs 15,000 as ad hoc expenses per machine equating to Rs. 3 lakh making a total of Rs. 7 lakh. But when the company moved on to thin clients based on OSS, all the above requirements were met in just Rs 2 lakh. This meant huge savings for the company.

Sushant Dubey of Red Hat said, “The value that OSS can bring to the table can be gauged by the example of YouTube. It was started by two young men based on the open source platform and than Google bought it for $1.5 billion.”

OSS can help reduce the IT expenditure and address security challenges. It gives freedom since it is not locked by any vendor, and it provides a solution ecosystem. “OSS works because it is built on standards, it is innovation, provides quality, gives the choice to users and it is flexible,” he said.

Open source and e-governance

Open standards are a set of specifications, whereas open source refers to software. Using open standards ensure that the applications are interoperable. But this is not always the case with open software.

Govind Raj, CDAC said, “Open standards in e-governance would improve competition and we would then have multiple vendors supporting open standards. India has been a possessive consumer of OSS but not a contributor. India at the moment ranks 36 in terms of contribution.”

P K Misra, Consulting Architect, Novell India added, “Open source makes sense, it is well established and is capable of doing everything that proprietary software is capable of doing. It has matured and is ready for e-governance.”

Uma Shankar further added, “As regards e-governance we need to stress on a common HR application with security and a common application for budget and financial accounting.”

nivedan.prakash@expressindia.com
varun.aggarwal@expressindia.com