Thank You

I am now in recovery mode after a really exhilarating and exhausting week. I would like to thank everyone for attending this year's conference. I have been receiving great feedback about the speakers, presentations, and the contacts they were able to make. I would again like to thank all of the speakers for their time

Continue to check back on the site for more information about talk recaps. We will also be posting the presentations during the next week. We are experimenting with some video and audio and hope to podcast some of the content. Feel free to pass along this link to others who were unable to join us or if you have your own blog, please add this link to your site spread the wealth.

Again, if you are interested in helping plan next year's conference, contact me at twr@chariotsolutions.com.

Open Source in Corporate Environments - Gianugo Rabellino

Gianugo Rabellino clearly traveled the farthest (from Italy) to present at the Philly Emerging Technologies conference. And when he got here he was faced with the realization that his presentation topic – open source in corporate environments – was being covered in one way or another by at least two other presenters. Fortunately, Rabellino (like software is supposed to be) proved adaptable.

Rabellino’s presentation deck won’t be of much use because he thoroughly avoided text in favor of images to illustrate his points. But here’s a quick look at a couple of highlights.

First, like Dodds before him, Rabellino emphasized open source as something more than technology. But then looking at open source as a broader approach, Rabellino went further and separated the category into two subsets. One subset that uses open source for distribution, but not in the development process. (SugarCRM is an example) And one subset that is fully open source and built around an engaged technical community (like Apache Software Foundation). Both are valid approaches, but their differences need to be understood.

Second, Rabellino introduced a perspective on enterprise open source that centered on its empowerment benefits. Instead of facing vendor lock-in (buying a large software package and getting officially locked in to a vendor for years), companies can keep their options open with open source solutions.

I wish it were possible to translate Rabellino’s dynamic and conversational tone into text, but there is only so much that can be conveyed in a blog post. Maybe the images from the slide deck will help. Be sure to check back.

The Growth of Enterprise Adoption - Phillip Dodds

"By 2008, OSS solutions will directly compete with closed-source products in all software infrastructure markets." –Gartner

Phillip Dodds started with this quote from Gartner to illustrate just how far open source has come in the enterprise. Open source may have snuck into the enterprise environment, but it’s an established player now, and one that IT managers must recognize and fully understand.

Dodds made the point early on that open source is not just about software, but a wholly different development approach. Open source is a distributed, community-based model. There are many benefits, but also many challenges when implemented across a large organization.

Benefits include extensibility, less restrictive licensing, open standards and community support. Challenges (the issues that keep IT managers up at night) include governance (issues with licensing models), delivery mechanisms for software updates/new releases, management of intellectual property (what belongs to the business vs. the development community), and indemnification.

Above all else, moving toward an open source approach means exposing and managing interdependencies, which can be an uncomfortable position for some enterprises.

Dodds’ full presentation will be available on this site soon, but here are his “Guidelines for Success” in the meantime:

• Look beyond OSS code: understand licensing implications; monitor community statistics and health; evaluate community infrastructure
• Evaluate vendor offerings: review available distributions; understand support- subscriptions/SLAs; determine if open-source add-ons can help
• Manage OSS consumption: build a repository; integrate legal activities; enforce control over your component usage
• Understand and leverage the OSS process model: distributed development; modular; reusable components; incremental development based on rapid iterations

Rails 101 - Brian McCallister

Sessions run concurrently at the Philly Emerging Technologies conference, which means it’s impossible to cover everything at once. After the keynote, I sat in on Brian McCallister’s “Rails 101” session. There was an overflow audience and people literally stood in the back for lack of chairs. This tells me that not only is there a lot of interest in Ruby on Rails in general (pretty well established), there’s a lot of interest in Rails in Greater Philly – an often-overlooked center of technology.

Since this was a 101 course, there was a lot of putting Rails in the context of other languages. Many folks out of the audience had primarily Java experience, and Brian accounted for that with comparisons where possible and appropriate.

Some basic on Rails: It’s an application framework written wholly in Ruby. The people who wrote it did a lot of work in Java, which is evident in the design aspects, and some of Rails (Web aspects) also looks like php.

According to Brian, there are a few principles behind Rails:

• Write less code – the more code you have, the more opportunities for mistakes
• Convention over configuration – write code based on common conventions
• Opinionated – the writers of Rails assume that people are going to write code in an obvious way. You can do it differently, but Rails was developed assuming you won’t and makes the “obvious way” the default/easy way.

The full session was highly interactive, with detailed Q&A throughout. (Sample: Q- The infrastructure I work with does not include Ruby. Could I leverage JRuby? Yes! The recent release of JRuby almost entirely supports Rails.)

Want to know more? The presentation will be available on this site shortly. Please note, I am not a developer, but if you have specific technical questions, add a comment to this post or send an email to Chariot. We’ll hook you up with a Rails expert.

Welcome to the Conference, Day 1

The Philly Emerging Technologies Conference kicked off this morning with a presentation from John Carrow, former CIO of Unisys. As a technology leader who’s been in the business for decades, Carrow brought perspective on how the big issues facing enterprise IT workers have changed pretty drastically in the last few years. From cost containment, the focus has shifted (thankfully) to top-line growth and innovation. Why? For several reasons. One, the speed of business has increased in the IM/SMS generation. Two, technology has improved so the focus isn’t on issues like having enough storage or bandwidth. Three, business is now global, which means a greater competitive playing field.

Carrow also talked about key aspects underlying emerging enterprise technologies:

• The drive toward real-time infrastructure – an infrastructure that is adaptable within minutes and seconds rather than weeks and days
  
• Application modernization – open source is a market-changer, primarily in its innovative and distributed processes
• Collaboration and communications – communication is person-centric now, which creates easier information access from human resources

The day ahead looks promising. Stay tuned for more event coverage, including interviews with speakers and hopefully discussion with attendees.