Report from OSBC in San Francisco (April 5-6 2005)
http://osbc.com
On this conference there were sessions and an exhibit.
The exhibit halls (2) had accommodated 40-50 companies. The most interesting from them:
- sugarCRM (sugarcrm.org) - the new hot CRM. They got a lot of traction since the last year I saw them on LinuxExpo. It's PHP/MySQL based, and the UI is coming really great -- it's very close to netsuite.com (ex: oraclesmallbusiness), which is top-of-the line web UI for such class of applications. The new feature is RSS feeds, but I still find the core functionality (customers, quotes, lead tracking, tasks, schedule, meetings, etc) to be the strongest one.
- BitTorrent (http://www.bittorrent.com/) -- these guys ware next to me demostrating their file-sharing technology.
- Bricolage (http://bricolage.cc) - it's an open source content management system written in Perl and Mason (as template system). It has all the features of enterprise-class CMS like web-based editing, versioning, customization, etc.
- netclime ;-). I was showing the Imagen, WatchCub and SiteKreator.
The sessions were on a quite "kinder-garden" level. The most boring session was the one with Larry Wall and the guys from Mozilla.org and Apache.org. The most discussed topic was how independent software developers can submit patches and how corporations can participate (read "influent") the development of these projects.
Andrew Morton (OSDL, Linux 2.6 maintainer) announced that the Xen integration in the mainstream kernel is scheduled for the next 2 months (so we don't have to apply it as patch), and iSCSI support is currently in process of selecting which stack will be embedded in kernel (there were 4 strong candidates).
The only interesting session came from Geoffrey Moore (Author of "Crossing the Chasm", "Inside the Tornado" - see our library). He was talking about Core and Context in each company/project. The Core is something hat contributes directly to sustainable differentiation leading to competitive advantage. The Context is everything else that fills in to the complete solution. For example in NetClime one of our cores is RDAM which help us provide services like SiteKreator which can be scalable but cost-effective. Context is SiteKreator which is a service we provide in very cost-effective manner because it's based on our Core technologies. When the time goes by many other companies are developing the same Core, so it become a Context (you can't differentiate yourself by it). The problem is that many people are still involved in maintenance of this Context and it won't provide any significant value to the company anymore. And there are many other companies who are maintain the same Context, without to bring any value to them either.
This is where the open source comes in the game. If this Context becomes open source, the companies can significantly reduce their cost of maintenance and focus more resource at what's Core for the company at this moment. Basically you have to invest in your Core and use/buy Context. Many examples of Context become an open source are available like Apache, MySQL, Linux. All of them are implementations of technologies available for 10+ years. All these technologies are not Core to anyone anymore.
You can find the full text transcript here and here
