Michael Tiemann, Vice President, Open Source Affairs, Red Hat, President, Open Source Initiative
Date & Time/Location: 3-26-09, 8:45am-9:45am, Salon A
In the face of mounting competitive pressures, executives have significantly reduced costs, improved efficiencies, and strengthened their companies' core business. Yet as John Hagel and John Seely Brown demonstrate in a book recently published by the Harvard University Press[1], firms continue to destroy value for shareholders and lose ground to competitors. They argue that business strategy depends not on core competencies or on frictionless transactions, but on productive friction and dynamic specialization, two features that define both the open source development model and Red Hat's own business practices. They also argue that Information Technology is the most critical and least reliable factor enabling firms to transition from 20th to 21st century competitive sustainability. They hold out hope that two new technologies, Service Oriented Architectures and Virtualization, will insulate firms from the disastrous effects of proprietary lock-in. I will evaluate those claims, particularly whether virtualization makes open source less relevant or all the more relevant to companies looking to establish and maintain a sustainable edge, drawing from customer experiences and Red Hat's own operational experiences and constraints.