gartner

Mission critical open source and referenceability

A friend emailed me today to critique an earlier post on Gartner's apparent curious underhyping of open source and the subsequent discussion on Open Season. He made some good points, but I admit that I was surprised to see this:

You guys [MuleSource and Alfresco] talked a lot about who is buying your software, and how those customer names demonstrate that you're enterprise-ready. You are leaving out a serious piece of data and you're not reporting honestly until you include it. What are those customers doing with your software?

If [a large financial services company] is managing its trading systems with Mule, then...you're in the club and you ought to be saying so. If they're running the server that manages the employee complaint drop box in their Indian call center, then shut up. [Big vendors like Microsoft, Oracle, SAP, and IBM are] not the monster because we sell to [big companies] -- we're the monster because without [us], [these big companies] would stop working.

This is a good point, but it overlooks an obvious point: … Read more

Gartner underhypes open source

I'm not sure who Gartner talks to when it puts together its famous "Hype Cycle" reports, but I'm finding it hard to believe that it talks with enterprises. I was recently reading through its "Hype Cycle for Open-Source Software, 2007" report, and was astounded to find out that I've been tricked by paying customers into believing that they were, well, paying.

To wit, Gartner suggests that we're years away from enterprise adoption of the following open-source software categories:

Content management (5-10 years); Enterprise Service Bus (5-10 years); J2EE Application Servers (2-5 years); and IP Telephony (2-5 years).

Does "mainstream" mean that everyone has already bought it? Or does it mean that a wide cross-section of the market is adopting it, and not merely the proverbial "early adopters"?

If the latter, I heartily disagree with Gartner.… Read more

Gartner: What open source teaches us about collaboration

Gartner recently issued a useful research report entitled "What We Can Learn About Collaboration From Open-Source Communities." As the report starts off, "Successful open-source projects are characterized by a mix of high participation, engagement and motivation, along with low coordination costs." The report therefore combs through nine principles that lead to these properties and point to ways to extend these "open source" benefits beyond open source.

There are a range of interesting principles, including "Visible Current and Historic Work in Progress" and "Visible Individual Contribution History," but I particularly liked this one that deals with modularizing a problem:… Read more

Gartner: open source to cannibalize proprietary software

First, a little Radiohead to celebrate the occasion (from "Where I End and You Begin"):

I will eat you alive. There'll be no more lies.

I've been meaning to put together a presentation for OSBC that has this song blaring and statistics of open-source adoption flashing across the screen. Undoubtedly, new data from Gartner Group would provide excellent fodder for such a presentation.

What did Gartner say? That open source is and will continue eating proprietary software alive.… Read more

Open source is in your proprietary software, too

If you think you're avoiding open source by buying a "commercial" (read: proprietary) product, think again. Gartner predicts that >80% of all "commercial" products will include open-source software by 2010.

So, you can buy open source outright, or you can pretend it doesn't exist and buy it in the form of proprietary layers on top of open-source projects.

Either way, you're going to be using a heck of a lot of open-source software over the next 20 years. Everything you use will be a product of open source, in some way. Better get used to it.

Gartner writes:… Read more

Hand gestures on the horizon for Microsoft Virtual Earth

Microsoft showed off one of its famous videos at this morning's keynote speech at the Gartner IT Expo conference in San Francisco. Eric Horvitz, principal researcher at Microsoft Research rolled a clip of some gesture recognition technology that looked like something out of Minority Report.

One of the coolest uses for this was maneuvering around Microsoft Virtual Earth using your hands. Microsoft showed off two methods, the first using a projector that gleams down on a tabletop. Using your hands, you can pull the map around and zoom in and out by pinching, in a similar fashion to what … Read more