Choice is Complete

Last year I switched from buying CD’s to downloading singles, therefore I have only occasionally acquired a complete “album” of music from one artist. Of the top 20 bands in my collection last year, more than three-quarters of these were cases where I downloaded one or two single tracks. The risk is that by doing this we might miss the summary effect of a complete work. This week we went to see the band “Sea Wolf” live and discovered that their debut album, “Leaves in the River”, is one of these cases. Like the new release by “Coldplay“, this one deserves a listen from start to finish.

A Second Look

At Ingres we are now taking a second look at our own digital face to our customers, the Ingres community, and Ingres Service Network. The capabilities we offer are all built utilizing open source tools and utilities. To render these sites as a more complete whole, we just signed up with Tricipher to provide a single sign-on solution for our web properties. Read the rest of this entry »

Last week I spoke at a web conference hosted by M.R. Rangaswami, publisher of SandHill.com, entitled “The Death of the Enterprise Software Buying Cycle.” The premise was that the SaaS business model is driving changes to the sales model and changing the role of the CIO in the buying cycle. For a replay of the discussion click here.

My input to the panel was focused on how the advent of SaaS solutions has changed the role of the CIO and what criteria we apply when evaluating SaaS vendors. In fact, many of these same points apply to the sales cycles for open source software vendors: Read the rest of this entry »

The past…

For years we in IT have been procuring and installing software and building onsite solutions with our internal resources. We did this based on a series of vendor compatibility matrices - pouring over specifications for operating systems, databases, application and web servers, along with other associated software infrastructure, and following these in exacting detail in order to end up with a supportable solution. We’ve kept all those bits up to date to stay on a certified code stack. Of course at the end of the day what mattered was that the business application or functional utility built on top of all that infrastructure ran reliably and was supported by the vendor.

A Better way…

I believe there are better ways to manage this complexity and an important avenue for this is to rely directly on vendors who have the proven ability to deliver a complete stack of software for a chosen solution. This is why I am so excited by our deployment of open source software “appliances” and “community bundles”, such as the Ingres Icebreaker appliance. Read the rest of this entry »

Career Is Over?

When talking about our 100% SaaS / Open Source strategy at Ingres, I am often asked, “what will that mean for your future as a CIO” or “how do you maintain control of technology at the company” using this model. The first thing I let them know is that CIO means “Career Is Over” – then I try to smile.

Enablement & Alignment vs. Control

First things first. Control is overrated. The role of the “evolved” CIO is to focus on strategy, innovation, and enablement rather than worrying only about operational efficiency. Sure we have policies, governance, and security measures, and we need to assure the company’s information assets are protected. But we count on people to follow the policies, and we put technology in place to assure no harm is done.

Then I hear – what about all these SaaS offerings – people can just sign up and you have no idea what they are doing. I think several CIO’s have stories about the tool, utility, or even application that suddenly appeared on the network. I certainly have my own. Read the rest of this entry »

Open Source adoption

Was just looking over a Gartner report, which finds that by 2010, 90% of SaaS providers will utilize “some” open source software in their offerings. But it is said that this use of open source is primarily limited to the vendor’s infrastructure and is not expected to offer them a “competitive advantage”.

Disruptive Technology Changes Everything

My first reaction was…huh? I believe these vendors absolutely will experience competitive advantages from their use of OSS infrastructure. The variable cost subscription model should allow SaaS players to grow or constrict their consumption of OSS at the same rate as their own customer subscriptions. Read the rest of this entry »

Who is going to the Software 2008 show next week April 29th and 30th in Las Vegas?

I am speaking there Tuesday April 29th at 3:45 p.m. under the following subject heading:

How Digital Killed the Analog Store: Open Source and SaaS Solutions Virtualize Global IT Delivery (also titled “how I stopped building data centers and learned to virtualize IT”). Yes I am fond of the movie “Dr. Strangelove” and that song by “The Buggles”. The presentation will focus on the twin disruptive forces of Open Source and SaaS solutions on the technology marketplace.

Our CEO and President, Roger Burkhardt, is on the keynote Software Trends panel Tuesday at 2:30 p.m., speaking about the future of technology.

Ingres will be there with a booth that emphasizes our latest solutions and services. Oh, get a “back stage pass” to join Ingres in our booth where we will be playing Rock Band and demoing Ingres on a PS3!

Come and see us at Software 2008 and make noise with Ingres!