Semantics and Euphemisms

George Carlin laments the softening of our language through excessive euphemisms in his final tome and notes as an example that many things which previously were “free” are now “complimentary” - allowing the requester to retain a bit of dignity, instead of sounding like a “mooch“. With all the talk about free open source, commercial open source, enterprise or business class open source, some basics could be lost in the semantics. However you name it, the core term open source software implies a way of building and licensing software. Sometimes the software rises from a team of unpaid developers, and other times it comes from corporations paying for the development.

(more…)

 

I talked to Chris Lynch yesterday from CIO Magazine about our 100% SaaS and Open Source strategy for sourcing IT solutions at Ingres. The article Chris posted is titled: The Benefits of the All-SaaS Shop: Money, Application Integration, and Did We Mention Money? Thanks to Chris the quotes are accurate and I appreciate the time to discuss our strategy. The “money” headline focuses quite a bit on the savings inherit in the SaaS model, and probably my only additional comment would be that what we really look for is cost effective, variable based pricing for our solutions rather than something cheap. Semantics yes, but a distinction. Thanks Chris - glad you are “on the bus”!

 

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: (more…)

 

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. (more…)