Offering regional and national programs, CIO (and CSO) events bring together some of the most respected names and thought leaders in information technology and security. Presented by CIOs and other senior level executives, these invitation-only programs offer timely topics and strong networking. Learn More »
Social Responsibility's Strategic Benefits
December 15, 11:30 AM - 12:30 PM US/Eastern (GMT-5)
Join Ed Granger-Happ, CIO of Save the Children, for a discussion of how creating an organization that is socially responsible improves staffing, retention, leadership development and overall corporate health.
Working With and Communicating to Your Board of Directors
January 13, 2009, 4:00 PM - 5:00 PM US/Eastern (GMT-5)
CIO panelists who will share tips and experiences working with their boards: Twila Day of SYSCO; Jeff O'Hare, West Corp.; Marc West, formerly with H&R Block.
IT's Role in Growing Mid-Market Companies
January 14, 4:00 PM - 5:00 PM ET (GMT-5)
Mid-market Council members will share their companies' stories and challenges in driving or coping with growth. Panelists represent Veterinary Pet Insurance, Medicis Pharmaceutical, and Intrax Cultural Exchange.
Learn more about the CIO Executive Council »Apply today for a FREE subscription to CIO Magazine!
May 20, 2008 — Computerworld Australia — How can something given away for free end up being the world's largest industry of its type? Well, according to open source content management vendor Alfresco CEO John Powell the value of open source is not what it generates, but what it saves, and that's worth billions.
"Open source is now the world's largest software industry," Powell declared during his keynote address as the first Alfresco community conference in Sydney, Australia.
"You measure it in the savings people are making in licence fees," he said. "Licence fees don't add any value to the product and are purely a transfer of wealth from consumers to software vendors."
By that rationale, the open source software industry is worth $60 billion - not from sales but from what customers have saved by choosing an open source product over a proprietary one with hefty licence fees attached.
"Open source itself is powered by people and it is allowing software to be deployed in a way that hasn't been possible before, and what that is doing is commoditizing the industry," Powell said. "If the database industry is worth $10 billion, the open source database industry might be worth $1 billion and the nine billion left over stays with the customer to help make the product work."
Powell boldly remarked that open source is not just software, it's "the most profound change in the computer industry since its inception".
"In the last couple of years it has moved from being the province of geeky individuals to becoming mainstream," he said. "Sun bought MySQL, Yahoo bought Zimbra, and Citrix bought XenSource for $500 million - a company with less than $1 million in revenues showing open source is about more than the traditional revenues of proprietary software companies."
Powell also talked up the success of the Alfresco open source content management system, saying the product has been downloaded over a million times and is running on some 30,000 production servers.
"We now have over 500 enterprise customers and to acquire this customer base in the traditional way would have been virtually impossible," he said. "We've gained some of the largest enterprises in the world. Governments love alfresco because of the economic benefit. If you buy proprietary the economic benefit directly goes to the vendor because the only people that can change the binaries of the code is the vendor. With open source local companies can support the product which helps the local economy."
Locally, Alfresco claims to have chalked up 1500 installations of its community edition in addition to a number of paying enterprise edition customers it has acquired with Sydney-based partner Lateral Minds, including Mincom, Sensis, ANU, and Leighton Contractors.
Just the basics, please. Sometimes we all need a refresher or we need to make sure our team and our colleagues are all on the same page.
Over 25 tutorials on everything from business intelligence to virtualization.