This year international senior keynote speakers include Paul Daugherty, Chief Technology Architect at Accenture and Scott Crenshaw, Vice President and General Manager, Cloud Business Unit at Red Hat. Daugherty spoke about Accenture’s work as a leading technology and systems integration outsourcing firm, with more than 6,000 people working in areas of open source development and deployment. In order to deliver high-performance capabilities, Accenture considers open source a key component. Accenture has continued to see a rise in open source adoption and expansion because of better quality, security, flexibility, and opportunity delivered by companies like Accenture and its partners (including Red Hat). These alliances work hard with their customers to create ever-improving innovative business solutions.Daugherty also discussed trends and shifts in the technology industry, including cloud computing, data, analytics, and architectures, and examined how today’s computing is service-centric instead of server-centric. These developments only heighten the importance of security and access control. He also touched on the usefulness and necessity of social media and platforms -- another method by which companies can listen and understand what customers like best, and need most.

Paul Daugherty also gave a keynote talk at the 2011 Red Hat Summit and JBossWorld.

Watch Paul Daugherty at the Red Hat Summit and JBossWorld.

Scott Crenshaw leads the Red Hat's Cloud Business Unit, responsible for Red Hat's strategy
and execution in the Cloud Computing and virtualization markets. In addition, he leads the
company's drive to integrate marketing across all business units. 

Prior to this position, Scott was the Vice President leading the company's Platform Business Unit,
during which the company's flagship RHEL business grew nearly 300%. Before joining Red Hat,
he was Chief Executive Officer of NTRU, a leading innovator in security technology whose investors
included Greylock, Lehman Brothers, Sony, and Texas Instruments. He held a number of executive
positions at enterprise software vendor Datawatch, including Vice President of Business Development
and Vice President of Product Development. Earlier, he held engineering roles at IBM and start-ups.
Scott is a Sloan Fellow at the MIT Sloan School of Management; he received an MBA from MIT and
a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science from North Carolina State University.

More information on our other speakers will follow soon.

Open Source continues to be relevant for organizations. In the last year we have seen several clients continue to work with Open Source at a large scale, and we have seen an increase in proposal work related to Open Source. The Open Source Conference 2010 indicated a tipping point in the market and was one of the largest Enterprise IT events in the Dutch market that was attended by almost 450 people.

Looking forward now, market analysts expect this trend to continue. Enterprises will increasingly deploy Open Source solutions in mission critical scenarios, at a service level that must be equal to or even better than closed source alternatives. Additionally, Open Source solutions are being adopted increasingly by conservative IT organizations, driven by risk mitigations and cost. Typically, organizations adopt the Open Source software stack bottom-up, that is they start on the system infrastructure level (eg. LINUX) and then move up the stack to application infrastructure (think applications servers) and to business applications.

Gartner just published the report “Hype Cycle for Open-Source Software, 2011” (august 9th, 2011). This report perfectly illustrates the expected adoption patterns of Open Source technologies by Enterprises. Looking forward to the next 2 years, Gartner expects high benefits from initiatives that enable mission critical workloads on LINUX and LINUX on IBM Z-series. Additionally benefits are expected in the next 2 years from initiatives that help organizations adopt Open Source DBMS, E-learning systems, messaging systems and Portals.

It is interesting to note that these areas are very strongly aligned with the Accenture Open Source Offerings. The Accenture Open Source substitution offering migrates proprietary solutions to Open Source solutions on the Operating System level (AIX/Solaris to LINUX), on the database level (eg. Oracle to MySQL/EnterpriseDB) and application server level (eg Websphere/Weblogic to JBOSS). For all solutions mission critical architectures are available to meet todays requirements in a very cost-effective manner. The Accenture Open Source solution stack offerings help clients to realize business applications using Open Source. Good examples in this area are Portal solutions, Document and content management solutions, E-learning solutions and E-commerce platforms.

The adoption of Open Source in the Dutch market has clearly started and we believe over time the usage of Open Source will become a “no brainer” for a number of areas. While many organizations might not do a stand-alone “Open Source” project, many large scale infrastructure transformation programs heavily use Open Source.  The usage of Open Source technologies can also be a good step towards Cloud Computing in a number of cases over a longer term.