Publicly Speaking

I’ve always been a fan a Dana Gardner. I remember dealing with him (and now I’m dating myself) all the way back to his days at InfoWorld and IDG News and always remember him to be quite insightful about the trends that are driving and shaping the industry.

We’ve had the opportunity to put a couple of our folks in front of Dana to talk about open source and its potential impact on the adoption of SOA. I think the podcast from back in December came out really well and is really worth a listen, but it’s one of Dana’a more recent entries that I found quite relevant to what IONA is all about.

Dana gathered a number of industry analysts – including Steve Garone, Tony Baer, Joe McKendrick and Jim Kobielus (in no particular order) – to talk about the Soul of SOA. The conversation, to my mind at least, naturally came around to what value does (or can) SOA bring to an organization. Each analyst has some pretty interesting views on the value of SOA and how you can measure things like ROI.

I don’t want to simply cut and paste quotes from Dana’s transcript of the conversation, because I believe they’re better, and more impactful, taken in context of the conversation. But after you spend some time with Dana and his cohorts, I’d welcome you to take a closer look at IONA and our distributed SOA infrastructure solutions including Artix and our open source offerings in the Celtix family. The kind of value these analysts are talking about is the kind of value IONA delivers to its customers every day.

There’s a fantastic article in this week’s issue of InformationWeek written by Charlie Babcock – somebody who seems to be able to cover nearly any high tech subject without skipping a beat. You just need to take a quick look at his bio page to see the diversity of what he reports on for the publication.

In “How To Tell The Open Source Winners From The Losers”, Charlie tackles the issue of open source from a business perspective and does a very good job of providing corporate users with a set of criteria they should evaluate to make sure an open source technology is right for them. He also looks at why some open source projects are so successful and why so many languish. It’s a great read and very insightful, and will likely open some eyes and change some perceptions about open source.

I’d also like to think that the next time Charlie or InformationWeek visits this subject, readers will see Celtix Enterprise (IONA’s open source ESB distribution) or the CXF project at Apache (the project on which Celtix Enterprise is based) on the list of potential winners in the battle for the hearts and minds of developers and users. Seeing that Celtix was just announced in December of ’06 and that CXF has only been in the Apache community since August of ’06, it’s really hard to see this as snub.

That being said, we’re starting to see a lot of interest in the project and in our distribution as more folks out there realize that the open source community, and the technologies that are being developed there, may be an extremely efficient and cost-effective way to begin their SOA deployments.

I get a lot of industry news across my desk on a daily and weekly basis. Some I read immediately, some I delete after looking at the headline and some I put aside for later when I have some time to really look at them. It’s usually the longer features that get the “put aside for later” treatment.

I just got around to looking at Eric Lai’s February 15 Computerworld article, “Has open-source lost its halo.” It’s an interesting article, but I have to say that I’m not a fan of the overly sensationalistic headline, which unfortunately helps to reinforce the flawed argument that there are “good” and “bad” companies involved in open source -- and that the "bad" companies are those that are involved in open source for some kind of commercial gain.

There are a lot of reasons that both companies and individuals get involved in the open source community. And the reasons, whatever they are, are really not as important as how folks behave as part of the community. If IBM, or Oracle, or Terracotta, or IONA want to be involved in the open source community and are willing to play by the rules of open source, fantastic. If involvement in the open source community creates competitive advantage, why is that a problem? And how is this any different than an open source contributor that builds a consulting business around that project? Is he or she an angel or a devil?