South African companies are not taking the rationale behind open standards seriously enough.
This is according to Dumisani Mtoba, a senior systems engineer at Sun Microsystems, and a speaker at the upcoming ITWeb Open Source, Open Enterprise 2005 Conference.
"A substantial number of South African organisations are using solutions that lock them into a single supplier`s products. The less a supplier adheres to open standards, the more difficult it is to implement an alternative solution for that organisation. As a result, companies end up using a vendor`s products purely on the basis of the fact that transitioning to an alternative would be too costly or disruptive to their operations," says Mtoba.
His presentation at the ITWeb event - on at The Forum in Bryanston on 15 March - will highlight the subtle but important differences between open source software and open standards.
"Delegates should attend this event to learn the value of implementing international best practices on standards adherence within their organisations," he says.
Philip Stander, MD of GlobeTOM, who will lead delegates through a case study at a large local telco, will give a practical example of Linux readiness for mission-critical environments.
Management representatives from Novell, Oracle, Microsoft and Intel will also explore issues around whether Linux is enterprise-ready during a face-to-face debate at the conference. Delegates will be given a change to pose their own questions in a Q&A session afterwards.
Willie Appel, international VP of executive directions at Meta Group, will deliver the keynote at the one-day event.
Others on the bill for the day are A Kayode, policy and strategy technologist at the Centre for e-Innovation for the Provincial Administration of the Western Cape; Neil Blakey-Milner, who holds development and advisory roles with the Bandwidth Barn, an ICT community incubator; and Alvin Paules, SAP Netweaver solutions manager at SAP Africa.
Fellow speakers include Gerrit van Gaalen, IT, Internet, IP and media law specialist at Buys Incorporated Attorneys; and James Thomas, business solutions architect at Novell South Africa.
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