Open source continues to gain mind share among companies looking to cut costs, says Willie Appel, international VP of executive directions at Meta Group.
Appel is the keynote speaker at the Open Enterprise 2005 conference being hosted by ITWeb at The Forum in Bryanston on 15 March.
The one-day event will address strategic and operational issues around implementing open standards and open source at local public and private sector organisations. It is aimed at local senior IT and business decision-makers looking to streamline their ICT systems so as to improve their reaction times to market changes.
"Users lured by the low-cost aspects of open source software should realise that lower-cost options often have higher management costs, eliminating any cost-saving benefit, " says Appel.
His presentation will cover, among other strategic issues, the development of guidelines and standards for the use of open source software - which may differ depending on the particular technology area concerned - at local companies.
Also on the bill at the event is a debate between Novell, Oracle, Microsoft and Intel around whether Linux is enterprise-ready. Delegates will be given an opportunity to pose questions during this debate.
Other speakers at the conference include A Kayode, technologist for policy and strategy at the Centre for e-Innovation for the Provincial Administration of the Western Cape. The centre`s core role is to supply and support the ICT infrastructure upon which all other ICT-related activities depend. Kayode will discuss the centre`s approach to open source and open standards.
"Open standards are crucial to guard against platform and vendor lock-in," says Kayode. However, he points out that the primary criteria for government selecting software solutions is the improvement of efficiency, effectiveness and economy of service delivery. Open source, he says, does have a role to play here.
Also presenting at the conference are Neil Blakey-Milner, who holds development and advisory roles with the Bandwidth Barn, an ICT community incubator; Alvin Paules, SAP Netweaver solutions manager at SAP Africa; and Dumisani Mtobo, senior systems engineer at Sun Microsystems. 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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