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October 23, 2007
From Barcelona, Spain - Burton Group Catalyst Conference
Today I presented a session on Collaborating for Open Source Interoperability at the European Catalyst Conference in Barcelona, Spain. I was actually presenting this under the Open Solutions Alliance banner - as one of the few Europe-based OSA representatives.
The session went well, I got interesting questions - from the Burton analysts. But I was surprised at how little open source coverage (and receptivity) there was at the Burton conference overall. Burton has this reputation for dealing mostly with Identity Management and Security, and trying to expand into Application Platforms. I would have thought these to be domains with a lot of open source. But only a few of the senior IT managers in the room admitted using open source (maybe they wouldn't admit anything, for security reasons...). And the SAP guy who had presented before me probably didn't care to hear about open source, for he left at the beginning of my presentation (I still took several stabs at SAP).
Actually, to be fair, there was ONE aspect of the OSA story that got several folks curious about: the IP compliance part. And then a gentleman from Nokia asked for my business card and told me he will be in touch, he wants me to come to Finland to deliver the same presentation (I hear they have good vodka there!).
Well, on the positive side of things - it shows there is still work to do for marketing people in open source companies. Which is good for me from an employment perspective :-)
Posted by Yves de Montcheuil at October 23, 2007 1:30 PM
