Try this at home

AS CHIEF OPERATING OFFICER and executive vice president of technology publisher and events group O’Reilly & Associates, C.J. Rayhill has an interesting vantage point as a technology implementer working for a company that reviews and evaluates emerging technologies. She is a member of O’Reilly’s senior management team, responsible for strategic planning. InfoWorld CTO Chad Dickerson spoke with Rayhill about the technology she uses, including open source, which O’Reilly has championed in print.

O’Reilly is pretty much identified with open source, for better or worse. So I was really interested in how open-source solutions fit in at O’Reilly on a day-to-day basis.

You name it, we use it, and we probably have it, in some way, shape, or form, almost everything we write about. And that, for me, is one of the most interesting challenges heading up O’Reilly’s technology efforts. Usually when I worked in the financial services or the health care industries, you had the — I’ll call it the “opportunity” — to be fairly directive in telling people, “Everyone will use Windows on the desktop, and they’ll use this piece of software, or they’ll use that piece of software or this OS.” So you could create fairly homogeneous environments, and obviously the support that’s required for doing those kind of things is less onerous. Here, I will tell you, it is a very different story. We use everything you can possibly imagine because we write about it. We are extensive users of what we call LAMP technologies. We have a lot of Linux, Apache, MySQL, PERL, and Python type of applications that run here. We make use of open-source office productivity tools like StarOffice or OpenOffice. We use Jabber as an instant messaging capability within our company. SSA, Sendmail — you name it, we use it. Now on the desktop basis, about half of our desktops are laptops. We’re a fairly mobile workforce — I think we have a little over ten percent of our workforce that are telecommuters or virtual employees. So that presents an interesting challenge. Currently the breakdown of our desktops are: Windows about 75 percent of our desktops, Linux about 10 percent, and Mac about 15 percent, and growing, I might add.

I’m really interested in what you think about OS X’s future in the enterprise, both on the client side and the server side.

For the first time in a long time, I think it’s a very compelling story. For us specifically, we have a lot of folks who literally have two computers on their desks. One was some kind of [Unix] box, whether that’s a Linux box or a Solaris box or something running some Unix variant, and another was a Windows box for possibly just doing desktop productivity things or interacting with the rest of the company in certain things that required that environment. And what we’re finding especially — and it seems to be starting with our really heavy technical folks — is a movement towards the Mac OS X desktop, where their desktop productivity tools and things that they want to use are available within that environment. But under the covers, of course, it’s just another [Unix] operating system. So instead of having two computers to deal with, they’re all getting their iBooks and [Power]Books, and going towards one computer system. I will share with you that we’re currently in talks with Apple to possibly do a corporate switching program.

What other technologies are you watching, as a general trend or for use within O’Reilly?

XML certainly is a big one for us and [so are] its applications in business and Web services. We definitely think that the network is the computer now. You just look at an environment like the Internet and the vast amount of information available to you out there, and instead of writing spidering types of programs or things that are fairly brittle, to go out and assimilate information together, we really think that the next big frontier is in the Web services area. Wireless is something we keep on top of a lot; that seems to be changing fairly consistently. We are extensive users of wireless technology ourselves.

What’s your biggest technology management challenge?

I, as well as I’m sure any other [IT executives] who are still employed, are facing the challenge of how to respond to what the business needs to grow and to prosper, and not spend a lot of money. That’s an interesting challenge and one in which I personally look to leverage a lot more in the open-source arena, and that kind of thing, as ways in which I can meet that challenge.