Marc West’s OSBC keynote

Marc is the CIO of H&R Block, a company whose use of open source I find fascinating. [His slides can be found here.] Marc indicated several times that much of what Block is doing would be impossible without open source/open standards. His closing line was that “Open source is a viable option for us,” but much of the rest of his presentation showed just how understated that sentence is.

Some highlights from his keynote:

• Newest technology is not always best, nor is it the most mature. The intersection of the best software through standards that wins.
• Some stats on H&R Block:

  1. H&R Block serves a market of 133 million consumers;

  2. 22 million consumers use Block’s digital and retail offerings

  3. Block has 13,000 retail locations, with 100,000 seasonal employees (tax professionals)…which are only needed during the peak of tax system (it’s like building up a slew of McDonalds franchisees overnight, then shutting them down again)

  4. Block makes half of its annual revenues in just 10 days
• Block therefore struggles with how to innovate “offline” when its business is online – if the system goes down during the peak season then the company loses tens of hundreds of millions of dollars.

To meet all these needs, H&R Block uses OpenLaszlo, Alfresco, Jive, Zimbra (email for these retail locations with full regulatory compliance at low cost), Red Hat, JBoss, MuleSource, MySQL, and other open source projects. Marc suggested that its offerings would be absolutely impossible without these open source projects – too expensive otherwise.

Open source gives Block “power,” declared Marc. Power to innovate. Power not available in the old world of proprietary software. That said, Marc did say he’s grateful that open source is “maturing,” by which he meant that open source is looking more corporate. This open source power, in his words, is stabilizing. That’s a good thing.