CIO hotseat (OSBC)

I’m in the CIO Hotseat session at OSBC. I love this session. We came up with it two or three years ago and it’s always one of my favorite sessions, because it helps attendees (including me) get into the minds of CIOs.

This time we have Niel Armstrong (Activision), Eugene Ciurana (Leapfrog Enterprises, formerly Wal-Mart), and Oliver Marks (Sony Playstation). Interestingly (though not planned), each of the startups presenting (Cleversafe, MuleSource, and Radview) are highly relevant to the IT needs of these particular enterprises.

There were no Grand Secrets revealed, but here were some of the questions:

• What happens if you go out of business tomorrow (asked of Cleversafe, and again of MuleSource)? This was then followed up with, do you have a large development community behind your product?

  The implication is clear: vendor stability is critical (no surprise), but a vendor’s community can alleviate some of this concern. Moral of the story: get community.

• What patent protection do you offer?

  MuleSource took this one, and it was relatively easy to answer: we own all of the code. Every line. We have no more IP risk than any proprietary company does. We just choose not to horde our technology from our customers.

It’s not the purpose of this session to dig into the technology – at least, not in any deep way – so it’s not surprising that we didn’t have much of that. But it was interesting to me that a fundamental concern continues to be in vendor longevity, and not on open source staying power. That’s a good thing. It means open source has grown up. It’s not the big question mark anymore. The value the open source vendor provides is. Finally.