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05/22/2007, 10:30 AM - 11:20 AM
Moderator:
Quentin Hardy, Silicon Valley Bureau Chief, Forbes.
Speakers:
Terry Barbounis, Chief Technology Officer, The Christian Science Monitor.
Fabrizio Capobianco, CEO, Funambol.
Paul Doscher, President & CEO, JasperSoft.
S. Christopher Gladwin, President & CEO, Cleversafe.
Until recently, open source has mainly competed with proprietary software vendors, rapidly gaining market share and converting customers by offering "good enough" performance, but at a much lower cost. Examples include Red Hat versus Microsoft and Sun in operating systems; JBoss against BEA and IBM in application servers; and MySQL versus Oracle and Microsoft in databases. It was a zero sum gain. Open source took market share away from proprietary vendors, essentially "buying" customers with lower prices.
Today, increasingly we see new open source startups changing traditional business models. These brash new companies are:
» creating whole new markets
» offering customers innovations in performance and capabilities
» filling market voids by serving needs un-met by proprietary vendors
While some argue that open source is not a truly "disruptive innovation," what can't be ignored is that open source is beginning to realize greater potential than merely changing existing markets. Now open source is creating markets in storage/security, business applications and telecommunications. This panel will look at emerging open source technologies as truly disruptive innovations, serving a new set of users, delivering new dimensions of performance, and instigating new competitive battles.
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