While Open Source software continues to redefine the landscape of the software industry and change the rules of the game, what will tomorrow's software ecosystem really look like? Who are the real winners and losers and why? What are tomorrow's innovations? What are the new applications that will take hold? From where will the biggest threats come from?

Join our panel of experts as we look at what lies ahead in 2008 and beyond. Our panel will review the results from our second annual "Future of Open Source" online poll taken prior to the opening of the conference. Learn what your fellow attendees are thinking and what their predictions for the future are.

Attend our session and you'll be able to have active participation with our online voting system. See why this session was rated "one of the best" by last year's attendees!

Download the Annual North Bridge Venture Partners/OSBC Future of Open Source Survey.

There is No Such Thing as an Open Source Business Model!
Larry Alston, VP and GM Open Source, IONA Technologies

Just as there is no such thing as an "internet business model" - even though the Internet changed everything - there is no such thing as an "open source business model." But open source does change everything...again. The old business model remains: fulfill a business need, and identify, attract and retain customers that have that need. What changes is how we do each of those steps.

Open source software is a great new tool to go to market, acquire new customers, and create a loyal and vibrant user community for products. Companies can either embrace this new tool, or risk being "Amazoned" as many companies were during the Internet boom. Hear how an existing integration and infrastructure company balances the use of open source with their traditional license business, to create new and differentiated offerings for customers and growth for the overall business.

The Future of the Operating System
Raven Zachary, Research Director, Open Source, The 451 Group (Moderator)
Dirk Hohndel, Chief Linux and Open Source Technologist, Intel
James Hughes, Sun Fellow & VP, Sun Microsystems
Roger Levy, SVP & GM of Open Platform Solutions, Novell
Jack Lo, Sr. Director of R&D, VMware

The operating system market and development models are undergoing rapid change. Virtualization, open source, and shorter development cycles are redefining what's possible and how organizations plan OS strategy. Where is the operating system going, and what does it mean for business?

Weather.com needs to be able to give end-users a consistent fast response time even during severe weather events like hurricanes when traffic can quadruple. However, the business requires a laser-like focus on profitability and this means weather.com must have a cost-effective infrastructure that provides scalability at the optimum point on the price/performance curve. Learn about the transformation that has made weather.com a cost-effective, highly scalable success.

Tailoring an Open Source Business Model for Your Business
Rob Bearden, Entrepreneur-in-Residence, Benchmark Capital

The phenomenon of Open Source has created a market so large and so massively disruptive that many believe it will define the next generation of enterprise computing, and perhaps the second wave of the Internet as well. With all that potential comes some tough challenges for entrepreneurs and executives who must try to create a successful business model around "free" software. Many are asking the same questions: Does building community automatically lead to commercial success? At what point should a company move from fostering adoption to driving monetization? What strategies exist to drive revenue, and at what cost?

Benchmark Capital has been a key player in the Open Source community since 1998, with early investments in Red Hat and MySQL, and more recently in Hyperic, Interface21, Zimbra and more. Entrepreneur-in-Residence Rob Bearden will share lessons learned by leading Open Source players, address important issues and trends underway, and discuss what's next for the industry.

What Open Source Can Learn from Microsoft and the Proprietary World
Stephen Walli, Consultant (Moderator)
Jean Barmash, Director of Services, Alfresco
Neelan Choksi, COO, SpringSource
Sam Ramji, Director, Open Source & Linux Strategy, Microsoft Corp.
Jim Zemlin, Executive Director, Linux Foundation

Open source software enjoys tremendous value from widespread, low cost distribution, community quality assurance, passionate, loyal users, and frictionless adoption that proprietary software often cannot match. However, these ideas are not necessarily new to open source. For example, software vendors like Microsoft have been nurturing their developer communities for a long time. Microsoft is particularly good at fostering their community of third party developers, users, developers, and partners. This panel will dissect how Microsoft and others foster community, build low-cost distribution, etc. and what open-source companies can learn from them.

Despite billions of dollars that have poured into enterprise software over the years, enterprise software remains cumbersome to administer, difficult for end-users to understand and use, expensive to deploy, and largely isolated from other systems. Compare this to the web, where startups and individual developers have built on open source software to drive massive improvements in scalability, ease of use, integration into disparate systems (through mashups and other means), and low cost.

The next phase of the web involves integrating the people who feed and pull data from the web. Called "social computing" or "Web 2.0," this transformation of the web is well underway as can be seen from Amazon.com, Digg, Facebook, Google, and other web services. When will the enterprise follow? In this session, industry experts will discuss ways that enterprises are leveraging open source to bring the social computing trend behind the firewall so that enterprises can connect their employees to make productivity gains and improve efficiency.

IT departments in large companies have evolved over the years to think of themselves as the "software factory" -- a large, complex, labor and capital intensive organization designed to manufacture and deliver complex industrial (enterprise) products. There are books and methodologies and consultants which construct analogies between the manufacturing of locomotive engines or automobiles and the development and deployment of enterprise software.

Advances in freely available software (commodity building blocks) which are simple to acquire and deploy have created for small startup companies the ability to build out sophisticated information technology applications quickly and at low cost. These practices are now available to the large corporate IT department. In this world view, IT is less like an automobile factory, and more like a deli. Customer orders can be filled quickly and cost effectively -- even if it involves a bit of customization.

At Asurion, we're building a software deli. This talk explains how it works.

It's no secret that the power of open source lies in the community. With vast numbers constantly exercising and improving the code, bugs are discovered and fixed more quickly, and development cycles are shortened. In addition, open source fosters a distributed innovation model, resulting in the rapid development and distribution of software modules and extensions of a breadth far beyond one that a centralized development roadmap would dictate.

Forward-thinking open source companies foster this type of distributed innovation by creating hosted incubators for project-related extensions and modules, or "Forges." Four notable companies, MuleSource, Hyperic, SpringSource and Novell are successfully leveraging their Forges as core components of their core value propositions. This session will feature the lessons learned from looking at their respective Forges and highlighting some particularly noteworthy projects therein.

This session will guide you through the legal decisions you need to make to release open source code, and the business decisions that drive them.  It is possible to release open source code while conserving significant IP benefits for your company -- join us to find out how.  Learn what legal due diligence will keep your company attractive to investors, while leveraging the benefits of open source.
 
--Identifying business goals
--Identifying development and user base
--Navigating the menu of licenses
--Planning your branding campaign (without killing your trademarks)
--Case Study: Re-energizing the shop-worn product
--Case Study: Open source is your sales force
--Case Study: Leveraging the non-software product

In particular, it will describe issues, and some resolutions involved with:
- Identifying solid, robust open source projects
- The importance of knowing from where and in what form open source has entered your organization
- Varying types and models of open source support
- Tracking vulnerabilities and critical defects within different open source projects
- IP litigation risks around open source software
- Identifying, cataloging, and ensuring compliance with the licenses associated with open source software in your organization
- Employees contributing to open source projects on either personal time, or company time

In this talk, we'll look at the history of open source adoption at nytimes.com as a basic example of the advantages of choosing open source software. By now, the competitive advantages of open source have been demonstrated by such success stories as Amazon, Yahoo, and Google, yet too many companies still find themselves "betting against the Internet" and stuck with proprietary closed-source solutions through fear or inertia. Don't worry, we've been there.

Through a few case studies, we'll look at several important topics for CIOs ready to make the jump:

Behind the Scenes with
Key Speakers

Click here to find out what's in store at March's event directly from key event speakers.

Putting Open Source to Work

The 5th Year of the Open Source Business Conference brings together senior business leaders, C-level technical strategists, lawyers and venture capitalists to collaborate on emerging business models, strategies and profitability for open source software use.

March 25-26, 2008
Palace Hotel
San Francisco, CA

Facebook Group:
Join your peers online and spark a discussion about topics you want to see covered in March.

Join at www.facebook.com and search for user group "Open Source."

Who Should Attend:
--IT end-users across vertical markets (Finance, Insurance, Healthcare, Government, Education, Telecommunications)
--Finance/Venture Capitalists
--Legal
--Open Source Vendor Community
--IT Analysts

Sponsorship Info?
Mike Dutton
Sponsorship Sales
801-358-4231

Speaking Info?
Call for Papers closed 11/30
Kaitlen Murphy
Content Manager
415-978-3251