'Open Source Will Become A National Industrial Policy Within A Decade'

Brian Prentice, Research Vice President, Gartner, spills the beans about the popular trends doing the rounds this year.

What is the current scenario related to open source in APAC as well as worldwide?

What is happening in most parts of the world is applicable to India as well. The adoption of open source is increasing and this is evident from its use in mission-critical applications. Its adoption also depends on the industry, and verticals such as merchant banking and the public sector are showing great interest in it.

One of the important factors for adoption of new technology is the knowledge of what vendors are doing in the market. By 2012, 80 percent of commercially sold applications will have open source in them. You don’t see the mention of open source in the strategy of an organisation. They were not building it into the architecture in the beginning but vendors are doing that now. A key area where open source can be used is the supply chain. CIOs need to have an open source policy within the organisation and for this, a management committee has to be instituted.

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What is the adoption graph of cloud computing looking like in APAC? What is the next level of cloud computing?

The next step for cloud computing is maturity, utilisation and success. The biggest customers for Amazon are programmers in multinational companies, who use the cloud for developing solutions for their business users. Many regard the cloud as ‘opportunistic’ and it cannot be denied that the cloud offers economies of scale.

The biggest hurdle right now is data sovereignty. Outside the US, people are concerned about data outside the cloud and managing this will be tricky. The most fascinating thing about the cloud is that it is offered as a service. It is a service provision engine. It is a case of SLAs v/s licencing agreements. The cloud of the future will be about integrated services across vendors and will go through a series of stages. Indian service providers are important and India will have 20 percent of the leading cloud aggregators by 2012.

What is your take on social networking at the enterprise level?

First, we need to see social software as a set of components, something like a collaboration pattern. The most successful pattern on the lines of shared knowledge in the enterprise is ‘wikis.’ A social networking model such as Facebook will not work because it is limited for internal use and employees don’t want to do be part of internal and external social networking platforms.

What external trends do you think will influence the business strategies of CIOs in 2010?

Pattern-based strategy is first. For instance, banks got signs about the recession early on and knew that something was going to go wrong. There should be technology in place to identify these patterns. The process should be – seek, model and adapt. CIOs must align strategy, cultural dynamics and products to get more ‘line of sight’. This is what will reflect and help the company move ahead in the changing world environment.

One thing that is going to gain prominence in the next ten years is open source as a national industrial policy.

Which main trends do you see gaining traction?

Mobility is going to be huge followed by cloud computing as the number of Indian providers increase. Consumerisation of IT, desktop virtualisation and BI continue to be top competitors in addition to information management solutions.