Learning from OSCON 2006

Port 25 — Tue, 15 Aug 2006 23:51:03 GMT

Hank Jenssen and myself attended the OSCON on the 27th and 28th of July. We did not attend the tutorials or the Executive briefing but were there two days of the two and a half days the sessions were in progress. We also attended the keynotes on both

re: What does business readiness of software really mean?

BrianLy — Thu, 27 Jul 2006 17:16:42 GMT

Interesting and appropriate posting!

My view on 'business readiness' is that the developer or ISV has considered integration and deployment aspects of the software. It's all well and good setting up an instance of your software on your own development servers, but having a real customer do it can be eye opening.

The problem varies depending on the scale of the client as well. Smaller organisations are likely to be less risk averse and have the ability to jig some servers around, simply because a small group of people are involved and they are close to the business. Large organisations are different. Here you have people specialising in specific areas - directory services, database, middle-tier etc. You need to be able to get buy-in from management groups in all of the areas. In most cases you will also struggle with technical incompetence and internal politics as well.

All of this is fairly applicable to open source since the onus is going to be on the people implementing the solution. An IT may have to pull the solution together and in many cases the business will not be fully confident in their capability. This doubt results in second thoughts from management and lots of rumours with IT of how difficult open source is...