San Francisco City launches its 311 Open , online government initiative. Includes the mayor of San Francisco, Tim O'reilly and Vivek Kundra (CIO to the Obama Administration).

In my opinion this video and the speakers provide a vision for where government is going online and back it up with some great concrete examples.

Good Economist article on the open source movement and the convergence with commercial software operating on "the cloud."

http://www.economist.com/business/displaystory.cfm?story_id=13743278Open-source software in the recession
Born free

May 28th 2009
From The Economist print edition
Open-source software firms are flourishing, but are also becoming less distinctive

MANY technology firms are floundering amid the recession. But many of the ones that offer services tied to open-source software—free programs written by volunteers who collaborate online—are boasting double-digit growth. Sales at Red Hat, the world’s biggest independent open-source firm with annual revenues of $653m, grew by 18% year-on-year in the first quarter. More and more firms, particularly in Europe, seem prepared to embrace open source (see chart). “Budgets are tight and we think that is good for open source,” said Jim Whitehurst, Red Hat’s boss, when announcing the results.

Indeed, open source is so widely accepted that traditional software firms are beginning to dabble in it, while some open-source firms are starting to sell proprietary add-ons to open-source programs instead of charging to provide support to firms using open-source software. If current trends hold, traditional software firms and their open-source rivals will soon be hard to tell apart. “A new pragmatism is rising,” says Matt Asay, an open-source advocate and an executive at Alfresco, which makes open-source software that helps firms manage digital content.

The “free and open-source software” movement, as it is officially called, has come a long way from its anti-establishment origins. Pioneers such as Richard Stallman did not want users to be locked into monolithic products, but to be able to change programs in whatever way they wanted, and to share their modifications.

For years, this software commons was no more than an obscure sideshow. But then the internet provided volunteer programmers with a way to co-operate cheaply. IBM and Oracle, two industry giants, threw their weight behind the Linux operating system, in part to weaken their rival Microsoft. After the dotcom bubble burst in 2001, many firms turned to Linux and other open-source software to save money.

Cost is once again the main reason why companies are turning to open source, says Jeffrey Hammond of Forrester Research, a consultancy. Its success is no longer limited to basic software, such as Linux or Apache, a program that powers web servers. Open-source firms are flourishing in databases (Ingres, for instance), business intelligence (JasperSoft), customer-relationship management and other business applications (SugarCRM, Alfresco). In addition, open-source firms have started to move into new markets without proprietary rivals. For instance, a company called Cloudera distributes a version of Hadoop, a program which helps firms process and analyse the unprecedented volumes of data generated by large websites.

But cost is not the only reason for open source’s growing popularity. Many firms now know that it offers more flexibility than proprietary programs, the licences for which often include restrictions on how they can be used, explains Matthew Aslett, of the 451 Group, a market-research firm. And companies no longer perceive free software as riskier, he adds. Getting sued for running programs that inadvertently violate somebody else’s intellectual property, for instance, has proven not to be as big an issue as once feared. Most open-source firms indemnify their customers against such lawsuits in any case.

All this has led many companies to develop a much more pragmatic approach to open-source software. In the late 1990s installing Linux was often something of a gesture of defiance against Microsoft’s domination of the software industry. Today decisions are more rational. The key question is whether the savings in licensing fees for proprietary products outweigh the additional costs in manpower to integrate and operate the free alternative. “Open-source software has become a means to an end,” says Forrester’s Mr Hammond. “Most firms don’t really care that it is libre, as in freedom, but that it is gratis, as in beer.”

Open-source firms themselves have also become increasingly pragmatic. Red Hat and Novell, its main rival, still make money by giving away Linux and charging for support: customers sign up for a subscription that gives them the right to all the updates and someone to call if something goes wrong. Yet recent years have seen a flowering of different business models. A popular approach is to sell proprietary extensions to an open-source core. “The support model does not scale well,” Mr Aslett explains. It does not generate the returns expected by venture capitalists, who invested more than $3 billion in 163 open-source firms between 1997 and 2008, according to a study by the 451 Group.

Conversely, having realised that they can economise on resources and garner good ideas, proprietary software firms are increasingly taking a liking to open-source programs, albeit mostly at the edges of their offerings. IBM has sprinkled open-source software throughout its product line and is rumoured to be interested in buying Red Hat. If Oracle’s acquisition of Sun Microsystems goes through, it will have an even bigger open-source portfolio including MySQL, a popular program for databases. Even Microsoft now carefully embraces what its managers once described as a “cancer”.

Cloud computing—the delivery of processing power over the internet from vast warehouses of shared machines—will further blur the lines between proprietary and open-source software. Most of the firms peddling this model, such as Amazon and Google, use open-source software, since having to pay licensing fees would make the business unprofitable. But their services also rely on code developed in-house, which is not given away free. Microsoft, meanwhile, is building a huge cloud using its own software. If computing becomes a service delivered over the internet, it will hardly matter how the underlying software is developed.

Does this mean that the quest for openness in software is obsolete? On the contrary. If they are not careful, companies and consumers could get locked into a cloud even more tightly than into a piece of software. This is because data residing in the cloud can be hard to move to another service. “If you have a gigabyte somewhere, it develops a certain inertia,” says Mike Olson, the boss of Cloudera, which recently found it could not switch from a poor storage service because there was no way to move the data.

This sort of problem has spawned an open-data movement. In March a group of technology firms led by IBM published an “Open Cloud Manifesto” that has since received the support of more than 150 companies and organisations. It is only a beginning, but perhaps this time around the industry will not have to go through a long proprietary period before rediscovering the virtues of openness.

The top ten strategic technologies for 2009 as identified by Gartner.
http://www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=777212

“Strategic technologies affect, run, grow and transform the business initiatives of an organization,” said David Cearley, vice president and distinguished analyst at Gartner. “Companies should look at these 10 opportunities and evaluate where these technologies can add value to their business services and solutions, as well as develop a process for detecting and evaluating the business value of new technologies as they enter the market.”

The top 10 strategic technologies for 2009 include:

Virtualization.  Much of the current buzz is focused on server virtualization, but virtualization in storage and client devices is also moving rapidly. Virtualization to eliminate duplicate copies of data on the real storage devices while maintaining the illusion to the accessing systems that the files are as originally stored (data deduplication) can significantly decrease the cost of storage devices and media to hold information. Hosted virtual images deliver a near-identical result to blade-based PCs. But, instead of the motherboard function being located in the data center as hardware, it is located there as a virtual machine bubble. However, despite ambitious deployment plans from many organizations, deployments of hosted virtual desktop capabilities will be adopted by fewer than 40 percent of target users by 2010.

Cloud Computing. Cloud computing is a style of computing that characterizes a model in which providers deliver a variety of IT-enabled capabilities to consumers. They key characteristics of cloud computing are 1) delivery of capabilities “as a service,” 2) delivery of services in a highly scalable and elastic fashion, 3) using Internet technologies and techniques to develop and deliver the services, and 4) designing for delivery to external customers. Although cost is a potential benefit for small companies, the biggest benefits are the built-in elasticity and scalability, which not only reduce barriers to entry, but also enable these companies to grow quickly. As certain IT functions are industrializing and becoming less customized, there are more possibilities for larger organizations to benefit from cloud computing.

Servers — Beyond Blades.  Servers are evolving beyond the blade server stage that exists today. This evolution will simplify the provisioning of capacity to meet growing needs. The organization tracks the various resource types, for example, memory, separately and replenishes only the type that is in short supply. This eliminates the need to pay for all three resource types to upgrade capacity. It also simplifies the inventory of systems, eliminating the need to track and purchase various sizes and configurations. The result will be higher utilization because of lessened “waste” of resources that are in the wrong configuration or that come along with the needed processors and memory in a fixed bundle.

Web-Oriented Architectures. The Internet is arguably the best example of an agile, interoperable and scalable service-oriented environment in existence. This level of flexibility is achieved because of key design principles inherent in the Internet/Web approach, as well as the emergence of Web-centric technologies and standards that promote these principles. The use of Web-centric models to build global-class solutions cannot address the full breadth of enterprise computing needs. However, Gartner expects that continued evolution of the Web-centric approach will enable its use in an ever-broadening set of enterprise solutions during the next five years.

EnterpriseMashups. Enterprises are now investigating taking mashups from cool Web hobby to enterprise-class systems to augment their models for delivering and managing applications. Through 2010, the enterprise mashup product environment will experience significant flux and consolidation, and application architects and IT leaders should investigate this growing space for the significant and transformational potential it may offer their enterprises.

Specialized Systems. Appliances have been used to accomplish IT purposes, but only with a few classes of function have appliances prevailed. Heterogeneous systems are an emerging trend in high-performance computing to address the requirements of the most demanding workloads, and this approach will eventually reach the general-purpose computing market. Heterogeneous systems are also specialized systems with the same single-purpose imitations of appliances, but the heterogeneous system is a server system into which the owner installs software to accomplish its function.

Social Software and Social Networking. Social software includes a broad range of technologies, such as social networking, social collaboration, social media and social validation. Organizations should consider adding a social dimension to a conventional Web site or application and should adopt a social platform sooner, rather than later, because the greatest risk lies in failure to engage and thereby, being left mute in a dialogue where your voice must be heard.

Unified Communications. During the next five years, the number of different communications vendors with which a typical organization works with will be reduced by at least 50 percent. This change is driven by increases in the capability of application servers and the general shift of communications applications to common off-the-shelf server and operating systems. As this occurs, formerly distinct markets, each with distinct vendors, converge, resulting in massive consolidation in the communications industry. Organizations must build careful, detailed plans for when each category of communications function is replaced or converged, coupling this step with the prior completion of appropriate administrative team convergence.

Business Intelligence. Business Intelligence (BI), the top technology priority in Gartner’s 2008 CIO survey, can have a direct positive impact on a company’s business performance, dramatically improving its ability to accomplish its mission by making smarter decisions at every level of the business from corporate strategy to operational processes. BI is particularly strategic because it is directed toward business managers and knowledge workers who make up the pool of thinkers and decision makers that are tasked with running, growing and transforming the business. Tools that let these users make faster, better and more-informed decisions are particularly valuable in a difficult business environment.

Green IT. Shifting to more efficient products and approaches can allow for more equipment to fit within an energy footprint, or to fit into a previously filled center. Regulations are multiplying and have the potential to seriously constrain companies in building data centers, as the effect of power grids, carbon emissions from increased use and other environmental impacts are under scrutiny. Organizations should consider regulations and have alternative plans for data center and capacity growth.

“A strategic technology may be an existing technology that has matured and/or become suitable for a wider range of uses,” said Carl Claunch, vice president and distinguished analyst at Gartner. “It may also be an emerging technology that offers an opportunity for strategic business advantage for early adopters or with potential for significant market disruption in the next five years. Companies should evaluate these technologies and adjust based on their industry need, unique business needs, technology adoption model and other factors.”