Nobody ever got fired for choosing open source?

Last week, Wavemaker Software and BSG Alliance hosted a CIO panel titled, CIO survival guide for Web 2.0. The CIO panel included Jim Sutter, former CIO of Xerox, Lila Tretikov, CIO of SugarCRM, Max Rayner, CIO of TravelZoo, Steve Douty, President of BSG Applications and former CIO of Hotmail, Larry Singer, former CIO of the state of Georgia and Andrew Aitken, CEO of the Olliance Group.

Today, Matt Asay posted a great summary of the WaveMaker/BSG CIO panel on his CNet Open Road blog, under the title, Any CIO Not Using Open Source Should Be Fired. It used to be that the safe choice was going with the the big enterprise companies and their big ticket proprietary software. A killer combination of low upfront cost and speed of innovation in open source software is causing CIOs to feel like open source is becoming the safer bet.

I posted my own summary of the event on the WebGuild site under the much less flashy title of What CIOs Think About Web 2.0. The net of all this discussion is that CIOs are very open to the value that new technologies can bring in democratizing the development of web applications.

So far, the tools for web development have been primarily in the hands of expert programmers working in core IT. Web 2.0 offers the promise of bringing easier to use web development tools to the edge of the organization, enabling more innovation at the edge of the corporation.

To help make this happen, the CIO's job will be to provide core infrastructure that enables innovation at the edge while preventing unintended damage. WaveMaker's role in this market shift is to provide a development platform that enables visual assembly of web applications at the edge that comply with core IT standards for security, data and governance.