Open source, virtualisation and identity management will be areas to watch in 2009, according to Sun Microsystems ANZ vice president and managing director Duncan Bennet. Bennet, who posted the observations in a video to customers, says open source will be important in the economic slow down.
“If you cast your mind back to the dot com boom and subsequent slowdown, that’s when open source started to get its hold in the commercial and government markets. We see the same happening in 2009 and leading the way will be MySQL which is used by organisations such as Google and Facebook.”
He added that it is not just Sun that sees the advent of open source. “Gartner recently put out a report that claims by 2012, 90 per cent of organisations in the market place will be using open source.”
Bennet says the company will continue to innovate next year. “In the year ahead we see opportunity to use IT to save costs in this economic slowdown and use IT as a differentiation going forward. There is no denying that cost control will play a strong role in purchasing decisions in 2009. And Sun will continue to introduce new products to enable businesses to do more with less.”
He also mentioned some of Sun’s achievements, including its acquisition in January of MySQL, an open source database.
Join the CIO New Zealand group on LinkedIn. The group is open to CIOs, IT Directors, COOs, CTOs and senior IT managers.