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SaaS, FaaS, HaaS - Simon Wardley on open source and the commoditisation of IT

October 10th, 2007 by Seb Chan

Mike Ellis tipped me to Simon Wardley who recently presented at the Future of Web Apps in London. Whilst that particular presentation isn’t up as a video, Wardley’s slightly older but very similar in content, presentation from OSCON 2007 is.

In a brilliant and witty presentation Wardley, much in the vein of Nick Carr, explores how IT services have moved from being a business advantage to a utility. He calls for an increasing focus on open source all they way “down the stack” (application layer, framework, hardware) as a way of freeing up resources and avoiding “reinventing the wheel” every time. The proposed “federated grid” in a “competitive utility market” as glimpsed in services like storage (Amazon’s S3), software-as-a-service (Salesforce) and even framework/platforms (Ning’s roll your own social networking service) arguably offers greater business advantage.

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Tags: Conceptual  Web 2.01 Comment

1 response so far ↓

  • 1 Simon Wardley Oct 26, 2007 at 11:38 pm

    Hi Seb,

    Thank you for the wonderful comment on my talk - I’m a nervous speaker so such kind comments are truly appreciated.

    I now have a video of the talk and I’ve posted it up on blip and put a link on my blog.

    http://swardley.blogspot.com/2007/10/fowa-video.html

    Anyway thank you - the ducks will be proud.

    Kindest

    Simon Wardley