Douglas S. Tracy, the EVP for IT (North America) and Chief Technology Officer, Global IT, Rolls-Royce. Doug has over 25 years of management experience in the private and public sector. In this role, he is responsible for supporting the IT needs of 8,000 employees in Rolls-Royce North America, a $4B subsidiary of Rolls-Royce plc. In addition, he is responsible globally for defining the medium and long range IT strategies for Rolls-Royce plc, a $15B and 40,000 employee organization that develops power solutions and services. As CTO, Doug determines the technical architecture upon which the IT environment of the future will converge and authorizes new investments in information technology solutions.

Barry Klawans. Barry was founder and CTO at Jaspersoft™ and responsible for the technical vision and direction. He has over 20 years of experience architecting and developing enterprise applications. Prior to JasperSoft, Barry was the Systems Architect at Bidcom, one of the original engineers at Remedy, and an early engineer at Sybase®, where he spent five years of development effort on the core server and network access layer.

Zak Greant, Electronic Frontier Strategist. Zak owns and operates Foo Associates, a strategic consultancy that helps companies adapt to and thrive on the Internet. Their clients include eZ Systems AS and the Mozilla® Foundation. Zak is an active participant in many free and open source communities, offering advice to groups like the Free Software Foundation and the Open Source Initiative.

Mikko Puhakka, Consultant and Researcher. Mikko is an open source consultant and a researcher at Helsinki University of Technology. He founded Holtron Ventures in 1999 and was an early investor in MySQL®. He is a founder of Open Tuesday in Finland.

Stephen Walli, Consultant. Stephen was vice president of R&D and founder at Softway Systems before being acquired by Microsoft®. Currently he consults on software business strategy.

Now, however I have undertaken a challenge to take the understanding of the emerging opportunities for entrepreneurs and investors in the OSS space in China to the next level.

The report will be made freely available both in English and Chinese targeting June release.

The work is quite challenging so I am grateful for all comments and advice as to what are the issues that should be addressed.

I will be in San Francisco during OSBC March 25-26th and in Beijing the week starting April 7th to discuss these issues face to face with anyone interested in the topic and possibly willing to contribute to the work all contributions included in the released work will of course be credited to the originators.

To get a better idea of the work please see the current outline below.

You are welcome to comment on this blog or e-mail me directly mikko.puhakka (at) gmail.com

Structure of the report (draft 0.1)

1. Introduction

1.1 Global trends in Open Source software deployment
1.2 Trends in Open Source software deployment in China including market size
1.3 Global Open Source communities vs. Chinese Open Source communities
1.4 Key Open Source business models with brief case examples
1.5 Fit of the key Open Source business models to Chinese market

2.0 Key Areas of Opportunity (Each topic has three aspects):
1) Technical
2) Market and business
3) Relevance and interface to China national technology programs:
• MOST 863, Torch Program, other key projects and software needs of China, and possible open source based solutions):

2.1 OSS Based Business Enablers
(Significant existing value gardens where redistribution of value is favored):

Purpose of this section is to outline some of the key areas where commonly used enabling technologies would significantly increase effectiveness while implementing solutions for future information society. It would not be a comprehensive “to-do” list, but rather a business and academic view of these key areas.

2.1.1 Protocols, tools, frameworks and engines
• Protocols, which are commonly used in IP world or on top of Internet Protocol stack (like authentication protocols, potentially peer-to-peer protocols that could be used in China etc)
• Commonly used Engines like, map engine, e-commerce engine etc.
• Product development tools or frameworks that could potentially provide additional value to Chinese market (different coding logic and understanding nuances of Chinese language etc)

2.2.2 Platforms, gateways and horizontal products
• E.g. operating systems such as Linux or products such as OpenOffice and e-commerce platforms
• Gateway (or protocol transcoding) which are commonly used

2.3.3 Security (e.g. Authentication, Transactional security like in e-commerce solutions)
2.3.4 Training and consulting
• How to create mechanisms to train efficiently people / organizations to take most out of the OSS based innovations and development
• How to link global software development and project management best practices into reality (University, public and private sector)

2.2 Software Driven Consumer and Business Services (applications)
(Opportunity spaces where new value can be developed):

Purpose of this section is to outline some of the key business areas where new value can be developed and created, in China but also globally. Especially areas in mobile communications, web business models for consumers, governmental and business-to-business are of interest.

New IPR creation will have more emphasize on this section.

As an outcome, this section will highlight not necessary detailed applications or services but rather a view of potential development directions and opportunity spaces (like wellbeing, environmental measurement solutions, social networks etc…).

2.2.1 E-services 2.0 infrastructure for governmental services (e.g. online tax services or other services for citizens, in Finland for instance Ministry of Labors’ registry of citizens and employment services)
2.2.2 Consumer 2.0 services (e.g. Amazon’s e-commerce)
2.2.3 On-demand business services (e.g. Salesforce.com service delivered as SAAS)

3.0 Some Other Key Issues

- Educational aspects through University collaboration?
- Best practices for OSS based software development, quality assurance and testing
- Knowledge transfer?
- Joint venture Company model based on Finnish/international business template?
- Consulting and training opportunities for agile companies?
- Mobile communication and related OSS areas as a separate item!

4.0 Public Sector and its Role in China

- A ‘’mind map’’ explaining the relationships and roles of various public organizations

5.0 Conclusions and Recommendations

6.0 References