The Information-Technology Promotion Agency of Japan held the IPA Forum 2008 in Tokyo, on October 28, 2008. OW2 CEO Cedric Thomas has been invited to give a talk in the open source session. The main theme of the session is "How OSS are utilized in businesses to improve competitiveness". ABout two hundred attendees are expected in this session, mainly management and senior engineers of software industry and IT management sections of various companies.

Cedric's presentation:~~* Open Source and enterprise competitiveness: the end-user case*~~

Abstract: "Open source software is generally described as a new development model, a new business model or a new licensing model and the point of view of the end-user is rarely taken into consideration. In this talk we will look at open source exclusively from the point of view of the end-user, be it a bank, a manufacturing company or a government agency.

In the first part of the talk, we provide a framework to explain the relationship between open source and competitiveness and to answer the question: ?Why choosing open source can make my company more competitive?? In the second part, we will draw from real-life end-user experience focusing on ten distinctive expected benefits to evaluate to which extend open source implementations meet their promise."

Full program is at http://www.ipa.go.jp/event/ipaforum2008/program/osc.html#osc1, in Japanese. Check the photo album.