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AT&T WIRELESS: CALL OSS A Wall Street all-star is now doing the 'vision thing' at AT&T Wireless. The real news is that the vision has Open Source written all over it. |
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 by Nancy Cohen January 8, 2004 |
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AT&T WIRELESS: CALL OSS A Wall Street all-star is now doing the 'vision thing' at AT&T Wireless. The real news is that the vision has Open Source written all over it. |
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by Nancy Cohen January 8, 2004 |
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a rule, any event where Open Source developers try to tell business types why Open Source is grand is considered as
pretty much a non-event. Attention is paid, though, when a Wall Street type who knows his Linux turns around and
tells developers what they still need to accomplish to get Linux accepted by the large corporations. One such attention-getter has been Robert Lefkowitz, battle-scarred Wall Street infrastructure developer, software architect, and, until July last year, director of Open Source strategy at Merrill Lynch. His career spans 20 years in IT in financial services. |
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An article about Lefkowitz in the Technology Review, a publication at MIT, Lefkowitz' alma mater, talked about his joining a group of select kernel hackers at an Ottawa Linux conference this past summer. "The MIT electrical engineering grad is one of the few people with both the technical chops and a detailed grasp of enterprise computing to make that kind of presentation, which is why he is fast becoming a prominent figure in the open source community." That uncommon aura about Lefkowitz did not escape the attention of honchos over at AT&T Wireless, who recently made him Director, Open Source. "We are early in the process of using Open Source so there aren't many specifics to share at this time," was the returned response from a media relations spokesperson at AT & T Wireless when Open asked when, why, and how AT&T Wireless decided to create this title in the first instance. Lefkowitz himself, however, has told Open about the company's plans to mine the business paybacks of Open Source: "We have a program to use more Open Source software to reduce costs and improve quality," he says. "Initially we are focusing on increasing our use of Linux as an operating environment, and using Nagios as a platform for enterprise system monitoring." |
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He says there are three components to the vision for Open Source software in that company's IT:
"We don't expect there will be large numbers of such products, but even a few key ones can provide significant advantage," he says. Such as? Lefkowitz and team are currently looking at development tools, middleware servers, databases, and content-management frameworks.
Lefkowitz buys into Eric Raymond's comment that given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow. "This is well supported by research on software inspection," he says. AT&T Wireless plans to adopt some of these development practices for internal software development.
While this third component sounds like automatic payback, Lefkowitz qualifies the move: "This is a longer-term objective, dependent on advancing the first two items in the agenda." In other words, whatever works. "We need to be using more Open Source software that we have some interest in enhancing. We also need to be comfortable using Open Source development practices to effectively participate in these communities." For 2004, he adds, "We plan to begin by encouraging and participating in development of Open Source applications that run on cell phones using wireless data connectivity." |
| If these 'vision" comments sound cautious, measured, and results-driven, they are from a corporate practitioner who's been in a toughened environment that requires proof of a business case for Open Source. In late 2002, for example, Lefkowitz joined executives from Red Hat and IBM for a panel discussion on the business case for Open Source at the law offices of Patterson, Belknap, Webb & Tyler LLP. Lefkowitz at that meeting referenced the Free Software Foundation's caveat that one should not confuse their premise of free speech with free beer in very different terms. Lefkowitz said, "We're not terribly interested, from a business point of view, in free as in speech...We like to think of it as 'free as in market.'" |
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In his interview with Technology Review, Lefkowitz spoke about instances where a company is looking at code for reasons related to testing porting and internationalizing in recognizably Wall Street terms. "If you want to port the code to 20 different platforms, then you need to acquire 20 different platforms to test it. Small developers can't afford to do that. But if they Open Source it, other people will do that work." He further noted that some Open Source projects like BSD and Apache are less concerned with encouraging the growth of free software and more with capturing what he referred to as a financial premium from innovation, One event where his bull-bear-and- penguin observations really caught notice was at last year's O'Reilly convention, where his PowerPoint presentation was illustrated with a rather compelling looking face-painted clown. This was for starters. As part of the disclaimer, the clown somberly peers back at its viewers against the words "The opinions expressed are unrelated to employers: I am just a bozo." Apparently, that self-effacement is not easily shared. "I just got the O'Reilly Conferences Letter and apparently one of 2003's most riveting speakers was Robert Lefkowitz from Merrill Lynch," wrote one blogger. For those wanting to listen to
what the new 'AT&T Lefkowitz' has to say, he will be speaking at this year's Open Source Business Conference in San
Francisco, a gathering where words like
"capitalize" and "monetize" will rule. |
Increasing the use of Open Source
components that can displace costlier commercial alternatives