Open Source gets Microsoft’s support

MICROSOFT Malaysia reaffirmed its commitment to transforming businesses and working with the Open Source community in Malaysia by participating and sponsoring the Malaysia Open Source Conference 2014.

Held over two days , the event saw more than 300 participants taking part in various workshops, discussions and keynotes.

The event is an annual event aimed at unravelling current and future trends of Open Source Software (OSS) and hardware, and is also a platform for businesses to leverage OSS latest innovations, best practices and success stories.

“The conference marks six successful years of engaging with the Open Source Community and Malaysian businesses on the promotion and utilisation of OSS and hardware,” said Open Source Developer community co-founder and chairman of the conference, Harisfazillah Jamel.

Microsoft Malaysia developer experience and evangelism director Dinesh Nair said Microsoft was committed to advancing the company’s investment in interoperability, open standards and open source.

“Today, thousands of open standards are supported by Microsoft and many open source environments including Linux and Hadoop, run on our platform.

“We will continue to engage with the open source and standards communities in a variety of ways, including workshop.”

Dinesh said Open Source standards are an integral part of the Cloud ecosystem, which provides developers and CIOs with the freedom and flexibility they need to operate their businesses.

He added, “Microsoft is the productivity and platform company for the mobile-first and Cloud-first world.

“In the Cloud, we support key standards that provide the building blocks for open, interoperable Cloud services and we support developer choice of programming languages.

“Additionally, we support data portability and believe customers own and control their data, no matter where it resides. By supporting these standards, we are contributing to and partnering with open source communities to promote interoperability, which makes it easier and less costly for customers to develop and manage mixed IT environments.”

A recent survey conducted by IDC supports Dinesh’s claim on Cloud adoptability, citing that in 2015, the share of IT spending directed to Cloud would increase — and noticeably, the number of respondents which indicated that they would not be allocating any budget to Cloud dropped from 22% in 2013 to just 1% in 2015.

“With the number of hosted private Cloud solutions now available from providers that have strong IT service management processes, demand for these offerings is set to grow at rates faster than other Cloud segments,” said IDC’s associate vice president for cloud services (Asia Pacific excluding Japan) Chris Morris.