Wednesday, November 19, 2008

Bye, bye Woolies?

Woolworths' 800 UK shops are on sale for £1!

Once a bastion of the British high street, and the cool place for teenagers to hang out, Woolies is in discussions with Hilco to sell its UK stores for a nominal £1. Squeezed between tat merchants and internet retailers, Woolies lacked a branding strategy that could hook into its history and use it to appeal to a new generation of shoppers.

Tuesday, November 18, 2008

Open Source breakthrough

A new report by Gartner suggests that 85% of industries in the North America, Europe, and the Asia/Pacific region - including a cross section of small, midrange, and large enterprises - have adopted open source software (OSS). It also reports that the remaining 15% are considering adopting it.

Why the breakthrough for OSS? Well, the need to reduce spending is reported as a major cause, much the same reason why Linux made its breakthrough in the IT recession of 2000-1. OSS is currently being used in web, print, email and customer facing applications. It is also being considered for ERP, CRM type applications too. It seems a safe bet that OSS will be considered for future projects as a matter of course as the need to retrench on IT spending continues.

Our web design company has been using OSS for over 5 years now. Many of our client's websites are powered by the Joomla! CMS, their databases run on the OSS database MySQL. We've also deployed the OSS CRM SugarCRM, as well as a myriad number of smaller applications and code snippets.

We use OSS for much the same reasons as those surveyed by Gartner - cost, flexibility and quality. Perhaps its time for you to consider the same reasons for using OSS?