The hidden message

Posted on by March 20, 2013

I feel sure I didn’t take from this article the message the author had intended. The title heralds woeful news: software sales are down – gnash! – and UK sales are foundering – oh no! Glossing over for now the enormous issues behind this comment from the magnificently named Fabrizio Biscotti of Gartner:

the UK has seen less enterprise software sales recently because the government has chopped so many of the country’s IT projects

…if you read on you learn several rather interesting things. The first is that:

25 per cent of the software market in Western Europe comes from the UK

…which suggests that our work in promoting the joys of open source software is far from done. Biscotti goes on to say:

Europe’s enterprise software sales were also slowing down as more businesses opt for open-source technology

He mentions the cloud as being partly to blame too. His most noteworthy comments though, from our point of view, were these two closely related points:

The SME market in particular is looking for lower cost alternatives to keep going…many IT customers have lost loyalty to the big proprietary vendors during the recession. The large vendors increased their maintenance costs in the recession, leaving customers with less money, but more to pay in maintenance. There are a good number of disgruntled customers out there, so vendor loyalty has been falling.

If Gartner is saying it, it must be true. It’s a shame that open source is portrayed in a rather LibDem light, ie where people storm off to in a huff with traditional services, but clearly open source stands to benefit hugely from the increased uptake from UK SMEs, and in turn UK SMEs stand to benefit hugely from the increased uptake in open source. It’s hard to feel sorry for the big proprietary vendors really, especially as the article goes on to make it clear that they’re still doing fairly well, just without the support of many UK companies that have moved on to better things. The next step now for those companies is to move over to UK-based energy efficient open source hosting.

GreenLight

Posted on by June 17, 2012

We’ve set a date! The first GreenLight meeting will be on Thursday 11th August at 8pm at, er, well, over to you. This is (more or less) the text of the email we’ve sent to the world. If you’d like to add comments below – general musings on the idea or a suggestion about where in Herefordshire to meet – please do.

GreenLight is a very informal (and free) group for local businesses who’d like to give and gain a bit of support with improving their ‘greenness’. This can be the easy, simple little things you barely notice, but can also include some complex measures that would be less daunting with the advice of those who have gone before you.

OpenSure was merrily doing its thing the way we see fit when it was pointed out to us that we had, in fact, excellent green credentials. In effect, we were green & ethical for the best reasons: it was just how we did things, not because it was a label we could use or deliberately set out to attain. We fully support the ecological benefits of green business practices, but we’re also acutely aware of the economic advantages of reduced waste, efficient energy consumption and using resources to the best effect. Being ethical is not, for us, just about Fair Trade tea bags in the office; as a business we support a local charity and offer our time and expertise freely to various events and groups. If you’d like to read more about our green and ethical status, please look here.

Our aim with GreenLight is to bring businesses together in a friendly and relaxed atmosphere to learn from each others’ experiences. There will be no agendas, pledges, targets, fees or speakers, unless of course that’s what people would like. This is your chance to be in at the beginning of GreenLight and help to shape it into something that you can benefit from and contribute to.

The first GreenLight meeting will be on Thursday 11th August, down the pub. Question is, which pub? If you’d like to suggest a venue we’d love to hear about it. All the evening will cost you is the price of whatever you’re drinking. Please let us know if you’re interested in coming along, and share your thoughts about the whole idea.

The OpenSure Free Press 27th June 2011

Posted on by June 9, 2015

Phew what a scorcher! Have you avoided meltdown? Here’s how:

Hardware Meltdown
Apart from keeping an ice-cold Ubuntu cola to hand, avoiding a hardware meltdown is about maintenance and being sensible, with a Plan B to hand. If your kit is several years old and has never had a good clean and some attention from someone who knows how to spot signs of potentially fatal wear, you’re running a high risk of things going bang. If your machine is overloaded with added-on bits of kit or you’ve souped up some of its inner workings, be aware it could be struggling. If you can hear the fan going hell-for-leather, your machine’s heating up and things are starting to go slow, it’s time to ask someone in the know to take a look at it. It’s worth bearing in mind that many doddering old machines have been given a new lease of life with a nice light open source operating system.

If the worst were to happen, your life will be much simpler if you have records of all the keys you need to access your data, assuming it’s stored remotely and out of danger. If you store data on your computer then ensure it’s backed up frequently (how old can your records be and still be any use to you? A day? A week? A month? Would you lose irreplaceable photos, and music you’ve paid for?) and that the back-ups restore the information you need – ie, test it out once in a while. This no doubt sounds very boring and worthy, but imagine your computer went up in smoke – how would you manage? Could you be up and running again in no time, or would you be left floundering and your business put at risk? It can happen and it does, so Be Prepared. Dib dib.

RIP Email
This article is an interesting and thought-provoking piece about giving up on email and communicating instead via social media, Skype and so on. If you’re drowning in email and wondering if you could live without it or just drastically reduce it, this is worth a read. If you did give up on email, what would you miss most or find most awkward to replace or work around in your business?

What makes a good web host?
This ITDonut article lists eight points to consider when looking for a web host. They all focus on the services and standards offered by prospective hosts and are all sound questions to ask. You should also consider which hosting is right for you. Websites with different purposes and functions have different hosting requirements, so make sure, when looking at prospective hosts, that they understand your individual requirements and can look after them. It goes without saying that we romp home.

The Green & Ethical Bit

  • Do you use Bit.ly, with its Libya TLD? You might instead prefer to use gree.nr – .nr is the domain for Nauru, a South Pacific island.
  • Joulebug is a smartphone app that turns saving energy into a game.
  • A Pennsylvania school district saves $15k a year and tons of carbon by cutting its grass like this.
  • Like us, you no doubt fly to Tokyo on business all the time. Read here how one day it could take just a couple of hours with barely an emission.

Other bits and pieces that have caught our eye recently include:

  • Our current object of desire – a transparent Aston Martin Android phone
  • Making a wind turbine out of Lego
  • Postcards from the Future – it’s the world, Jim, but not as we know it
  • And last, but not least on this the hottest day of the year so far, the solar-powered bikini

Please recommend us to your friends if you think we deserve it and leave a comment below if you have something to say about the newsletter, open source or green & ethical business.