Michael Blechar sent me an e-mail containing this photo montage of a bad day in the life of two tow trucks. If you scroll all the way to the bottom, you will see that the second disaster is actually a fake (which makes me think about my post on application security).

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Many application leaders feel that their greatest challenge is not the technology side of the picture, but rather it is the people and behavior side of things. For years, the applications world has been talking about worthy goals such as driving re-use, improving quality, and becoming more agile. We have collectively spent a huge amount of time and money chasing the latest "shiny object." Back when I first got into the applications world in the 1980s, we all chased the promise of object orientation, stored procedures, remote procedure calls, etc. On the quality side, some of us spent tons of money on testing suites, scripts, etc. All too often, the end result was that we did the same things with increasingly fancy (and expensive) tools and technologies. This led to a painful adage – a fool with a tool is still a fool.

A different way to say this is that the real challenge we need to tackle is governance and management. Matt Hotle leads our research on applications governance, and has recently recorded a great podcast – You Don't "Do" Governance. He also recently wrote "Key Issues for Application Management and Governance," which is a great overview to this subject. We have an entire track dedicated to "Governance and Management: Fellow Citizens of Agility and Innovation" at the AADI Summit. For those of you that are Gartner for IT Leaders customers, Matt and a bunch of great governance research are highlighted on the Applications Leaders homepage this week – make sure to check it out.

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Today, Gartner has published a special report looking at "The State of Open Source." Over the past several months, Yefim Natis (one of our conference chairs) has led a community of more than 50 Gartner analysts analyzing open source (between his regular research responsibilities, chairing events, and herding analyst 'cats' on this special report, you wonder when Yefim has time to sleep!). These analysts developed 53 research notes looking at open source from a variety of technology, industry and geography perspectives.

Open Source touches literally every part of IT as well as many parts of the business world. The question isn’t whether there is open source in your environment, but rather whether you know all the places it has found a home. In some cases, like those of you running Eclipse or JBOSS, it is obvious. However, there are many more cases where open source is 'inside' products from traditional software vendors or underneath the covers. Mark Driver will address this in his session entitled Gartner's Open Source Scenario for 2008 and Laurie Wurster will look at the open source marketplace in The AD, AIM, SOA and Open Source Industry Outlook.

Here are a few of the key strategic planning assumptions that came out of this effort:

- By 2013, a majority of Linux deployments will have no real software total cost of ownership (TCO) advantage over other operating systems (OSs).
- By 2012, more than 90% of enterprises will use open source in a direct or embedded form.
- By 2011, open source will dominate software infrastructure for cloud-based providers.
- By 2012, software as a service (SaaS) will eclipse open source as the preferred IT cost-cutting method.

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