451 CAOS Theory 
A blog for the enterprise open source community
Introducing…Jay Lyman
Raven Zachary, January 2, 2007 @ 6:01 pm ETIn my blog post before the holidays, I briefly mentioned that we were adding a second full-time open source analyst to The 451 Group. I’d like to introduce Jay Lyman, although for many of you, Jay will be a familiar name in the open source world already. Jay’s focus at The 451 Group will be Linux operating systems and distributors, virtualization, databases and other free and open source software. Conveniently for me, Jay is located in Portland, Oregon, and with the two of us here, I can now state with greater validity that Portland is The 451 Group’s ‘open source office.’
Prior to joining The 451 Group, Jay was a daily writer for LinuxInsider and TechNewsWorld, where he covered open source and a range of other IT topics from 2003 to 2006. Jay also covered open source software communities, development and products as a contributing editor with NewsForge from 2004 to 2006. He has been a regular contributor to other technology publications, including Web Host Industry Review (theWHIR) and Small Times, a nanotechnology Web site and magazine.
Before his coverage of the tech industry began with NewsFactor Network in 2000, Jay worked as a newspaper reporter in Southern California, covering business, government and crime for the Glendale News-Press, a daily paper in the Los Angeles area. Other traditional publications and news organizations that have published Jay’s work include the Associated Press and Time Magazine. He has gladly traded long city commission meetings for the latest and greatest in high-tech, but Jay still brings a straight news approach to his work.
An avid fan and user of Linux and other open source software, Jay holds a BA in journalism from San Diego State University, where he got his start as a news hound serving as reporter and city editor at The Daily Aztec.
As soon as Jay gets settled, 451 clients will be able to follow his work through our Market Insight Service (MIS) and he will be contributing to the CAOS Research Service, through this blog and the reports, over time. Welcome, Jay!
Comments (1) Categories: The 451 Group
Welcome aboard, Jay. The 451 Group is well positioned, along with Saugatuck, to tackle some of the better opportunities in this space.
As the outsourcing hub for Tsinghua University, China’s MIT, we see all sorts of open source developments, albeit mostly in the embedded space. It will be interesting to see how open source will expand in the enterprise space. Also, The 451 Group has a golden opportunity to explore the combination of open source with grid computing. This is an area where China will be very strong, much stronger than India. Already, China is outpublishing India with English-language papers by over a five-to-one ratio when looking at open source and/or grid computing. Also, there’s massive MOST (Ministry of Science and Technology) support in this sector, not necessarily for IT per se, but as a IT solution to other problems, e.g., in agriculture and energy research. The Indian government isn’t even coming close to providing the level of support that’s provided by China’s government, mostly at the central/federal level. On the downside, there’s a lot of dual-use possibilities, namely adapting and adopting IT for energy research (as one example) for PLA/military applications. This is to be expected. And, like in the States, the PLA is willing to pay an outrageous amount of money for new(er) technologies.
Keep your eye on the open source and grid computing balls and The 451 Group will have an enviable position among IT advisory services. And I say this as a former VP, E-Business Strategies at the META Group.
BTW, stay focused on the enterprise. Even though the embedded space might be better in many ways, there is too much competition among the IT advisory services for the embedded sector — and they’re well-established players with a good understanding of the embedded space (and they have almost no understanding of the enterprise space … and don’t want to). Don’t try to be like Gartner and know very little about everything. That’s what journalists are for.