May 14, 2008 6:35 AM PDT
Spend less, get more: A CIO's guide to a rough economy
CIOs are looking for ways to stretch their IT dollars further through the economic slowdown. IDC expects global IT spending to increase by 5.7 percent in 2008, down from 7.2 percent in 2007. (Gartner's numbers come in below this, with 3.3 percent growth this year on top of 3 percent growth in 2007.)
To that end, a Wall Street Journal article suggests several ways to lower costs - defer hardware upgrades, virtualize hardware, etc. - but overlooks a key way to spend less while getting more from software: Open source.
Open source is a great way to retain top talent and leverage that talent efficiently. If you're a CIO that isn't aggressively adopting open source, are you really doing your job well?
Matt Asay brings a decade of in-the-trenches open-source business and legal experience to The Open Road, with an emphasis on emerging open-source business strategies and opportunities. Matt is vice president of business development at Alfresco, a company that develops open-source software for content management. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure. You can follow Matt on Twitter @mjasay. 
