Creating a New Development Culture Leveraging Lessons from the Open Source Community at the 2006 SMP Event

Kenneth Kunin, VP of Product Management at SunGard, shares how he helped to create a new product and development culture within the $4B software company leveraging the spirit of the Open Source Community at The 2006 Software Marketing Perspectives Conference and Expo, held June 12-14, 2006 at the Santa Clara Convention Center.

Santa Clara, Calif. May 17, 2006 – Let’s face it, bringing separate successful companies under the umbrella of a conglomerate is challenging in the best of times. Now add the pressure of integrating disparate business applications, technology platforms and development teams from multiple acquisitions with a customer business environment that is rapidly consolidating, and you can begin to understand the issues Kenneth Kunin faces at SunGard.

SunGard is a $4B organization that serves the top 50 financial institutions in the world, with hundreds of legacy applications ingrained in their daily operations. Failure is not an option. So how could SunGard continue to respect the innovation, results, and culture of its entrepreneurial business units while consolidating touch points and operations with their customers?

Kenneth Kunin, VP of Product Management for SunGard’s Common Services Architecture, looked to the lessons of community and technical excellence in the Internet-based Open Source Community for insight. “We noticed the way the open source community leveraged geographically dispersed talent and discovered a model that we could adopt across SunGard’s decentralized organization. We created a Service Oriented Architecture with a common core repository that is shared and contributed to by independent business units.”

Imagine – SunGard, a geographically-distributed organization with vastly different business cultures, development teams, and operational strengths, created a corporate-wide, technology-agnostic, service oriented architecture using federated development teams. These independent development teams are now working toward a common approach to software development, facilitated by using the same workflow and collaboration techniques found in the Open Source Development Community.

John Desmond, Editor of Software Magazine and Conference Chair is excited about Kunin’s session. “SunGard took the innovation we all noticed in the Open Source Community and discovered a way to apply the principles within a corporate structure. This is the invisible next step that most organizations do not take. SunGard had the foresight to see this next step and make it visible and successful.”

The Software Marketing Perspectives Conference and Expo ( www.smpevent.com ) is the event where the high technology product management, marketing, public relations, and business development professionals go to exchange ideas with other senior professionals responsible for delivering results.

Come to the Software Marketing Perspectives Conference and Expo, June 13-14, 2006 at the Santa Clara Convention Center. You may register at http://www.smpevent.com/registration.htm .

The Software Marketing Perspectives Conference and Expo invites technology marketing professionals from product management, marketing communications, public relations, business development, and market analysis to attend this power-packed two-day event.

The SMP event’s Premiere Co-sponsors -- Pragmatic Marketing, Ryma Technologies (makers of FeaturePlan), and O’Keeffe & Co. -- are joined by QlikTech, Autodemo, Pathfinder, OpSource, Good Leads, Orasi Software, Apogee Search (Leads Customer Growth), Leverage Software, Telelogic and DM2. Sponsorship opportunities are extremely limited. Interested companies should call Carol Samost at (617) 962-4725 or email her for more information.

The 2006 Software Marketing Perspectives Conference & Expo is produced by King Content Co. of 233 Needham St., Newton MA 02464. Contact: John P. Desmond. Phone: 508 668 9928.

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