Travels, like life in general, can often be filled with coincidental meetings and accidental occurrences. My recent trip to the Intel Developer Forum in Shanghai China was no exception. As I lumbered down the long skinny hallway of the jumbo jet that was to be my home for the next dreaded 13 hours, I approached my cramped middle seat in the very back of the plane to find a familiar face smiling at me from the seat next to my own.

Now it was no surprise to see other Intel employees on this entirely full flight to Shanghai, but it was nice to see a former colleague seated next to me. This meeting proved even more fortuitous as I later in the week ran into him once again just in time to sit down for a brief conversation about the important work his team is doing in the realm of open source software at Intel.

Ram Peddibhotla, Director of Intel's Open Source Technology Center, spoke with me about Intel's efforts in leading a variety of open source projectsincluding moblin.org, the open source project devoted to developing an open operating system for the mobile internet devices (MIDs) that were the talk of IDF.

In addition to moblin.org, Mr. Peddibhotla discussed the variety of other critical open source projects in which Intel experts are instrumentally involved, including lesswatts.org and as maintainers of the Linux kernel itself.

Certainly not new to many of you in the IT Community, open source software continues to drive more and more of the critical applications we use to power business everyday. So I'm curious:

• How many of you have either adopted or are evaluating open source software for critical functions like customer relation management (CRM), business intelligence, communication apps such as email or other productivity tools?
• Are there particular benefits or challenges you've faced when implementing this software?
• And are there particular applications you wouldn't consider using open source software to accomplish?

Greetings! Allow me to take a brief moment to introduce myself. I am new to the OpenPort community and will manage the overall OpenPort's site going forward. I am thrilled to be a part of this growing community and look forward to engaging in a plethora of ongoing discussions with you all.

Let me start with a truth: I am not a technologist. I don't even play one on TV. So I promise never to wax poetic on deeply technical things that you know more about anyway. However, I am an enthusiastic tech user in both my professional and personal life. So hopefully my insights won't be completely from left field. Oh, truth number two: I have worked in software for the last four years so sometimes my focus is a bit myopic.

With that little revelation it will probably not surprise you that I wanted to start by mentioning some recent headlines regarding Intel's announcement last week. Perhaps you heard, but if you didn't last week Intel and Microsoft announced they had awarded UC Berkeley $20million to fund research on new ways to program software so it would take advantage of the benefits brought forth in multi-core processors. The research is focused on addressing challenges to parallel computing and encompasses programing for applications & operating systems to ensure they take better advantage of multi-core processors.

This is an interesting development and once again illustrates how Intel works with the broader ecosystem to help propel technology of all kinds forward. I am often suprised to learn of the many behind-the-scenes efforts Intel helps drive to bring about technology innovation; things like pushing WiMAX standards for ubiquitous wireless access worldwide and the formation of moblin.org to host open source projects for the development of software targeted at mobile internet devices (MIDS).

I'm not saying Intel's efforts aren't in the company's own best interests. But these endeavors are meant to affect sweeping industry changes that help advance technology that makes all our lives better. It kind of gives me a warm fuzzy feeling.