Marc Vloemans
Director of EU Business Development
Boundless
Netherlands

Biography
For more than 15 years, Marc Vloemans has been professionally involved in the dissemination and adoption of open standards, open source software, and open data both in The Netherlands and internationally. As an accomplished market and business developer, he specialises in the design and development of commercial eco-systems and user communities in the international open spatial sector. At present he serves as Director of European Business Development for Boundless, the international market leader in open spatial IT.

Abstract
Ask for Professional Open Source and Demand Commercial Open Eco-Systems: The Economies of Scale and Scope

Increasingly governments and public sector agencies promote, favour and even demand the use of open source. For open (source) spatial IT in particular, this provides another positive driving force along with open standards and open data. However, with the increase in projects and implementations, the question of where/how to procure the necessary (specialised) support inevitably arises. In the past, a coherent eco-system of service suppliers was lacking so DIY (“Do It Yourself”) was often the approach, and organisations were forced to support and maintain their own open source applications. Nowadays, IT is - more often than not - considered to be a non-core activity within the public and private sectors; thus many small and medium sized local specialised service suppliers have emerged. The emergence of these suppliers can raise questions about the continuity of service and jeopardise the system's availability, security, scalability and quality. Fortunately, there are lessons to be learned from non-spatial open source IT such as Linux and Drupal; these are lessons on ‘dominant stacks’ and navigating myriad service suppliers. Marc’s presentation will provide some practical criteria for decision makers to choose open source solutions and reliable service providers.