I was eager to read the Open Solutions Alliance open source CEO predictions for 2008, figuring it would have some interesting thoughts and perspectives on the open source year ahead. However, I had no idea the forward-looking statements would apply to me, personally and directly. One did. Adaptive Planning CEO William Soward, in the first response of the OSA predictions report, quotes my colleague Raven Zachary on the discussions we’ve had about open source coverage and my job title. Let me explain.

I was hired by 451 Group a litle over a year ago as an analyst covering enterprise software, and more specifically, open source software. Thus, my title has been: analyst, open source. We’ve found that I’m working with practically all of our other analysts, who typically cover more vertical categories such as storage or hardware, in the course of covering open source.

Naturally, I’ve done some work with our software development analyst, Vishy Venugopalan and our infrastructure software analyst Dennis Callaghan. I began the job working quite a bit with our content management/collaboration/groupware analyst Kathleen Reidy, as well as our mobile guy Tony Rizzo. I’ve worked with John Abbott and Rachel Chalmers on Linux management and virtualization. Of course, there’s been crossover with Matt Aslett and his area of database management software and China Martens with software applications, but there have also been open source links to Krishna Roy in data integration, Simon Robinson in storage and William Fellows in grids and messaging. I’ve worked with Nick Selby and our security practice as well when open source was involved. All of this illustrates the fact that open source is in play and having an impact on nearly every part of the tech industry. We’re still figuring out my title, but it’s clear that open source is literally all over the place.

Soward’s quote from Raven: “Specialized open source analysts are becoming anachronistic, since open source is becoming a fundamental element of all software.” Now I’m going to read the rest of the OSA report so that I might avoid becoming anachronistic.