Good afternoon. My name is Si Chen, and thank you for coming to my presentation about the adoption of open source business applications.
It's a long of fun to be here alongside the developers and industry veterans who are shaping open source software today because, well, my background is a little different. I used to be a hedge fund manager and worked right up the street at the Met Life building on top of Grand Central, right here in New York City.

I'm here today because about six years ago, I helped start an online retail company named Gracious Style. Being a startup with very little money, we naturally went the open source route. As we grew, I wanted to help build an open source enterprise application suite that could suit the needs of our company and others like it. I did this because I fell in love with the whole idea of open source software, not just because of the cost, but because of the freedom it gave me, the user, to control my technology destiny. In that process, I met a lot of other people, from small business owners to decision makers at Fortune 500 corporations, who were all looking for the same thing—open source applications that could run their businesses.

This is our story of why we're all adopting open source business applications.

Interesting story for friends who find themselves not completely in control of their corporate IT destiny.