Open Source : team spirit that cultivates innovation

June was a busy month of open source events for Societe Generale. As a sponsor of open source software, it was with great pride that I represented our Group on 7 June at the opening of the archive of SoftwareHeritage.org, an initiative led by Inria in partnership with UNESCO, and the world’s biggest library of computer programme source codes. It was also a great pleasure for me to talk about our open source strategy at the annual convention of the French IT infrastructure and production managers club CRiP. What's more, on 26 June we will host, together with David Fiou, the annual general meeting of the TOSIT association at our Les Dunes technology hub, an event that will bring together several major French companies around the subject of open source, and on the same day we will sponsor the PG Day, an event aimed at the French-speaking PostgreSQL community in Marseilles.

This intense level of activity reflects the level of commitment to putting open source at the centre of our digital and innovation strategy, one of the priorities of the 2020 “Transform to grow” strategic plan presented to investors at the end of 2017. With a pool of more than 23,000 talented people worldwide and an IT budget of €3.8 billion in 2017, Societe Generale is a leading technology player. At a time of unprecedented technological development and changes in usage, we are speeding up our transformation to better serve our customers. This also involves implementing container based microservice architecture, infrastructure as a service and big data platform, and I have no doubt that open source will be a key part of the collective innovation undertaken to facilitate this acceleration, and attract and retain talent. 

For this reason, in response to demand from our developers, we have adopted a deliberate three-pronged open source policy: 

• USE: adoption of an “Open Source First” approach to increase open source software within our information systems;
• CONTRIBUTE: contributing to existing projects, financing communities, and being open to contribution for our internal projects;
• ATTRACT: offer an attractive and innovative technological environment for our developers and technology leaders.

We are already starting to reap the rewards of this Open Source First approach. At present, we are working on the building of an open source work station for developers based on the Linux Ubuntu operating system. From POC stage in June, we expect the work station to be rolled out by the end of 2018. Also in response to the wishes of our developers, we are taking further steps to increase the open source footprint of our databases, application servers and message-oriented middleware. Our objective? To have 30% of our databases operating as open source applications by 2020. Another key example: we recently published on GitHub.com the source code of OS Factory which automates the creation of an operating system's image for publication on the cloud. 

Projects are rolling in fast thanks to support from across the company. The significant advances that I mentioned would not have been possible without Societe Generale adopting an open source policy and the involvement of our top management, who we meet regularly and to whom we introduce these technologies. I also know that we can count on the commitment of our passionate IT experts to facilitate the appropriation of open source on the ground. 

I believe that the open source philosophy of sharing and cooperation has a strong future at Societe Generale and within all institutions and organisations looking to achieve a positive transformation.