The View From Las Vegas
COMDEX
Weeks
before COMDEX opened, its management spoke with us, noting that
the goal for the show was an emphasis on IT, and a much smaller
(50,000 attendees), but more tightly focused event.
It was very clear from how much easier it was to get around
Las Vegas, that COMDEX was a smaller show.
There was much agreement that the program was quite good
– but the show floor, small and with many major vendors missing
(about 500 booths total), was disappointing.
Some
things, however, continue. The
COMDEX tradition of a Sunday night Bill Gates keynote, often used,
as a way for Microsoft to offer glimpses into new products or
directions, was clearly still a big event.
Gates
used the occasion to surface a new concept, Seamless Computing,
fueled by advanced in processing power, storage, graphics and web
services, which allow developers to create new software that
better mirrors the way the real world works and erases the
boundaries between people and technology.
Gates
believes that it is important to achieve software breakthrough in
connected systems, information-driven software, rich user
interfaces and new experiences to enable a seamless computing
environment where users will not need to notice boundaries between
devices, applications, services and networks.
Gates
demonstrated this, for the Microsoft user, using advances in
Windows Server 2003 and its support for an integrated application
server, SharePoint Services and web services plus new functions in
the Office 2003 System, including the OneNote 2003 program,
originally designed for the Tablet OS, but now available for
desktops and laptops as well..
The goal is to offer users applications that are seamlessly
connected across platforms and devices.
Gates sees seamless computing as both revolutionary and
evolutionary, with gradual changes that will add up to a big
difference in the user experience.
cdXPO
Meanwhile,
across town at cdXPO, we were busily chairing a track about On
Demand Computing, speaking at and hosting four sessions.
We also were pleased to attend sessions on open source.
Attendance was light, but interest levels high.
We’ve
already mentioned the SCO keynote.
We
also attended an interesting keynote presentation by Peter
Blackmore who focused on the move to a more digital world,
supporting complexity in IT, and the notion that heterogeneity
requires standards.
Blackmore
sees four interrelated trends:
management software (where HP spends half of its R&D
budget), mobility, security, and digital content, commenting that
less than 10% of the world’s information is digitized today.
He doesn’t think there is a single Next Big Thing, but
that rather a whole lots of things: price, reliability, security,
simplicity and manageability, adaptability, innovation and
connection are together the Next Big Thing. Sounds good, but hard to coordinate. He also placed HP firmly in the IBM camp, noting that the
real value in making investments in linking the technology
infrastructure to the business applications was to permit
transformational linkages to the business processes.
(Sun and Microsoft, who aren’t in the services business,
tend to be more focused on the infrastructure, rather than
business process transformation, as the representative panelists
on my On Demand Vendor Panel made it clear.)
The
real payback, says Blackmore, is synchronizing business and IT to
capitalize on change. That,
HP believes, is the definition and the goal of an adaptive
enterprise. It will
happen through simplification, standardization, modularity, and
integration.
I
can see I need to have another pass through my Virtual Computing
charts!
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