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Gartner plays buzzword bingo

Carly Fiorina must be pleased that her message is getting through. The opening keynote at Gartner Symposium/IT Expo here at Sydney's Darling Harbour Exhibition Centre was all about "agility," Gartner's "new" term for the dynamic enterprise.

Agility is of course one of HP's marketing terms. Ever since IBM started its On Demand campaign well over a year ago, HP has been attempting to define its own version of what's basically the same thing. In short, enterprises build powerful network infrastructures coupled with service-oriented architectures (SOAs), and enabled by the industry-wide push to develop Web services standards. HP's term for all this was the Adaptive Enterprise.

A few of Gartner's slides contained that phrase. I was having flashbacks from when I sat in on HP's Adaptive Enterprise launch in Silicon Valley. Now, Gartner might well come back and argue they owned the term "Adaptive Enterprise" first. Either way, it felt odd to hear what sounded like HP marketing bandied about instead of IBM's.

Also confusing from this morning's re-hash of everything we already know about app dev, was the surprise comeback of the portal. That's right, Gartner has decided that the enterprise portal is the panacea for how enterprises will achieve "agility."

Certainly the portal does have a valuable role to play in certain multi-app environments. But what I didn't get was how portals will help the business analyst of the future  create new business processes on the fly by "drawing lines" between objects that represent individual services and components.

Around 18 months ago I saw a very long and complex demo of such a system designed for business analysts by the now defunct Commerce One. In theory, it's a great idea. Need to tweak your inventory management process? Under this model, no Java or .Net programmers are required. But Commerce One had a custom app to handle this process.

So if we're ultimately meant to evaluate custom apps vs portals as the method by which enterprises will become "Agile" then I guess the portal wins today - there are far more portal vendors in existence than e-commerce dinosaurs like Commerce One or old foe Ariba.

But in the end I didn't feel like Garnter made a strong enough case for the portal. A couple of industry people I talked with agreed with me. One commented that feedback he'd heard from CIOs exiting the keynote was they were not hearing anything new.

Here's hoping the tutorials and Gartner one-on-one's make up for lost ground.

Roll up, roll up

It's just three days until IDG Australia's first My Home Entertainment Expo kicks off at Sydney's Darling Harbour.

Yes, this is a gratuitous plug, but hey, we're excited. Our team has signed up a raft of big consumer and digital entertainment brands.

And unlike other shows, such as Hannover's recent effort, our strategy is to focus on entertainment. We believe that consumers relate better to the word "entertainment" than they do "digital" or "intelligent."

CIO sets Agenda

Nick Carr proved to be the draw card we’d hoped for yesterday at CIO Agenda 04, drawing a very healthy crowd.

For anyone like myself who’s already familiar with his arguments, his keynote didn’t offer too many surprises. But I suspect many people were reassured to hear he doesn’t believe that IT innovation per se is finished.

Quite simply, Carr is an advocate for more conservative IT spending. Companies cannot rely on IT for competitive advantage if they want customized, low-cost, mass-produced products, he argues. Of course, that doesn’t mean you can’t find a niche and exploit that opportunity using technology. Just look at the business being generated by low cost airlines, for example.

Anyway, I enjoyed seeing the CIOs challenge him on issues such as IT spending, security, and the false notion that CIOs will ever completely do themselves out of a job. He didn't get away without a fight, of sorts.

It was also interesting to hear Carr speak after CIO President Linda Kennedy detailed the results of the publication’s most recent CIO survey. CIOs report one of their top priorities is convincing CEOs that IT delivers a competitive advantage. No thanks to our mate Nick!

Meanwhile, here’s something reassuring for us in the events business. CIOs I spoke with over lunch were actively interested in hearing from our sponsors, particularly if a vendor’s keynote didn’t address all of their issues. I saw business cards being exchanged, and the promise of one-on-one meetings. This is a great sign of health in the local IT economy.

Nick Carr is in town

Mr IT Doesn't Matter himself is in town. I'm heading down to CIO Agenda tomorrow at Sydney's Darling Harbour to listen to him and the other speakers on offer.

Attention mobile developers

Microsoft Australia's Frank Arrigo points at media coverage of an upcoming Mobile Developers Conference.

Australian developers are promised they can get their hands on a copy of Microsoft's Visual Studio in April, according to ZDNet.

Here's Frank's overview of the conference agenda.

It's interesting because mobile application development is the next great IT gold rush as far as I'm concerned. Execs and consumers of all types now demand access to a wide range of applications, data and services. The era of non-mobile computing is well and truly over, and it's up to .Net, Java and open source developers to carry the torch.

Selling wireless to salespeople

I'm just back from Sydney's Museum of Contemporary Art where I was one of the presenters at an event called "Unwired Success." Hosted by Salesforce.com, Telstra & Intel, the breakfast seminar was designed to help sales & marketing execs understand how to take advantage of wireless.

Interestingly enough (err, actually, I was stunned), it seems that while wireless technology and hotspot use is skyrocketing in the Asia/Pacific region, plenty of sales types are not familiar with many wireless "basics" I thought were assumed knowledge. For example, one guy asked me what hotspots were and what "Wi-Fi" meant. Wow.

Audience questions during the panel were predominantly about security and integration (both issues are largely resolved, we assured them), and others I spoke to were concerned about wireless costs. For example, $0.75 per MMS message is unsustainable for most companies.

Anyway, the gist of my talk (here's the PPT that contains local market stats etc. It's 3837KB. Download file) was that I believe we're at a point in time where we have the wireless networks, devices and applications to make the wireless computing experience closely mirror the office computing experience. There are of course plenty of issues to resolve, like Wi-Fi roaming & the cost of wirelessly enabling the sales force. But the industry is getting there - WiMax is the latest innovation buzzword, for example.

So at the end fo the morning, we had around 160 to 170 people sitting down for the event (which IDG helped market). I'd call that a success.