I've just returned from a week long trip to California that was profoundly stimulating, educational and productive. As I reflect back on the dozens of conversations I had with old and new faces, I've made the realization that the entire week was, in many ways, a study in contrasts.
From Sunday through Tuesday afternoon, I attended M.R. Rangaswami's Enterprise 2006 Conference. The annual conference is an invitation only event where thought leaders converge to candidly discuss the state of the enterprise software landscape. Held at the gorgeous Inn at Spanish Bay, there was a sense of tranquil exclusivity that made for a very relaxed and candid atmosphere.
This year's theme was Innovation, but ultimately I felt it should have been called Reality of Today's Enterprise. Fortune 500 CIOs presented how their companies are innovating, and to a man it wasn't about the technology, it was about the process. If there was a unifying theme of the conference's attendees, it was that innovation is born out of business value (not new bells and whistles). Large, multinational enterprises want to be able to do more with less, and are pushing their vendors for incremental reductions in TCO. With 70%-80% of their budgets dedicated to maintaining existing systems and processes, there is precious room in the budget for new technologies without a clear, quantifiable ROI. Important software trends including open source, SaaS, SOA and emergent applications (e.g., blogs, wikis) are gaining mindshare, but there remains a healthy dose of skepticism about whether any of these trends are evolutionary.
From Tuesday through Thursday, I headed to downtown San Francisco to attend the Office 2.0 Conference put together by my friend and fellow Irregular Ismael Ghalimi. Whereas I was one of the youngest attendees at Enterprise, the 300+ attendees at Office skewed much younger (at least as many 20-somethings as any other age group). The setup was no less impressive, as Ismael landed the newly-refurbished St. Regis as the conference location (thanks in no small part to Julia French). The vibe at Office 2.0, by nature, was far less about today's reality as it was about the promise of tomorrow. On one hand, there was a bit of an echo chamber effect that didn't reflect the buying behaviors and needs of today's enterprises. On the other hand, I think those who dismissed the wares with a "who needs another online spreadsheet?" completely missed the mark. What I saw at Office 2.0 were hundreds of bright, energetic and driven minds leveraging technology to help re-think the way we manage personal productivity. I'm far less interested in what they had to show me today as I am in seeing what many of these companies are doing two or three years from now.
If I had just attended Enterprise, I think I would've come away with a sense that large enterprises are a long way away from embracing many of the changes that dominate today's software trends. Whereas had I just attended Office 2.0, I would've come away sensing an unstoppable wave of entrepreneurial innovation that was going to pave the way for the next software paradigm. The reality lies somewhere in between. Transformational technology trends can't be bounded by today's thinking, and the best CIOs will recognize that or risk losing the chance of being tomorrow's CIOs. That said, many of today's startups have a lot of maturing to do if they hope to provide software-based solutions that meet the needs of big enterprise.
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you capture both events very well. What you failed to describe was the CIO irritation and angst with incumbent, large vendors. I had to coach and edit slides of both John and Dave on my Sandhill panel to stay focused on innovation and not beat up too much on SAP, Oracle, Accenture ...if they are skpetical of newer vendors and models it is because they are sore...
Posted by: vinnie mirchandani | October 14, 2006 at 07:42 PM
That's a fascinating contrast I wish I'd been there at Enterprise 2006. I'm hoping that next year's Office 2.0 Conference can blend some of the two together and have much more input from CIOs and business users. One of the ingredients O20con lacked was real world, customer case studies and experiences, and many of the software demos didn't have good enough examples (some of the immaturity you mention). The sector is at an early stage, but the energy and innovation is very evident.
Posted by: David Terrar | October 14, 2006 at 10:36 AM