Larry Dignan and other IT industry experts, blogging at the intersection of business and technology, deliver daily news and analysis on vital enterprise trends.
Larry Dignan is Editor in Chief of ZDNet and SmartPlanet as well as Editorial Director of ZDNet's sister site TechRepublic.
Andrew Nusca is a writer-editor for ZDNet, contributor to CNET and the editor of SmartPlanet, ZDNet's sister site about innovation. In 2013, his coverage will focus on enterprise startups. He is based in New York.
Rachel King is a staff writer for ZDNet based in San Francisco.
San Francisco - Gartner Symposium/ITxpo — The last time I was at a Gartner Symposium/ITxpo (last Spring's event), the charismatic Michael Fleisher was the CEO and he had established a reputation of giving very forward looking keynotes in an effort to give the IT professionals in attendance some idea of how he'd strategize if he were them.
After years of assisting customers in building increasingly more complex, real-time IT environments, Gartner has targeted "conquering complexity" as the theme for Symposium/ITxpo 2005 in San Francisco. Peter Sondergaard, Gartner head of global research, attributed complexity to the constant search for a silver bullet to solve all problems, the implementation of point solutions and short term thinking--no architectural approach.
The following transcript is from the keynote presentation, entitled "Conquering Complexity: Operational Excellence in IT," at the Gartner Symposium ITxpo in San Francisco on May 16:RAY:And you thought IT was complicated!Just remember thatwhen you open your car door.
San Francisco - Gartner Symposium/ITxpo — Come to think of it, why isn't there a manager of managers solution called superMOM? It seems like such a natural name for a product that horizontally cuts across all of an IT infrastructure's management technologies (SNMP, Windows event logs, security appliance APIs, etc.
San Francisco - Gartner Symposium/ITxpo -- Put another way, SupportSoft vice president of marketing Bruce Mowrey asks this question: "If computers are so smart, then why can't they fix themselves?" And therein lies the nirvana that Mowrey claims Supportsoft can get its customers closer to than any other solution on the market.
San Francisco - Gartner Symposium/ITxpo -- When most people think about distributed processing technologies that simultaneously make the applications they host run faster while also making them more tolerant of system failures, the terms "cluster" and "grid" come to mind.
San Francisco - Gartner Symposium/ITxpo -- In the old days, if you were an IT shop or an application developer, you had almost total control over the environment in which your application lived. You had some code and it may have accessed a database or some other sort of structured data but it all lived on one system that you had control of.
In response to my blog post asking whether handhelds with hard drives might start to give iPod (and other dedicated music players) a run for its money, one Talkbacker pointed out that iPod now includes a Calendar feature, showing that iPod can give as good as it gets and push back against incursion from handheld vendors.
In response to my argument about why anti-malware vendors should form a consortium that builds a centralized database of legitimate applications and why the database that Uniblue has come up with as a part of its WinTasksPro product would be a good starting point, not only did Zone Labs CEO Gregor Freund have something to say, but so too did the folks at an outfit called answersthatwork.com.
It has happened so many times before and now the question is whether it will happen again. In the past, when Microsoft has decided to provide the same utility around which a cottage industry has formed, the cottage industry subsequently vanished.