Jarrett House NorthNow with 80% less politics!

I spent the day today bouncing back and forth between sessions that were a little closer to our product’s core functionality (service desk, asset management) and actually doing product demo. I had a demo via Webex that ended just twenty minutes before I had to check out of my hotel room.
An aside to the Gartner [...]

Below is a partial transcript of new Sun Microsystems CEO Jonathan Schwarz’s Q and A at the Gartner Symposium.

Q: Let’s talk about StorageTek — loyal following but what’s next?

A: Talked to a board member who lost their tapes. I said, “What’s the big deal? The tapes are encrypted, right?” But tape data isn’t encrypted. So [...]

…across the street in the other part of the Moscone Center, to be more precise, Sun’s new CEO Jonathan Schwarz announced at the JavaOne conference that Sun will release the Java source code, and is asking developers for feedback on how to do that in the least disruptive way.
Wow. Cool. Guess I was at the [...]

Spent some time this afternoon looking at Vista and talking to the Microsoft team here (which includes some folks I know from my past life at Microsoft.com and my internship—hi Arvind! hi Peg!) about what’s coming down the pipe that our company needs to know about from an application development perspective. The guidance I got [...]

If you know me, you already know one of my points about a few of the sessions that in a well-intentioned and generally thorough way address the question of “consumer” technologies in the enterprise. That’s the C-word itself. Our employees are not gullets that crap cash, and talking about technology expectations set by “consumer-grade” services [...]

One of the pitfalls (or blessings, depending on your perspective) of being a small software company is that you get laser-like focus on your core business problem out of necessity. For me as a vendor, one of the real value points about the Gartner show is getting exposed to other market segments that touch ours [...]

I’m back at Gartner’s ITXpo after liveblogging parts of it last year. I’ve decided this year to pseudo-live-blog—to take notes during the session and post them later. Pulling out a laptop during one of the keynotes last year just felt too weird. Blogger culture hasn’t totally permeated the IT universe, and I drew too [...]

The keynote interview with Dr. Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google, was as interesting for what he didn’t reveal as what he said. Eric has a bracingly dry sense of humor about his business and the industry, but he is deadly serious about the company and its responsibilities and challenges. He is also skilled at the [...]

Catching up on non-ITxpo related topics this morning, two things caught my eye. First, my delayed reaction to the announcement that the New York Times will be putting some of its content, notably op-ed columns, behind a for-pay wall starting in September. This is of course brilliant because the Times’s editorial opposite number, the Wall [...]

Charles Giancarlo and Steve Mills are on a panel with two Gartner officers. Giancarlo defines “complexity” as anything that causes customers headaches in implementation. Customers want simplicity, by which they mean that solutions are thoroughly tested for their environment, not fewer features. He points out that we simplify the mundane (networking protocols) and then [...]

One thing I find interesting is the small number of bloggers in attendance at the conference. I’m currently sitting next to the only other blogger on the conference blogroll, Boris Pevzner of Centrata (and of MIT Course 6 mid-90s). Feedster and Technorati don’t turn up many hits for ITxpo; in fact, Feedster notes that this [...]

Ken McGee is speaking about real time enterprises. He claims that with real time enterprises, which represents IT moving beyond its traditional boundaries into adding real value through real time monitoring and modeling of events in the company, that business uncertainty becomes “unnecessary and unavoidable.” The talk is an expansion on Ken’s book, Heads Up. [...]

This morning’s first session for me, Excellence in IT Service and Support, was a review of best practices in service desk management. A few interesting data points came out in the context of the talk, including informal survey results (of Gartner Data Center conference attendees) indicating that about 62% of respondents intend to adopt ITIL, [...]

Some follow up links on IBM/Tivoli’s ITSM announcements yesterday.
CNET: IBM’s Tivoli tackles IT processes: “The majority of application failures are due to changes that get introduced to a working system, said Bob Madey, vice president of strategy and business development for Tivoli.”
ComputerWorld: IBM unveils Tivoli systems management software. “The idea of having a centralized database [...]

Well, that’s it for my first day at ITxpo. I’m off to Toronado.
Hey, a quick thought to other bloggers at the conference: while Gartner is mediating a networking breakfast on blogging on Thursday, I’ll be heading out on Wednesday night. If you’re interested in having an impromptu blogging meet-up on Tuesday or Wednesday—in or out [...]