Day 1 - Opening session
Nearly every seat of the biggest theater of the famous Palais du Festival in Cannes was taken when Gartner started the conference with the opening session. In my opinion there are a lot of things Gartner is known for, but the most impressive one is how they actually organize events. Very professional, very structured and perfect in presentations. Especially the opening session reminds me of concerts where an impressive intro runs before finally the band appears.
In case of the ITexpo it was Gene Hall, CEO of Gartner, which came on stage. In his welcome speech he focused on the exploded amount of available technologies and the high complexity which comes along with that. But he also spoke about the opportunities technologies provide today, for the ones who have the skills and the knowledge. According to Gene, time is over when IT projects had been done "only" to provide internal improvements, every investment in the end has to lead into increased revenue.
This year the whole conference is about the “Power of Transitions”. Peter Sondergaard, SVP Research at Gartner, did the opening note and started his presentation with the year 1990 when PCs, the world wide web and mobile phones did not exist in our daily life. His presentation ended with the year 2010, where PCs reached every corner of our homes, mobile phones are in every pocket and the world wide web is a significant part of our life.
He asked two very true questions:
How could we even exist without all these things in 1990 and more important: What have we actually done all day without Twitter, Facebook, google and emails? :-)
According to Gartner we are facing four major trends these days:
- Cloud Computing
- Social Computing
- Context Aware Computing
- Pattern Based Strategy
After giving a short introduction into these topics, Peter concluded with the following statements which reflects how Gartner sees the standing of IT within enterprises leveraged by the trends mentioned above:
IT matters to the Enterprise!
IT drives positive outcomes!
In my opinion this was a pretty nice start and I’m looking forward to learn about these trends within the upcoming 4 days. The amount of the provided sessions is huge, so... Let’s Go!
