You may recall that I asked folks who attended VORTEX to share their thoughts on the event. Dave Swartz, a CIO from George Washington University and a member of the VORTEX Advisory Board, took me up on that offer and put pen to paper. Here are some of Dave’s comments, from why he attended to which speakers and ideas left the deepest impressions.
YES!!!Boston Globe headlineAMEN!
Boston Herald headline
Dear Vorticians,
I will be a model of restraint this week, barely mentioning the Red Sox sweep of the Cardinals to win the 2004 World Series. Actually, we’re all too tired around here to jump up and down. Besides, those one-word headlines from Beantown’s big daily papers speak volumes.
A news note before I get into the meat of this week’s missive. Last time, I reported on our VORTEX 2004 Town Meeting on U.S. tech leadership. One key issue discussed at that confab was the need for a clearly articulated broadband policy to ensure America doesn’t fall farther behind nations with more aggressive policies.
This week, the Consumer Federation of America and the Consumers Union issued a stinging report claiming a failure of U.S. regulatory policy has caused the nation to slip to 13th in the world in broadband adoption. According to the two consumer groups, U.S. customers pay 10 to 20 times as much for broadband as consumers in Japan and Korea, and the rate of adoption of high-speed Internet access has stagnated. The groups criticize policies that have led to a “cozy duopoly” (using a phrase from a recent Business Week piece) of cable and Bell companies that aren’t being forced to open their networks to competitors – a factor the groups claim is key to other nations’ rapid adoption of broadband. The same failed U.S. telecom policies, CFA and CU say, have also exacerbated the so-called “digital divide” among consumers at different income levels.
The report makes for compelling reading and you can download it at https://www.consumerfed.org/digitaldivide.pdf
Now, you may recall that I asked folks who attended VORTEX to share their thoughts on the event. Dave Swartz, a CIO from George Washington University and a member of the VORTEX Advisory Board, took me up on that offer and put pen to paper. Here are some of Dave’s comments, from why he attended to which speakers and ideas left the deepest impressions. It’s good news for some and… well, here goes.
“Like many CIOs, I attend a number of technology conferences. Recently I have begun to review my attendance at some of these conferences and look for those that do a better job at meeting my strategic requirements. One of the things that first hit me about VORTEX was the diverse list of attendees. There were many CEOs, COOs, CFOs and members from the investment community present, in addition to senior IT folks, not your common attendees at technology conferences. The second aspect of the conference was the novel format for presentations. In fact, there were few formal presentations and most interaction with invited speakers was in a Q&A format.
“The conference used the traditional IT stack as a way to view the strategic positioning of the established leaders and emerging companies. For example, if we look at Oracle, they own the database level of the stack and they are attempting to strengthen their position up the stack in applications through the acquisition of PeopleSoft, so as to better position themselves against the market leader, SAP. We had the opportunity to sit through some pretty exciting discussions over two days and I came away from the conference with a much better understanding, as well as a gut feeling about these companies.
“Who is the wild card company emerging in the marketplace today? My vote goes to EMC. Howard Elias (EVP, corporate marketing and office of technology) had the most quotable sound bite of the conference, ‘Our job at EMC is to put the I back into IT.’
“EMC is the clear market leader in storage systems. However, their long-run strategy is to move up the stack and provide compelling solutions that address the information management, access and sharing needs we face today. Recent acquisitions are making this possible and EMC has the vision to pull it all together. Think about all of the information contained in any organization and the benefits of placing it on the net, including content management, online documents, workflow and collaborative sharing of documents, etc. Combine this with a tiered-information management strategy that can move information from fast, expensive disk to slower, less-expensive storage automatically and you have a recipe for success.
“What about the other companies and my thoughts on their future success? I could almost write a book on my thoughts, more than the space that can be allocated to this brief report. However, I would like to note with interest the comments from Jonathan Schwartz of Sun, who maintains a widely read blog (https://blogs.sun.com/jonathan). Did he make a compelling case that Solaris will not be overrun by Linux? Did he make Sun’s strategy clear?
“Without question Jonathan is one of the more brilliant men in leadership positions in the corporate world today. However, I came away from the discussion without a warm fuzzy. While I am a Sun fan from way back, the current Sun message does not resonate with me. Part of that is the style of delivery; part is the lack of clarity in how all of the pieces add up to create the whole. I wasn’t the only one present to make such an observation.
“These brief examples show the importance of having these discussions. Like a handicapper who walks down to see the jockeys work with the horses before the big race, I want to meet the leaders of these companies and have my questions and concerns addressed. I want that warm fuzzy feeling you get when all seems right with the world and my selection of long-run partners.
“Why is this important? Because CIOs need to know who will win and who will lose. If you ‘choose wisely’ you may not obtain eternal life, but something longer than the average two-year tenure of CIOs may be possible. We all know CIOs who have made significant commitments to vendors that are no longer around (remember Digital?). As someone who recently passed the five-year mark, or 100 years in CIO time, I want another five years. Don’t you? Well then you might want to consider VORTEX when it rolls around a year from now. I know I will be there again asking the tough questions.”
Thanks Dave. Next week: Insights from the aforementioned Jonathan Schwartz. You can decide from yourself whether you get a warm fuzzy. As always, you can reach me at jgallant@vortex.net.
Bye for now.
P.S. Your fun fact for the week. The Boston Bruins, Celtics and Patriots all beat teams from St. Louis to win their first national championships. Weird, huh?
