Software Conference
How are large multinational corporations dealing with changes in the software industry? CIOs of several large organizations discuss how their IT departments are dealing with budgets and vendor relations in a constantly changing environment. Learn how companies like Wal-Mart, Shell, and Motorola are getting the best bang for their buck in this Software 2006 Keynote Chief Information Officers panel.
In this fireside chat with Andreas Kluth, S. Ramadorai discusses India's rise in the IT world and compares it to China's emerging role. India has gone from being perceived as a non-participant in the high-tech industry, to a major resource, to an innovation engine and a market. Ramadorai also discusses the shift in IT from a products focus to an industry that he argues is based on knowledge and services.
Microsoft is a platform company and they are eager to redefine how business practices are automated. Simon Witts, Corporate VP of the Enterprise and Partner Group at Microsoft, discusses the company's new People-Ready campaign, which aims to change the formal definition of business practice and empowers people to make decisions. As keynote speaker at the Software 2006 Conference, Witts describes the Microsoft strategy for customer relationship management.
One seventh of humanity cannot read and write. Because of this, making projects in the developing world often depends on educating locals and distributing low tech devices, such as books. At the Software 2006 conference the Scaling Organizations Panel discusses how problems in the developing world cannot be solved by imposing solutions from the top, but by co-creating appropriate solutions with the aim of building trust and respect.
As we enter the next era of software, market leaders are faced with a dilemma. Early innovators can soon become victims of their own success, bound by the demands of a large customer base. Meanwhile, startups and upstarts gain the edge in the innovation space. In this talk, Mark Bregman shares his insights and Symantec's vision for maintaining leadership while driving innovation to face the challenges of Security 2.0.
"The location barrier [around innovation] is finally broken." In his keynote address to the Software 2006 Conference, Dr. Prahalad explains how traditional centers of innovation, like Silicon Valley, will soon become just one of many interdependent nodes in a global technology ecosystem. In addition to the geographic breakdowns, barriers between industries are beginning to break down. Prahalad discusses what we might expect to see, as industry convergence gains momentum.
Outsourcing work to other countries presents challenges along with the obvious benefits. Companies must overcome time, cultural, and language differences to compete effectively. In this session of the Software 2006 conference David DeWalt, President of the EMC Software Group, talks about how his company has adapted to changing global business needs and what has gone into integrating traditional software business practices with open source software platforms such as Linux, PHP and MySQL.
Oracle has combined its existing database and application suites with many of its recent product acquisitions to create a new, unified platform called Fusion Architecture. In his keynote address at the Software 2006 conference, Thomas Kurian, VP of Development at Oracle, looks at the current trends in enterprise software and explains how Oracle is addressing them, with particular reference to Fusion.
After weathering the bubble and Y2K, the enterprise software industry must now figure out how to integrate into an ever more networked world. Top analysts take up the challenge in this lively panel discussion from Software 2006. Service Oriented Architecture holds promise as a platform for sharing business processes. But what are the pressures on the big and small players in this new world? Will customers buy in? How can IT be seen not just as a cost center, but as a true provider of service and innovation?
It's time to get excited about software again. Software spending is up, capital investment is up, but what does Web 2.0 really mean for the enterprise? Vanessa Colella blends optimism with practical suggestions on how software companies can move to the next phase by understanding their niche in the customer's ecosystem. Shifting the focus from the provider to the customer will help companies rise to the new challenges of supporting tacit interactions, those messy decisions-based problems which businesses, and software vendors, must now face.