Software 2006 part 1

Ask and ye shall receive Jason. I attended the first day of Software 2006 as well, so I thought I’d add my voice to that of Will Price, Jeff, Zoli, Sadagopan and others who are also here. Some observations:

Interest and Interaction

Echoing Zoli’s comments, we enterprise software folks aren’t a very lively bunch are we? The conference is very well attended by all corners of the software community, but between presentations there was only the most grudging, perfunctory applause. Also the low interaction between the audience and speakers implies to me we’re still a ways from a participatory web 2.0 ethos in the enterprise.

Trend Surfing

MR Rangaswami kicked the conference off by reviewing the big themes of the past two conferences: offshoring and industry consolidation (this year it’s the ecosystem). It struck me how quick our industry is to jump on the latest trend and believe it’s going to sweep the market. A year passes, we forget about the old trend and move onto the next one, without much of a post mortem.

The irony of MR’s trend review is it was immediately followed by a host of presentations that proceeded to compete on who could interchange the same 4 buzzwords in the most creative way. “InnovationSaaSOpenSource?” “OpenSourceSOASaaSInnovation!” “InnovationInnovationOpenSourceSOASOA…” Every once in a while someone would throw in a “web 2.0” just to mix it up.

These are all big important trends in our industry but sometimes they were interchanged indiscriminately despite the fact that they’re extremely conceptually dissimilar. It was like a screenwriter pitching a Hollywood producer with: “Hey, it’s Batman meets Brokeback Mountain meets Pimp My Car!”

My favorite of the keynotes/panelists was Goldman Sach’s Rick Scherlund. He was exceptionally thoughtful and did a great job articulating how many of the new hot trends will co-exist with the status quo they’re meant to tear down:

- multi-tenancy and on-premise
- open source and proprietary
- bottom-up, user based purchasing and centralized, “buyer’s circle” based purchasing

I also attended both of the software showcases on open source and enterprise applications. Each session was comprised of 5 companies doing rapid fire 10 minute presentations/demos. These were very thought provoking and will be the subject of a future post.