New Florence. New Renaissance.

Analyst Cam: Erik Keller - A Therapist’s Garden

As we have moved to virtual briefings, I have increasingly been excerpting short video segments (with permission) as part of my Analyst Cam series.

I occasionally invite authors to present on their new books in this series. This time it is my former Gartner colleague and mentor, Erik Keller

In his book, available at Amazon, he shares his personal journey after he retired from his technology analyst career and became a master gardener and from there a horticultural therapist. He has helped over a thousand clients including cancer patients and juvenile delinquents with the restorative power of flora.

We cover a surprising amount of STEM topics – gene sequencing in plants, how drones and mapping tech have influenced gardening, Google Lens and gardening mobile apps. I am driving to SAP’s Sapphire event in Orlando this week, and will probably talk about spargel (white asparagus) season (which goes from April to June) with many of the German executives. Erik reminisces about his trips to their HQ in Walldorf and has a botanical angle on the delicacy.

We also discuss how much more information is available even to the amateur gardener nowadays. And how much publishing has changed since his last book, Technology Paradise Lost, he wrote in 2004.

Very inspirational and educational half an hour.

Razer’s Modular PC

From BusinessWeek

The State of Blade Servers

InfoWorld reviews the state of Dell, HP and Sun blades.

Disappearing Ink

It is being used on temporary visitor passes - as the day goes by the ink disappears so you or someone else cannot use those credentials the day after. Why not with printed documents so they could be recycled over and over? That is the concept being tested by "garbologists" at Xerox.

Read more at NY Times

Florence during the Renaissance

Welcome to my new blog. Some of you may have read my Deal Architect blog.

I spend much of my time helping CIOs reduce their “utility” spend with large, incumbent vendors and started my Deal Architect blog to focus on efficiencies and savings opportunities. But the more I work with CIOs the more I realize, for an amazingly new set of economics, they can leverage innovation from many new sources, often from completely unexpected places around the world.  While there is so much noise around “consolidation and the death of innovation” and “IT doesn't matter”. If you cut through the fog and the noise, we are really in the midst of a revolutionary time. And so I also started to write posts on the blog about innovative CIOs and business applications.

I  believe all this innovation deserves its own blog - so I am starting a "spin-off".

This is what Florence must have felt like during the Renaissance with so much happening in so many technology areas:

“Mobile Internet” - see this fascinating presentation by Mary Meeker of Morgan Stanley as she generates renewed excitement this time around the “new Web”

Open Source - when Kleiner Perkins shows excitement, it is usually a pretty solid endorsement for a sector as this BusinessWeek article describes

BPO - a growing recognition in corporations business processes need to be “commoditized” and the wide array of call center, transaction processing and knowledge work that is being done in India and elsewhere

Sensor Telemetry - somewhat high-faluting term used by Accenture to describe all the neat payback companies are seeing from combining RFID, GPS and wireless technologies

Software as a service - the excitement being generated by AppExchange from salesforce.com and the growing understanding of operational and financial success factors for the model

Digital content and new media - the realities of the on-demand, blogging and podcasting world and how Madison Avenue is changing - and changing us along the way

Analytics - a growing focus on the challenge of master data management and the promise of next generation predictive analytics

Security and Surveillance: All the stuff from biometrics to other sensors to basic security for fraud detection and intrusion management

I did not even mention web services, mesh networks, collaboration, storage and server technologies and a whole bunch more.

Here’s what’s really exciting. This time “Florence” is virtual. Open source excitement from Scandinavia, mobile commerce excitement from Japan, BPO from India. New media in the US. Telemetry payback in utilities and healthcare. Security payback in financial services and government. BPO in insurance claims and mortgage processing.

And for a change, many of the technology initiatives do not require 8 or 9 digit budgets. You see this is why CIOs send me emails like this one ” ..more power to your elbow in driving out waste and excessive premia in our industry”. They all want the “innovation dividend” so they can book that trip to the new Florence. Exciting times!

Over the next few weeks, I will be moving many of the innovation focused posts from the Deal Architect blog .The Deal Architect blog will continue to focus on technology negotiation, process efficiencies and reducing “utility” spend. Look forward to your comments on both blogs.

Gartner Survey of CIO Priorities

Gartner's annual survey of CIOs (1,400 surveyed with average IT budget of $ 71 million and staff of 300 IT employees) shows Business Process Improvement as the highest priority for 2006. Not surprising based on comments I got back from a few of them as they read my "process angioplasty" post.

Many of the innovative CIOs I have written about in the last year - Steelcase, Starbucks, others have focused on mobility, telemetry, predictive analytics, biometrics and collaboration applications. They have found huge paybacks from relatively small investments in those areas. Not surprisingly, those technologies get high priority. While the software industry keeps hyping up SOA as the silver bullet, CIOs rated that 6th in importance on technology priority. Another buzzword "virtualization" shows up 9th.

Gartner's annual survey of CIOs (1,400 surveyed with average IT budget of $ 71 million and staff of 300 IT employees) shows Business Process Improvement as the highest priority for 2006. Not surprising based on comments I got back from a few of them as they read my "process angioplasty" post.

Many of the innovative CIOs I have written about in the last year - Steelcase, Starbucks, others have focused on mobility, telemetry, predictive analytics, biometrics and collaboration applications. They have found huge paybacks from relatively small investments in those areas. Not surprisingly, those technologies get high priority. While the software industry keeps hyping up SOA as the silver bullet, CIOs rated that 6th in importance on technology priority. Another buzzword "virtualization" shows up 9th.

Now this is Utility Computing!

One of the oldest free Web e-mail services, Hotmail relies on more than 10,000 servers spread around the globe to process billions of e-mail transactions per day. What’s interesting is that despite this enormous amount of traffic, Hotmail relies on less than 100 system administrators to manage it all."

Courtesy of Sadagopan I saw this interview with Phil Smoot, an engineer at Hotmail.

I have complained before that the outsourcing definition of "utility computing" does not deliver its economies of scale, does not take advantage of automation - read here.

Phil has to deliver to SLAs which require availability 365x24x7 - given its global mail users. His price is zero - it is a free service. And he has some of the most hostile users in the world - spammers. He has engineered his environment to depend more on automation, rather than labor.

If he can do it so can the outsourcing industry. He provides a very good role model for emerging utility computing scenarios.

Leonardo da Intel

Intel which has fueled so much of our personal productivity over the last 3 decades is poised to expand in to several "business platforms" - health care, the digital home and others. As these BusinessWeek and NY Times articles show, the transformation is well under way.

Leonardo da Vinci was the original Renaissance Man because he so effortlessly moved from art to science to urban planning. Intel is poised to be something similar in the new Renaissance.

Intel which has fueled so much of our personal productivity over the last 3 decades is poised to expand in to several "business platforms" - health care, the digital home and others. As these BusinessWeek and NY Times articles show, the transformation is well under way.

Leonardo da Vinci was the original Renaissance Man because he so effortlessly moved from art to science to urban planning. Intel is poised to be something similar in the new Renaissance.

Emereging Technologies: ExtremeTech

In keeping with the theme of Florence during the Renaissance, this is part of a series of posts around what various industry influencers consider promising - or in some cases over hyped - technologies. It goes way beyond the current buzz around Web 2.0. Some technologies/tools are available today - others are still a work in progress, and applications will take a while to be commericially viable. Not all may directly influence information technology, but as we know advances in most branches of science eventually impact others.

I liked the taxonomy ExtremeTech, a Ziff Davis site uses to organize its materials on emerging technologies

3G Networks- The evolution of wireless networks into voice, video and data. 

Bio Chips- Technology inside the body.

Digital Paper- Foldable, persistent electronic displays and e-ink. 

Digital Rights Management- The war over content, and the rights to use it.

eBooks- Publishing in the electronic age. 

Fiber- Last-mile, high-speed broadband.

Fuel Cells- Techniques and implementations of alternative fuels. 

GPS- Finding your way in the digital age.

Grid Computing- Distributed computing, thousands of servers, one Web site.

Identity Management - The pros and cons of warehousing personal information.

Internet2- How the next-generation Internet is being used. 

IPv6 -Tracking the shift toward the complex, next-generation IP addressing scheme.

LCOS- Liquid Crystal on Silicon technology, displays and enhancements.

Mesh Networks - How WiFi networks are being tied together into municipal broadband.

Nanotechnology - Enhancements in science, medicine and technology at the molecular level. 

Organic LEDs - The problems and potentials of low-cost, self-luminous displays.

Photonic Computing -Computing with light—instead of electricity. 

RFID -Dog tags for the digital age—the devices and the deployments.

Robots - The evolving robot, in automation, medicine, and the home. 

RSS -The evolution of content distribution on the Web.

Satellite Radios - Coast-to-coast radio, in your pocket and your car. 

Sensors -Without sensors, there is no detection. And with no detection, there is no control.

Smart Home - How technologies like voice recognition, Bluetooth, and Z-Wave will automate the home of the future. 

Solar Power- How researchers and corporations are using the sun as an alternative fuel source.

Ultrawideband - From Wireless USB to wireless surround sound, UWB is leading the way. 

VOIP -The handsets, services, and technologies allowing you to make phone calls over the Internet.

WiMax - Intel has high hopes that this will replace DSL and cable broadband. We’ll tell you if it will. 

Zigbee -Making sense of this cool-sounding technology for unwiring home automation.

Emereging Technologies: MIT Technology Review

This is part of a series of posts around what various industry influencers consider promising - or in some cases ove rhyped - technologies. It goes way beyond the current buzz around Web 2.0. Some technologies/tools are available today - others are still a work in progress, and applications will take a while to be commericially viable   Not all may directly influence information technology, but as we know advances in most branches of science eventually impact others.

Technology Review, asssociated with MIT, had this list in May 2005

Airborne Networks - An Internet in the sky could let planes fly safely without ground controllers
Quantum Wires - Wires spun from carbon nanotubes could carry electricity farther and more efficiently
Silicon Photonics - Making the material of computer chips emit light could speed data flow
Metabolomics -A new diagnostic tool could mean spotting diseases earlier and more easily
Magnetic-Resonance Force Microsocpy:  The promise is a 3-D view of the molecular world
Universal memory: Nanotubes make possible ultradense data storage
Bacterial Factories: Overhauling a microbe’s metabolism could yield a cheap malaria drug
Enviromatics: Computer forecasts enhance farm production and species diversity.
Cell phone viruses: Wireless devices catch bad code through the air and then infect supposedly secure computer systems
Biomechatronics: Mating robotics with the nervous system creates a new generation of artificial limbs that work like the real thing.

This is part of a series of posts around what various industry influencers consider promising - or in some cases ove rhyped - technologies. It goes way beyond the current buzz around Web 2.0. Some technologies/tools are available today - others are still a work in progress, and applications will take a while to be commericially viable   Not all may directly influence information technology, but as we know advances in most branches of science eventually impact others.

Technology Review, asssociated with MIT, had this list in May 2005

Airborne Networks - An Internet in the sky could let planes fly safely without ground controllers
Quantum Wires - Wires spun from carbon nanotubes could carry electricity farther and more efficiently
Silicon Photonics - Making the material of computer chips emit light could speed data flow
Metabolomics -A new diagnostic tool could mean spotting diseases earlier and more easily
Magnetic-Resonance Force Microsocpy:  The promise is a 3-D view of the molecular world
Universal memory: Nanotubes make possible ultradense data storage
Bacterial Factories: Overhauling a microbe’s metabolism could yield a cheap malaria drug
Enviromatics: Computer forecasts enhance farm production and species diversity.
Cell phone viruses: Wireless devices catch bad code through the air and then infect supposedly secure computer systems
Biomechatronics: Mating robotics with the nervous system creates a new generation of artificial limbs that work like the real thing.