Software 2007 Wednesday: More of the same

The second and final day of Software 2007— CMP Media’s conference for software executives – was very much like the first day, with keynote discussions split between people who had things to say, and people who wanted to get the most value from the fees they paid for the keynote opportunity. (See this earlier entry for my notes about the first day of Software 2007.)

Today’s agenda consisted of four keynotes, from Motorola, Tata Consultancy Services, Microsoft and EMC, and then a brief wrap-up from a McKinsey principal consultant.

Scorecard of Wednesday’s keynotes:

Ed Zander, CEO, Motorola
Company pitchiness: high
Value of presentation: medium

Zander – a Silicon Valley legend – focused on innovation in mobile devices. Software companies and enterprises have to expect mobility everywhere, broadband everywhere, and content everywhere, he said. The challenges are to connect the unconnected, unify disparate wireless and wireline networks, build “wicked cool” devices, drive content to the edge of the network, and provide access to everything everywhere. He then explained what Motorola is doing in those areas. Overall, Zander (pictured) provided an interesting vision of a mobile-centric world from a mobile-centric company. Of coures, that vision is the same as Motorola’s marketing position.

The best quote was, when asked “How will you deal with the forthcoming $500 multimedia phone” – a clear reference to Apple’s forthcoming iPhone – Zander’s answer was, “The real question is, how do they deal with us?” (He then said, “Don’t quote me on that.”)

S. Mahalingam, CFO, Tata Consultancy Services (TCS)
Company pitchiness: low
Value of presentation: high

Mr. Mahalingam was a last-minute substitute for S. Ramadorai, TCS’s CEO; his keynote was in the form of a lengthy interview by BusinessWeek’s Steve Hamm. This helped ensure that there was a lot of value in this discussion, which not only introduced this Indian technology giant to the conference’s attendees, but which also got into a lot of issues regarding outsourcing, the state of India’s labor market, the service economy, and the emergence of China. I will blog about this talk soon, but it was a highlight of the day.

Steve Ballmer, CEO, Microsoft
Company pitchiness: very high
Value of presentation: low

Ballmer is fascinating to listen to. Even when he’s being a company cheerleader, his raw enthusiasm, exuberance and energy are breathtaking (and eardrum-shattering). I mentioned his comments about Linux and Novell in an earlier post.

The point of his keynote was to make the case for Microsoft’s “smart client” business model, which combines Microsoft servers at the back end (in this case, SharePoint), and desktop applications (Office 2007) running on top of Windows Vista. To prove his point, he had a customer, Dassault Systems, do an impressive demo that showed a 3D aerospace parts catalog running through SharePoint and InfoPath. (It was much better than the Salesforce.com demo that Marc Benioff showed yesterday.)

Ballmer lives in a 100% Microsoft-centric world, and his talk could be summarized as a pitch for writing Office applications. In fact, at one point, he loosely defined “Software as a Service” as using Microsoft Office as a front end to access disparate information services, such as those running on SharePoint, Salesforce.com or SAP. There was no vision of the future – only selling The Microsoft Way… that is, The Microsoft Stack.

Jeff Nick, CTO, EMC
Company pitchiness: low
Value of presentation: high

Nick’s presented the most technical of all the talks at Software 2007, and covered the inflection points between the key points of an enterprise IT system: information, application, infrastructure and interaction, all tied together with security. For example, the inflection point between information and interaction is context and semantics – that is, concept like metadata modeling, ontological navigation and extracting knowledge from information.

He discussed the need for developing new methods of innovation which involve process pipelines which engage the customer in a virtuous cycle spanning multiple product lines. He talked about the need to drive collaboration across the enterprise, and linking customers and companies together with tools like blogs, wikis and forums where ideas can be freely shared.

While Nick mentioned that “EMC is doing all these things,” he didn’t focus on EMC products or services. He also acknowledged that innovation of this sort was happening all over the industry; he didn’t claim any special role for EMC as a provider of solutions for those inflection points. Perhaps because Nick is a CTO, and not a CEO, his talk was refreshingly direct. And informative.

Ken Berryman, Principal, McKinsey
Company pitchiness: none
Value of presentation: high

Berryman wrapped up the conference with a ten-minute presentation that made the following points:

• Disruptive change sparks waves of innovation
• The innovative wave of software is on the upswing
• Don’t think that innovation only moves one way: Old business models might work in the future
• Think bottom-up, not top-down, and use communities to build software
• Despite the fad-of-the-month, there are many, many models for building a software business
• Always look for new source of value: Who would have imagined that advertising revenue would be driving software companies?
• Celebrate success: the software industry is growing fast, with 30%-50% margins
• Investment in software companies from venture and private equity is at an all-time high

It was a high note on which to end a fairly good conference.

Next year, CMP is merging Software 2008 with its Interop network infrastructure conference, which will be held April 28-29 in Las Vegas.