As the temperatures cool down, activities within SIMNY heat up. The Women CIO panel was very successful and attracted many participants. Many thanks to our panelists who came from the entire region. The November 12 program will concentrate on the CIO of 2010 – far enough to be futuristic close enough to be realistic. And in December, we have a Google executive as our key note for the traditional holiday dinner. Our SIG for Internet had more than 60 registrants. We will launch an education SIG soon.
So what’s hot in IT now days? Well – it depends. If scale is an issue then you are either using or looking into grid computing. Grids are a bunch of servers that are used as a single virtual resource. The size of the “bunch” varies as well as its characteristics, with deployments ranging from dozens of dual-core servers to several thousands. Some grids are CPU-oriented, while others are memory intensive. The tools vary as well, but this growth is huge, so large that our data centers threatened to collapse. Not due to physical space, as the new servers are normally blades – but due to power requirements. Who imagined five years ago that power will be our bottleneck? I didn’t. What’s next? Back to the mainframe? Don’t laugh – it’s happening. In 1984, a big article in ComputerWorld claimed “The Mainframe is Dead!!”. Twenty-three years later, the mainframe is alive and kicking and the writer is getting older… SIM is addressing these issues as part of its Financial Services SIG – please contact Erich Winkler for details.
Last and not least – on December 14th and 15th the Asia Forum is taking place in Guangzhou, China. As part of the forum which attracts many Fortune 500 CEOs, there will be a technology forum dedicated to IT in China: both as a supplier (outsourcing and BPO) as well as a customer (software, services). SIM will have a special delegation and arrangements, so please contact me for details.
TSVI
Tsvi Gal
February 2007