Publication: Silicon, 15 Nov 2011
But, rather unusually, CA Technologies' choice of pre-keynote entertainment at its CA World event seemed to me to almost verge on the profound.
The company kicked off its customer conference in Las Vegas last night with Cirque du Soleil performers, and it's very tempting for me to view such entertainment as a vision of the state of enterprise IT.
Could the clown, juggling while balancing on a giant ball, represent the harassed and overworked CIO? If so, perhaps the mime with an iPad is a living metaphor, representing the difficulty the IT department has in communicating its ideas to the rest of the business? And in which case, should we interpret the exotic stilt walker as the CEO, peering at the business from a perch way up high, but unable to see the details that matter?
Could the advent of cloud computing spare the CIO the need to juggle competing demands placed on the IT department?
No doubt none of this was intended by CA Technologies when it booked the performers, but it struck me that they did fit rather elegantly with the content of the first session at the event - a discussion that explored the consequences of cloud computing, and touched on how the cloud is reinventing the familiar roles of CIO, CEO and IT professional.
