The Interop New York Conference began this morning with Lenny Heyman, VP and General Manager of Interop, introducing the two keynote speakers. Even for an enterprise IT related conference and keynote, there was a fair amount of talk of Web 2.0 and social networking. Heyman stated that technology's main focus these days seems to be on “Facebook and iPhones ... However, it is important to note that the social networking and web 2.0 runs off of the business and networking technologies … they can’t do it without you.”
After Simon Crosby (CTO and Founder of XenSource) spoke, Heyman returned to the stage to present two slides. The first was a poll taken from registered attendees on how their company views social networking in the workplace. Surprisingly only 10% of the companies had completely blocked and prohibited social networks, while the remaining 90% had varying degrees of allowing access to several sites. The second slide showed that collaborative web sites, applications and software were on the rise, with document and presentation collaboration as the top tools being adopted into companies and photos and videos following closely thereafter.
Matthew Glotzbach, Head of Products for Google Enterprise, gave a very impressive
non-technical view of how the rise of innovation in technology is affecting the way in which IT departments have to react to their end users. Glotzbach doled out many quotes and statistics during his speech with colorful Google-esque slides behind him. Several of the interesting statistics included: 2.7 billion active wireless devices in the world which is 1/3 of the World population and that there are 37 million photos uploaded to Flickr every day.
Glotzbach went on to discuss the hot beds of innovation in technology and noted that Israel, while having a population of only 7 million has the highest percentage of engineers per capita. In addition, Israel is only 2nd to the United States for patents in technology, including the innovations of SMS and GPS.