The New Digital Divide: Personal vs Enterprise Technology

The Annual CTO Roundtable Event was held at the very impressive CIT facility in Northern Virginia. Walt Mossberg (WSJ) and Todd McKinnon (salesforce.com), each presented their vision of the future of consumer and enterprise technologies.

Todd kicked-off the event with the salesforce.com view that all enterprise applications will be delivered as a service (SAAS). He emphasised the value of multi-tenancy in reducing the operational cost of applications and is confident that the SAAS vendors will narrow the gap by quickly delivering consumer-side innovations to the enterprise. Of all the SAAS vendors (I have first hand experience having worked for Brassring, an ASP in the recruitment space), salesforce.com is the most successful and well known. I am quite intrigued by their release of apex on-demand programming language.

Walt, on the contrary, believes that corporate IT departments are the main impediment in the way of end-user requirements driving the corporate IT agenda. As expected, Walt presented a very controversial view point, making the event very interesting and successful. He was insightful and very entertaining.

I will get into the details of both views in future posts.