Kicking off Gartner’s AADI Summit in Las Vegas

Today kicks off the 2012 Gartner Application Architecture, Development and Integration Summit (AKA AADI) in Las Vegas, Nevada. It’s bright…no, still dark…and early and I’m ready to head over to Caesar’s Palace for the breakfast.

Even before the getting to Las Vegas, I was able to use Gartner’s app to find the agenda and to create a personalized schedule that even ‘books’ constrained sessions. I’d expect nothing less from an organization completely invested in discovery and analysis of the latest in technology.

Nexus of Forces

And even less surprising was the frequency that Cloud, Social and Mobile appeared in the titles of the sessions that run for the next three days. Let’s call it, “Give the people what they want”: Technology people are hungry to understand how these three combine with Information to be what Gartner calls The Nexus of Forces.

The Nexus of Forces is the convergence and mutual reinforcement of social, mobility, cloud and information patterns that drive new business scenarios. Although these forces are innovative and disruptive on their own; together they are revolutionizing business and society, disrupting old business models and creating new leaders. The Nexus is the basis of the technology platform of the future.

Gartner is on to something very big and I’m glad they have a term that describes this ‘thing’ as much bigger than the sum of its parts. While history is full of hyped ideas, I’m not sure computing technology has been at an intersection quite this big before.

New investments

Managing the Nexus of Forces will require most of the companies in attendance to go in directions they’ve never gone before. They’ll need to make investments in technologies in they don’t know very well yet, like:

• Infrastructure - More data, coming faster and from more places
• Visualization and analytics - To find what’s happening hidden in all of that data
• In-memory computing - databases alone are inadequate for the Nexus of Forces
• Event processing - To manage the correlating information that can’t be ‘seen’ without automation
• …and…are you ready for this one? - Business process management (BPM)…because none of this matters if you can’t act on what you know

It always seems to come back to BPM, no matter how much we try to keep the problem a technical one. That’s why technology has been and will remain a matter of connecting the dots…the tools that creates a systematic approach to business, whether that be organizing electrons or people.

Viva, Las Vegas.

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Christopher Taylor