Romesh Wadhwani: Software Captain

You have to read this blog - it summarizes Romesh Wadhwani’s impactful keynote speech at  the Enterprise Conference  I attended last week.  Bruce Richardson at AMR wrote his perspective on the conference, and so did I.

Romesh is a remarkable industry leader with fingers in a a number of enterprise software companies.  Symphony Technology Group, his holding company has stakes in IRI, Intentia (recently merged with Lawson), GERS Retail Systems, and Symphony Services. The Services group in turn outsources R&D development for a number of software companies like Siebel, Manugistics, Autodesk and others.

Prior to his role as investor (and industry leader), Romesh had a huge hit when he sold his company Aspect Development to i2 at the peak of the internet bubble.

What I liked about Romesh's speech (and the blog) was it had a senior adviser tone. Yes the industry has challenges, here are some new ways to approach things. Not everyone in the audience agreed with every one of his 10 themes - but every session referenced at least one or two of them. That's a measure of a good keynote speech and a man who knows the industry very well.