Red is gray and Yellow white

It felt like a Moody Blues moment at the Sandhill Enterprise conference I attended this week. So many different things are blurring in our industry

I asked John Baumgartner of BP as he finished presenting on tech innovations BP is leveraging from Second Life to mashups to  location aware services, if  the innovations were  winning IT back  respect with the business community. His response - the lines between business and IT are blurring. Business is coming up with many tech ideas and IT is increasingly embedded in products and processes.

3 of the 5 vendors showcased in the Next Big  Thing session are selling hardware appliances, hosting and telecommunication gadgets. So much for calling them "software" vendors.

Ray Lane presented on the theme of the "personal enterprise" - the consumerization of technology. Prof. C.K. Prahalad in his opening keynote focused on a similar theme.  One of the vendors showcased in the Next Big Thing is pioneering an advertiser funded model in enterprise software. Another is pioneering multi-player gaming concepts in the enterprise.

Finally, there were repeated references to emerging technology and vendors from around the world.

Interestingly, there was little positive discussion of MISO during the session, even though the underlying focus was to reminisce the last decade of enterprise software. The Nights in White Satin theme is appropriate.

We are seeing the end of an era. And the beginning of a shiny, somewhat confusing, new day.