Gartner Symposium and ITxpo 2011
BBD was a proud exhibitor at the recent Gartner Symposium held at the CTICC in Cape Town from 23 to 25 August 2011.
This annual event is billed as the most important gathering of CIOs and Senior IT Executives in Africa, and this year there were over one thousand delegates from all over South Africa and the continent.
The theme of this year’s conference was “Re-Imagine IT: Leading from the Front”.
The IT world is changing rapidly, in many cases despite IT leadership, not because of it. Hence IT leaders need to re-imagine their entire view of IT, setting aside old paradigms, and find ways to lead from the front rather than follow reactively.
In line with this theme, Mark Raskino raised the following points in the CIO Resolutions session:
- IT leaders and their teams should get out more! They should spend more time with business teams such as sales teams.
- They should spend more time on information strategy, and less on technology strategy.
- They should embrace and govern consumerisation, rather than fighting it.
- They should make time to gain hands-on experience with trend-leading technologies.
Some points and predictions from other sessions:
- The outlook for South African IT is positive, despite some headwinds. According to Will Hahn, growth in IT spending is higher in SA than many parts of the world.
- South Africa is able to “leapfrog” parts of the worldwide tech cycles, benefitting from lessons learnt in other markets.
- Apple will continue to dominate the Media Tablet market over the next three years. The other major players will be Android and Microsoft. And this is a huge market – according to Peter Sondergaad almost a billion tablets will have shipped by 2016!
- By the end of 2015, one in ten worldwide banking interactions will be initiated via cloud-based banking services.
Taking the Pulse of IT in 2011
This year, as previously, BBD was one of the exhibitors in the ITxpo section of the symposium.
Our stand was well situated in the middle of the ITxpo area, and we had a steady stream of visitors throughout the symposium. This gave our team a chance to meet and catch up with IT leaders from various companies and sectors.
When they were not manning the stand, team members took turns attending various symposium sessions.
Overall, this gave us a high-density exposure to the current state of global and local IT.
BBD Competition
One major drawcard for our stand was the BBD Competition.
In return for completing a simple survey, attendees put themselves in line to win a brand new Apple iPad 2. The popularity of the prize, combined with the sterling efforts of our two brand ambassadors, ensured that we received a record number of entries this year. We passed last year’s record on the first day!
The prize draw was held after the symposium had ended, and the lucky winner was Gregg Abrahams from the Lewis Group in Cape Town. Congratulations to Gregg, who received his iPad in person a few days later, and thanks to all those who took the time to complete our survey. Better luck next time!
BBD at ITxpo and prize winner Gregg Abrahams, Lewis Group
