by Erica Driver.

It's Thursday night of Forrester IT Forum and I've had 19 formal one-on-one meetings with attendees so far, and talked with dozens of other people during meals and breaks and before and after presentations. There's something striking about these conversations, compared to years past. Pretty much every meeting I've had with non-vendor attendees has been about their organization's enterprise collaboration strategy or Information Workplace strategy — or their need to develop one. I've been speaking with information and knowledge management professionals with titles like CIO, VP Emerging Technology, Sr. Project Leader, Dir. Global Strategy and Architecture, and VP of Information Systems. They are coming to 1:1 meetings extremely well-prepared, armed with architecture diagrams, drafts of their collaboration strategy documents, and lists of carefully thought-through questions. What a difference from five years ago when common questions were, "What are other companies doing in the area of collaboration?" or "Which is a better team collaboration tool: eRoom or Groove?"

SAPPHIRE this year is in the historic city of Vienna, famous, among other things, for waltzes, psychoanalysis and Orson Welles’ classic film. The film is actually showing at the local cinema, in a double bill with “Mr. Bean’s holiday,” which makes you wonder exactly what market they are targeting. Next week Ingmar Bergman and “Are You Being Served?”

Sometimes A Cigar Is Only A Cigar

The key theme, as it was a couple of weeks ago at SAPPHIRE US in Atlanta, is the Business Process Platform, SAP’s positioning of NetWeaver as the basis for their customers’ IT architecture. Leo Apotheker echoed our Business Technology concept with his keynote statement that “IT is All About Business”, as described in their press release “SAP’s Apotheker Puts Crowing Touch on Customer Conferences”. Well, this is where they invented the Freudian slip!

The recent “buzz” in the WLAN space among both users and vendors takes a look into Aerohive Networks, the soon-to-launch, controller-less WLAN solution we expect to make its debut at or around Interop 2007 in Las Vegas. Formally emerging from stealth mode this week, the vendor seeks to target CAPEX savings among large, distributed enterprise deployments by removing the need for a WLAN controller in the design of a WLAN. Stating that its access points are, in fact smart, “thin” access points — in keeping with the design mores of competitor’s WLAN offerings, Aerohive offers control of all access points via a centralized software appliance. In this model, the controller does not necessarily go away, rather it is virtualized. Some might counter that this sounds similar to the “thick” AP designs of yore and, to that point, I would be willing to concede it seems somewhat of a hybrid approach; yet another nod to strategies of other WLAN vendors.

Welcome to the Forrester Research IT Infrastructure and Operations blog! As the Research Director for the team, I am pleased to announce our entry into the world of Web 2.0. On the blog, you’ll find entries from analysts covering servers, storage, systems management, networks, and clients that address the major research themes we are pursuing. We’re kicking it off with “virtualization” — a topic that touches on the research interests of everyone on the team. We’re hoping that you too will step up to the plate and offer your own thoughts and experiences with this technology. Each week, we’ll add a new topic to the discussion and I’d welcome your suggestions.