This week I found myself in London again presenting at a users conference. I like user gatherings. It is always a great chance to talk with people who are real users of technology and since they took time out of their schedule to attend a conference, they are usually pretty passionate about their jobs and the tools they use. This was not a Sun conference, rather one of our partners. It was the Proxima Technology's user conference. Proxima has a great product called Centauri which is essentially a piece of software that has the capability to turn data into information. We all know that there is too much data in the world and not enough information. Meaning that it is often hard to answer real questions with existing data.

If you could wake up and have a dashboard that gave you real insight into your world/buiness, what would be on it? That seems to be the first question the folks at Proxima ask. The point being, we should be able to measure real business processes and value in ways that business folks can understand, by using data sources, telemetry, etc that already exist.

I was speaking on the subject of "IT as a Service". The trends and activities taking place in our industry that are moving in the direction of expressing almost everything as a service. Be it software, computing capability, storage, etc - all moving in the direction of a service.

The names Proxima have chosen for their company and their product are rather interesting. If you don't know, Proxima Centauri is the closest star to the sun. Which is interesting as Proxima is a great partner of Sun. Coincidence? You decide...

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