By
Damon Poeter
13 November 2007 02:34PM
Tags:
amds | ruiz | innovate | die
It's time for the high-tech industry to finally put aside the function of IT as "support" and fully embrace a proactive role in building businesses as integral drivers of growth, said Advanced Micro Devices CEO Hector Ruiz in his morning keynote at Oracle Open World on Monday.
Ruiz, channeling Thomas Friedman, noted that in recent years it has become clear that "technology has allowed us to evolve in this flat world." The head of AMD pointed to broad, rapid advances in developing countries as examples of technology helping people to leapfrog challenges to increase productivity and quality of life.
"Look at the developing world, where people used mobile phone technology to leap over the costly infrastructure that was once required to make phone calls. We are going to see those same countries use mobile device technology to close the gap on Internet connectivity in the coming years," said Ruiz, speaking at the weeklong San Francisco conference.
Ruiz argued that the two big challenges facing the industry were making computing more energy efficient and developing widespread Internet access to all corners of the globe. The CEO of the Sunnyvale, Calif.-based chipmaker stressed the opportunities arising from virtualisation as being key to achieve these goals.
"We have the opportunity and the responsibility to think bigger about the impact of IT on business," he said.
In the second half of his keynote, Ruiz brought out top executives from several AMD hardware and software partners to answer challenges forwarded by customers in the gaming, sports and entertainment industries.
Shane Robison of HP, John Fowler of Sun Microsystems and Mark Jarvis of Dell shared the stage with Ruiz, discussing solutions to questions posed by customers at Electronic Arts, MLB.com and Lucasfilm.
Robison addressed the needs of EA, a global game development company that must manage employees from disparate places and forge them into a team. To facilitate the kind of communication an EA needs, Robison said the IT industry can provide business technology and information management tools to optimise and simplify access to all the important areas where collaboration is most needed.
A question from MLB.com was handled from Fowler. The Web site, jointly owned by all 30 major league baseball clubs, needs technology that scales fast to meet rapidly growing demand for more real-time content and broader access to statistical data.
"We're going to see very deep real-time analytics available to all subscribers of MLB.com. And they're looking to monetise by delivering globally, so that gets into areas of data management and content protection," Fowler said.
The challenge to IT from Lucasfilm was simple: Help us to keep up with our technology needs at a price we can afford.
"Technology is absolutely vital and essential to what we do, which is some 75 percent of the world's special effects business. Our technology demands grow every day and we need you to help reduce our IT costs. Can you help, and more importantly, will you help? You truly are our only hope," said Rick McCallum, and executive producer of the original Star Wars trilogy, in a taped segment.
Jarvis tackled that rather open-ended plea, saying the IT needs of LucasFilm mirror those of the world writ large, in that many-fold increases in the number of Internet users and devices in the coming years will tax our data manipulation abilities to the limit.
The answer? Simplify, simplify, simplify, said Jarvis.
"We have two choices really. We could we breed more people to staff a growing number of IT departments, but that's not very sustainable or efficient. Or we can simplify IT technology so it's easier to use and doesn't cost as much," he said.
"Look, 70 percent of IT budget goes towards maintaining what we already have, and just 30 percent is spent on innovation. So how do we grow that innovation? We go to open systems instead of legacy ones."
See original article on CRN.com