Movin' and shakin' at Cebit
As this column is being written, tens of thousands of IT-savvy business professionals and techno junkies have just descended on Hanover for the Cebit show. Obviously, any Germans within two light years of Hanover will have moved as far away as possible so that they can even rent out their dog kennels to one of the 600,000 visitors for the same price as a brand new BMW.
Cebit is Europe's version of Comdex, but because it's not held in the US and because most of the largest IT movers and shakers are US companies, Cebit's announcements often lack the flair and importance of those made at Comdex. While Cebit is prone to being inundated by overpaid senior managers spouting on about the 'future of whatever', it's an excellent showcase for the latest gadgets coming our way. Like a technology version of Hamley's, Cebit is the show to go to if you want something to perk up your offerings, as well as find out what all of your suppliers are up to.
Microsoft and its eager partners are hoping that the show will pump life into Windows CE on the handheld front, while AMD kicked off things with a demonstration of a 600MHz K. AMD has always milked the soapbox value of Cebit better than most, but this time it is aiming not just to compete with Intel, but to surpass it. Fighting talk has been heard, with AMD boasting that the arrival of the K7 later in the year will beat anything Intel has. No longer a minor irritation but a serious rival to Intel, AMD will use the show to pull in as many manufacturing partners as it can.
Intel, on the other hand, will be practising how to be nice. Ever since the behind closed doors cop-out by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) over its anti-trust lawsuit, Intel has probably been celebrating endlessly. Considering that it didn't have to admit to holding a monopoly in the chip game - despite having an 85 per cent share - the FTC's deal is small change. That said, Intel is prohibited from withholding advance technical information about its processors from customers unless it is for 'legitimate business reasons'.
It is also prevented from refusing to sell chips to a customer for reasons related to an intellectual property dispute with that customer. So, now that it has to be officially nice and fluffy it can probably afford to reduce the size of its team of sharks - sorry, lawyers - by at least 1,000.
Back at Cebit, 3Com introduced us to the buzzword destined to drive us all mad once the damned millennium bug has sunk into oblivion. 'Convergence' is the talk of Hanover and 3Com is just one of many that will bombard us with convergence theories and technologies over the coming months.
Convergence of voice and data networking is inevitable and will probably steal the limelight at the forthcoming Networks Telecom show (see Advantage, page 64) in Birmingham in June.
There's plenty of money to be had in convergence and discerning network resellers are already banging the drum. If not, they should be, because you can never be sure when the next big thing in networking is about to land.