The keynote presentation was held by John Soyring, vice president in IBM’s Solutions and Software division. An interesting talk from time to time, focusing on some of the modern day’s challenges, ranging from healthcare expenses, over climate change to terrorism. For my part, I would have prefered a more focused talk, as some of the issues were treated without much insight. For example, he mentioned poverty as a reason for global terrorism, but failed to explain why terrorists (if we’re talking about the islamic ones) are mostly middle class western europeans, and never from any of the poorest 3. world countries, let alone what it has to do with java and programming…

Anyway, the topic of healthcare was especially interesting from my perspective, as I’m an architect with the danish and Århus-based Healthcare division, and, according to Soyring, a part of the solution to the approaching healthcare problems.

In an american view, the “baby boomers”, a nick name given to the large birthrates of the post-WII years, are now looking for retirement, and this is popularly refered to as “the silver tsunami”, as this large body of people are now leaving the workforce, and will require large amounts of help from the healthcare services, doctors, hospitals etc. We’re facing similar problems in denmark, though we have a less glamoruous name for it, as we call the problem “the elder burden”. He actually mentioned the danish healthcare sector as a prime example of how to do healthcare. In denmark, we may have a bit more nuanced opinion on this. He also mentioned personal electronic medical records, a field in which we are working in at the moment.
IBM has put out a report on this: http://www-03.ibm.com/industries/healthcare/doc/content/landing/2955767105.html

As a solution to these problems, he somehow managed to link them to massively parallel processing environments, being either based on server stacks or community computing, two fields in which IBM plays a major role. I found the arguments a bit stretched, even though he’s most certainly right about the forth coming change in the architectures we build systems from. Here, he also tied a knot to the emergence of SOA and SOA governance, which he found particularly important, as it helps companies predict the value generated by IT.

One of the more interesting side stories, was that of out sourcing to India and China. Apparently, Indian companies are now actively outsourcing their outsourcing businesses, as they are in lack of qualified personnel(!) Also, the labor rates in these parts of the world are rapidly increasing, which in the end will make it less profitable for western companies to outsource their production.

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