CIOs Poised To Talk BI, Social Media At Midsize Enterprise Summit

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MES West will be highlighted by keynote speeches from Geoffrey Moore, author and strategic consultant to TCG Advisors, and Andrew McAfee, an associate professor of technology and operations at Harvard Business School.

Moore spoke at the MES East show in May and plans to focus his address on a shift in midsize enterprise IT needs toward more collaboration and next-generation communications applications.

Meanwhile, Moore's address, titled, "Social Media in a Corporate Environment," also looks at how companies are using Web 2.0 technologies to increase revenue, decrease costs and generate innovation.

According to a poll of MES attendees conducted before the show, 70 percent of CIOs use social networking tools for business, but many are still looking for the best ways to leverage the technology.

"I know there's a pretty fair group of people here that used LinkedIn, but I don't know how we'd use [social tools] as a marketing tool for the company," said Carl Gammon, director of information systems at Minntech Corp. in Minneapolis.

At MES, IBM will take the wraps off of IBM Cognos Express, a combination of business intelligence and financial planning applications designed for midsize companies with limited IT resources.

A recent IBM survey of 2,500 CIOs found that 83 percent of midmarket executives ranked business intelligence and analytics as their top priorities for improving competitiveness and cutting costs.

Also at MES, three Gartner vice presidents will address the topics of e-mail in the cloud, enterprise wireless strategy and emerging business intelligence trends.

In addition, dozens of vendors will showcase their technologies at a Solution Showcase, which many CIOs said they use to find products to help solve their business problems.

Michael Pate, director of IT at Complete Production Services in Houston, said he's looking forward to the BI session and to find some new BI vendors at the showcase.

"Our maintenance costs have gone up 18 to 20 percent with our [current Oracle solution]," Pate said. "I believe we can buy a new BI tool from a tier-two vendor and get ROI in less than 12 months."

In other keynotes, Nancy MacKay, president of MacKay & Associates, will speak on how to win the war for IT talent, and Christofer Farrow, of IANS, will talk about securing a virtualized environment.

"Virtualization is a big topic for us. So is business intelligence. Those are a couple of areas in our near-term future," said Minntech's Gammon.

The CIOs will also be voting for vendor awards in six categories: best execution of a midmarket IT solution, best hardware solution, best software solution, best services solution, best of presentation and best of show.

Rick Whiting contributed to this article.