I'm down this Tuesday/Wednesday at EPS.  It's a pretty cool idea and one that Microsoft has been doing in other regions (Europe, Asia) for a while.  Basically, it's a couple hundred executives from Microsoft partners and a couple dozen of executives from Microsoft.  Over a day and a half, everyone talks about the future of the Information and Communications Technology (ICT) industry. Very cool!

One of the most interesting things for me today, was hearing both Simon Witts (Corporate Vice President, Enterprise & Partner Group) and Rich Reynolds (General Manager, Windows Commercial Marketing).  What was interesting was that they both talked about an idea that Reynolds called 'comsumerization'. 

Reynolds was talking from a Windows client perspective (i.e. Vista) about how, increasingly, users expect a seamless flow between their personal computing environment and the professional computing environment - between work and home.

Witts was talking about how Microsoft was the only company working across the 'broad canvas' - mobile, desktop, web, etc;  Witts elaborated on why support for the broad canvas was important:

1. There's a large partner & customer opportunity by breaking down silos (as an aside, partner & customer opportunity is understood to be a good opportunity for Microsoft).
2. Because every technology is flowing from the consumer market into the enterprise (basically from home into work)

This 'comsumerization' has been identified at imason for a while.  The notion that innovation is happening at the consumer level and flowing into the enterprise (or creating pressure on the enterprise) is a 180 degree reversal from the last 20 years of computing where innovation happened first in the Enterprise and then flowed into the consumer market.  I'm surprised this trend hasn't received more press.

This trend, or what we call at imason a Market Insight, is a significant driver behind our recent split into two Business Units - Employee-facing Solutions and Customer-facing Solutions.  We felt it was critically important that we stay in the market where we're building solutions for consumers (technically, we still build them for our clients, but the end-users are consumers).  This is where most of the the innovation is happening, and that's where we want to be!

Anyway,  back to the session.... Live demo of Windows 7 is going on now as I type!