Governator, California CIO to Be Guests of Honor at CeBIT

CeBIT will be opening its gates in Hannover, Germany, on March 2. The world’s largest IT and telecom trade show will feature California as its so-called “Partner IT State” and will highlight the hot themes of “Webciety” and green IT.

Webciety? That’s a new one.

The Governator, Arnold Schwarzenegger, will be the conference’s guest of honor. California’s new CIO, Teri Takai, will also be a guest of honor and make a presentation. The Station will be there to find out how she intends to solve her state’s legacy IT problems. Did you know that the hugely antiquated California HR department is still using a COBOL-based system from the 1970s?

The biggest names at CeBIT 2009 include Deutsche Telekom, Microsoft, IBM, SAP, Software AG, Datev, Vodafone, Intel, Dell, Hitachi, Panasonic, Adobe, Alcatel-Lucent, British Telecom, Hewlett-Packard, Rittal, Lampertz, Oracle, Samsung, Yahoo, Symantec, E-Plus, Xing, LinkedIn, Acer, Porsche and Volkswagen.

Yours truly will be speaking twice at the huge conference, addressing the audience on March 3 on the topic, “eWEEK’s Take on IT 2009: Nothing’s Certain Except Death, Taxes and Buying Storage.” On March 4, the topic will be: “Is Cloud Computing the Real Deal, or Just Steamed-Up Hype?”

The Station would like to take this opportunity to thank writer colleague Sharon Linsenbach, who came up with the first title in a story she recently wrote about FalconStor for Channel Insider.