Diary of an Asian Swing: Day 4

Halfway across the world you go to breakfast and see a neighbor is in your hotel too. How often does it happen? Today I saw an SAP colleague I worked with two decades ago at Sybase – and his colleague, with whom I’ll meet while in Singapore. Great start to the day.

This day was all business. Met several Gartner clients to talk Big Data (since that was my billing.) Interest is high, and like North American firms, one of the key questions, as always, is Value. “What are people doing? What is proving useful from a business perspective?”

Gartner’s local office is beautiful – two floors in a thriving business neighborhood in one of the world’s most vibrant cities. I was told per capita income here is the second highest in the world, and the way the city is kept continues to impress: clean, efficient, beautifully designed and planted with fabulous flora everywhere. Our people here are professional, motivated, friendly and prepared for all our meetings, making sure I know who we’re meeting with and why.

It was a busy, stimulating day capped with dinner with my colleague Arun Chandrasekaran in the Pan Pacific Hotel’s restaurant. Multiple serving stations with different cuisines: Indian, Cantonese, Japanese…. that marvelous Singaporean polyglot cuisine I love. And if the food was good, the conversation was even better. Arun and I talked about how his infrastructure research and my software focus converged in big data and what our next collaboration should be after the Hadoop pilots piece we’re nearing completion on now.

Closing the day with a little BBC World in my room, I watched the pre-election coverage, amused by the overloading of the “battleground states” metaphor when I switched to CNN. They even referred to reporters “embedded” there. Please. Thank goodness this overpriced, overheated exercise will soon be complete. And after all the sound and fury, I don’t expect much will have changed.