Today is the fourth annual MIT CIO Symposium. The weather could have been better and parking could have been much better (my house is within 25 minutes walking distance from MIT. I drove instead and spent 30 minutes looking for parking) - but the conference is fairly well attended. My JavaOne style outfit stands out a little bit among the business attire crowd at CIO Symposium - but, hey, CIOs need developers, in particular, a developer who just came back from JavaOne and just learned about JavaFX, right?

Right before JavaOne, I was at  IBM Mashup Summit (see Jeff Nolan's blog coverage) organized by Rod Smith and David Boloker at IBM. At Mashup Summit, "Situational Application" was the pop phrase of the day. Interesting enough, the concept of "Situational Application" seems to be fairly popular here at CIO symposium as well.

Jo Hoppe (CIO of Pega Systems) talked about her orgnanization is experimenting with "enabling end users to build their own applications". Kumud Kalia from Direct Energy talked about how to enable a highly acquisitive organization like his (25 acquisitions so far) to integrate and function in an agile fashion. David McFarlane (COO of Nexaweb)  talked about  what he learned about Mashup and composite applications from a customer perspective.

It seems like a coincidence that both Mashup Summit and CIO Symposium are talking about the same topic. But on the other side, it is a fairly good indicator of the level of interest. Mashup Summit is about vendors and CIO Symposium is about customers. Isn't it interesting that their interests are actually converging?