Charles Wang, CEO of Computer Associates International Corp, warmed up for the CA World conference in New Orleans Sunday, by heaping scorn on today’s graphical user interfaces such as Windows. I think it’s terrible. That’s not user friendly, I don’t care what you say. The future, said Wang, lies with realistic 3-D interfaces.
The future, in fact, lies with interfaces built with the products of companies such as ViewPoint DataLabs International Inc, which CA acquired in the fourth quarter last year. Wang said that Viewpoint’s visualization software will turn tomorrow’s business interface into a real 3-D type world. So far CA has used visualization software in animation for movies but it will also integrate it with its mainstream enterprise products, including Jasmine and Unicenter.
And the new business interfaces won’t just look different, they will be intelligent, adapting themselves to user work habits via the neural network agents or ‘neugents’ pattern recognition technology CA acquired in 1997 when it bought AIWare. Neugents will be used in Unicenter to predict NT system failures, said Wang, with no apparent irony. The agents have already been integrated into Jasmine where they make database queries more efficient by learning from rules and previous queries (CI No 3,661).
Wang said he believes that there will be a fundamental shift in IT and the perception of IT. Computer systems have traditionally been used to cut costs, he argues. We’re not about saving money, he said, building businesses is about creating wealth. Information Technology is just another commodity, he said, with computing power and bandwidth the units. Wang sees a future which IT, like electricity, is access from a wall socket, and paid for by use.
Wang spoke persuasively on why IT should be higher up the corporate hierarchy, saying that more than half of the world’s CIOs still report to CFOs. The status of the CIO in companies, he forecasts, should and will rise as a result of the new position of IT within companies.
