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Tom Laffey was back hosting the keynote, dressed in a cycling shirt from Team TIBCO, one of the best US women’s pro cycling teams. He was joined briefly by a member of the team who also happens to hold a Ph.D. in biology; like any geeky engineer, Laffey giggled nervously in the presence of an attractive, brainy woman in form-fitting cycling gear, although I suspect that some of the nervousness was due to the pair of cycling shorts that she was handing him to try on.

Having covered the product announcements yesterday, this morning’s keynote moved to a customer focus, starting with Simon Post, CTO of Carphone Warehouse discussing how they improved the processes within their IT department. He made an excellent point: there is no "ERP for IT", that is, packaged software for running an IT business; this requires large IT groups roll their own process improvement efforts instead. They have the capability to do it, but that’s not the point: the IT departments are there to provide services to the business, not to spend time building systems for themselves unless no packaged software exists or they need custom capability for a competitive advantage. Carphone Warehouse uses TIBCO products extensively for their IT processes and systems: iProcess and BusienssEvents for the process layer, BusinessWorks for system orchestration, and EMS for messaging. They haven’t stopped at IT processes, however; they’re building their service-oriented architecture and rolling out services across the enterprise, facilitating reuse and reducing costs as they set up new locations in several countries.

I ducked out after that to review notes for my presentation, coming up at 11:30, since I want to take the time to see the Spotfire+BPM session that’s on just before mine.