opinion It's CeBIT week in Sydney, and Australia's technology industry is tremendously excited.
The epicentre of the buzz is located on the show floor in the voluminous cavern of Sydney's Exhibition Centre, where hundreds of technology companies and other organisations have spent mega-dollars on huge glamorous stalls proclaiming their wares.
Dell's mini-ampitheatre is hosting talks on scalable storage and handing out free showbags while a barista makes visitors premium coffee. A bevy of yellow and black clad eWay consultants are swaming like bees around customers, under a brightly coloured sign proclaiming the presence of security vendor AVG.
The police have parked a huge truck marked 'Police Forward Command Post' in one corner, while the Federal Government went one step further, with an entire semi-trailer across the hall displaying piles of brochures. In another corner one company has hauled in a huge mobile datacentre in a box, while another has installed racks of live servers complete with cooling. A third has a rainbow display of multi-coloured Ethernet cables in every colour.
HP, D-Link, Acer the NSW Government, Pronto Software, the list goes on. Everyone's here '” and business is frenetic. And if you widen the net a little further, things get even more interesting.
