CeBIT Australia 2005

24 May 2005

Attended this one this afternoon – it was rather impressive, with over 600 exhibitors. I was surprised by the prevalence of open-source businesses there… that, along with VoIP, were probably the two emergent technologies this year. There were also the usual business CRM/”knowledge” drones, but they generally stuck to themselves, so that was okay.

Aside from that, various content management systems were out in force – including one or two that apparently haven’t caught onto the semantic web yet. Most notably, one was demoing their CMS on a massive plasma screen with blatantly obvious character encoding errors everywhere (you know, characters displaying as black diamonds with question marks). I quizzed one of them about it and he basically said that it was something to do with their not demoing it on a live site. Bull.

If you can’t get that sort of stuff right at a trade show, when you’re trying to sell products, what are the chances of actually being able to deliver?

Another provider, Netcat.biz, seemed to have the right idea in terms of sematics at least in their presentation at CeBIT, but a quick check of their own website reveals a lack of a DOCTYPE, despite their use of CSS for presentation and a not-too-horrible (or relatively easy to patch up) markup situation.

There’s still clearly a market for truly accessible content management, although I doubt many business customers would actually know the difference. Unfortunately, that’s the reality of it, and possibly why neither of these two companies (there were other CMS exhibitors, but those two stood out as most ‘impressive’, regardless as to the quality of their solution) have bothered to develop such a product.

Sigh.

Whilst I’m on a bit of a rant, the exhibition had a blatantly sexist culture happening. ATI and Sapphire were probably the worst offenders, employing lycra bodysuits to attract attention, but they were by no means the only ones. Short skirts were the norm for many female salespeople at the event – one has to wonder when the IT industry is going to grow up.

In all, however, the event was impressive – signage and event displays were wonderfully over-the-top, exhibitors, for the most part, knew what they were talking about, and free coffee abounded!