Editor's Blog: Post-CIO Forum

My head is a bit clearer now. Looking back on Tuesday this week - our CIO Forum - a few observations come to mind.

It was a great gathering of CIOs and other top technology types. Those on the programme, many of whom are close contacts of silicon.com's all year round, were outstanding. The feedback has been gratifying.

It was all those things and more (See all our related content here.) But looking back, I'm going to be selfish and mention five minutes of prime stage time I had at the start of the day.

Before opening the day, and handing over to the much more capable hands of chair René Carayol and keynoter Peter Cochrane, I hadn't been sure how much to have a go at events similar to ours. But I did it anyway.

Many have a publication's name above the door - but the publication might send along one reluctant editor. Many claim to be events for CIOs - but you're hard-pressed to find any CIOs there. The silicon.com team was all over our event and about 40 per cent of the audience of 250 were CIOs or equivalent. (And it's interesting that the people who tend to complain about non-CIOs being allowed in are often not CIOs themselves.)

Bottom line: I was proud of our set-up. Of course what was said and done through the day was at least as important and it was consistently compelling... I guess you had to be there.

That evening, I made the long journey to the CNET Networks UK Technology Awards to see where the gongs were going. OK, so I knew where the gongs were going, having been a judge way back at the start of the summer, spanning the judges' day in July, right up to catching up with Sir Robin Saxby a week or two ago to film his acceptance speech for winning the Outstanding Contribution to the UK Technology Industry award.

I know Robin going back some way. A plaque on the wall of ARM's offices (he was CEO and then chairman of that chip designer) from 1998 reminded me of covering that company's IPO back then and conversations we'd had about all sorts of things - Liverpool FC, mending old TV sets and even the future of tech and tech talent in the UK.

A nicer guy in the industry you could not meet. I'm looking forward to his upcoming year, as an industry evangelist with the IET and outside of ARM for the first time in a long time. He follows Sir Terry Matthews and Sir Tim Berners-Lee as the winners of the past two years. But you don't have to be a Sir, I'm told.

Finally, catch up with me tomorrow. I want to get writing about an interesting briefing yesterday with Shai Agassi, one of the biggest execs at German software giant SAP and - to my mind - clearly a CEO-in-waiting. I was impressed. Maybe he should have made our Agenda Setters 2006 list. Blame that project's judges, whoever they were.