Now, it’s rare for me to hear something at an industry conference that makes me freeze in my seat, hold my breath and hope to hell no one notices I’m taking notes. But that was the case at this conference’s CIO Town Hall on mobility, where the audience was encouraged to talk about issues related to mobile computing.

For talk they did — about the financial costs associated with “bring your own device” versus company-owned mobile devices, for example. About disaster recovery for mobile devices. About the relative merits and shortcomings of the mobile device management vendors out there. (P.S.: Just because your name is Good doesn’t necessarily mean everybody thinks you are.) Whether virtualizing desktops is the answer to making mobility work in the enterprise. Whether it is the CIO’s job to give employees the device they want.

Click on the links and you’ll see that these are issues we’ve tackled on SearchCIO.com this year, as mobile computing is reshaping — at warp speed, it sometimes seems — how IT provisions and supports the technology employees use to do their jobs. But let me tell you, it was edifying to hear first-hand, nuanced accounts from CIOs across many industries about these topics and other problems we haven’t even considered — it was eye-opening, actually. People were not afraid to raise a problem and say they didn’t know how they were going to fix it. When Gartner Inc. says it’s early days for mobile computing, it’s right. The CIOs’ concerns revealed how few standards and best practices currently exist for managing the growing portfolio of consumer devices that are taking over enterprise computing. My promise is to keep tackling these problems one by one, in as much depth as possible.

Now, about the man in the uniform. I was too far away to see a nametag. I wouldn’t give his name anyway, given what came out of his mouth. Let’s go to the tape: The new chief of staff for a branch of the military came in with an iPad and wanted to use it. And so, the security folks for this military service decided to show him how unsecure it was. They hacked his iPad and were able to see a classified document on his desk through its camera. That woke him up, the man in the uniform said. He passed it along as a useful bit of intel for CIOs for when their CEOs demanded iPads.

On another note, I had a birthday yesterday, one of those ones that husbands can’t ignore, so my spouse dutifully stepped up. Guess what I got? Fortunately (or unfortunately for my career as a news reporter), I don’t have any secret documents on my desk.

Doesn’t it seem like time is moving faster than before? This conflux of smartphones, tablets and the Internet — along with a general migration to laptops, which now constitute nearly half of enterprise endpoints, according to the Enterprise Strategy Group in Milford, Mass. — is demanding IT’s attention.

But wait — aren’t they all cloud computing solutions? Well, they would be if they were all connected. And that’s what’s so interesting about a spate of announcements this week surrounding application performance management (APM) — or transaction performance monitoring (TPM) — or rather, business transaction management (BTM). The acronyms are beginning to blur into an alphabet soup of end-to-end monitoring, inside and outside the corporate firewall.

Call them cloud computing solutions or not, the number virtually skyrocketed this week of software programs that promise end-to-end discovery of application performance problems originating from the cloud to the data center. There was the announcement of “Compuware Corp.’s Gomez First Mile to Last Mile, which allows organizations “whose businesses depend on Web applications to quickly assess the business impact of a problem and instantly determine whether the cause of the problem resides in the data center, on the Internet, with a third-party provider, or with the user’s browser or device.” Gomez, you may recall, is the granddaddy of APM.

The Compuware announcement followed Microsoft Corp.’s recent purchase of APM vendor Avicode Inc.; Precise Software Solutions Inc.’s announcement of “Precise for Cloud at VMworld 2010; Veeam Software Corp.’s Veeam Monitor, which supports troubleshooting, issue resolution, trend reporting and capacity planning; Quest Software Inc.’s Vizioncore’s placement in Gartner Inc.’s Magic Quadrant for application performance monitoring; and a new release of LogMeIn Central from LogMeIn Inc., a Web-based management console that introduces — what else? — end-to-end reporting.

It was truly a week for CIOs to savor, because, with all the promises of virtualization and cloud computing solutions, the new paradigms have produced a virtual fog for IT. Yes, there has been faith that all is working well behind the fog, but really, it has been difficult (at best) to locate the source of the problems that cause latency. More than one of the CIOs I had the good fortune to speak with this week described the troubleshooting process in 2010 as “finding a needle in the haystack.” Is it in your data center? Is it on the Internet? Is it with your cloud provider?

Clearly, IT has a life-changing trend on its hands, with APM programs that discover problems in minutes that might have taken weeks to find before. “The ability to see thousands of transactions and still drill down to the atomic level is critical,” said Phil West, CIO of Gainsco Inc., an automobile insurance company headquartered in Dallas. “It changes from being reactionary to being able to provide more value-added services,” he said. “Fixing things that are broken adds no value to anyone.”

Mobile? That’s just one part of the picture.

As you’ve probably heard, in lieu of a $30-a-month plan with unlimited data, AT&T will ask new iPhone subscribers to sign up for either a 200MB plan for $15 a month or a 2GB plan for $25 a month. In either case, a user can pay extra for increased data allowances.

Clearly, this is aimed more at the consumer than the corporate user (I’m still waiting to hear whether corporate users are moving to the iPhone platform for business purposes, since my impression is that the BlackBerry is still the king). But it could mark a subtle but important shift in how cell phone subscribers think about their usage. It’s a whole lot easier to keep track of cell phone minutes and text messages than it is data. Minutes and text messages are quantifiable and discrete, whereas the MB requirements that come with regularly checking one’s email or watching videos on YouTube aren’t as clear.

In the enterprise, one advantage of cloud computing that’s constantly being trumpeted is its scalability — enterprises can purchase the number of licenses they need based on the number of employees using the application. Again, very discrete numbers, but in the wake of AT&T’s decision, might we see other vendors following suit? Could cloud providers eventually offer even greater scalability, down to the number of minutes spent using their applications? Might the pricing discounts be worth the CIO inquiring about such options?

These are all points to ponder as enterprise resource planning management floats into the cloud. Would the AT&T tiered usage model be viable in this case? Sound off with your thoughts below.

He’s predicting that this will change, however, given a boost by nine technologies that he believes will put BI usage on the same mainstream usage trajectory as that of the Internet.

Before 1993, few people used the Web, but technologies such as broadband, Web browsers and search engines changed all that. These technologies gave people ubiquitous access to information. Then Web 2.0 technologies came along, turning Web surfers into content creators, he said.

Schlegel believes emerging business intelligence technologies such as columnar databases, interactive visualization and scenario modeling, among others, will allow users to follow a similar adoption path for BI.

Here’s a rundown of the nine technologies Schlegel predicts will kick-start mainstream BI usage:

In-memory analytics: DakotaCare, a small managed health care network provider in Sioux Falls, S.D., was able to compress 140 million records with hundreds of columns of data on every claim paid since 2001 into a QlikView server. The server was on an x64 dual-core Xeon processor with 12 GB RAM.

“That is not a huge amount of memory,” he said. In-memory analytics are offered by niche players such as QlikTech International AB, as well as big BI vendors such as SAP.

Columnar databases: This lets you store data by columns, rather than rows. A columnar-based approach for data storage is better for data analysis, and, in turn BI, because it’s well-suited for complex queries of large amounts of data. Vertica Systems, Sybase Inc. and ParAccel Inc. are a few vendors in this space.

Cloud services: As BI evolves, companies will start to tap data from outside sources. He predicts that a group of SaaS providers will aggregate and offer data analytic services to fill this need in the cloud.

Interactive visualization tools: Many vendors such as Tableau Software, Tibco Software Inc. (with Spotfire) and Advizor Solutions Inc. display multidimensional data on a 2-D screen. Today, users don’t have to just look at static pie charts, but interact with them by drilling down into individual pie wedges. On top of that, users can interact with a variety of reports or heat maps and geographic maps. “These are tools that require no training — you don’t have to be brainiac number crunchers to use them,” he said.

BI integrated search: The concept: putting a search engine interface on a BI platform and being able to do ad hoc queries seems simple enough. This would really bring BI to the masses, but there aren’t many companies using this technology in production yet. Schlegel likes the idea of using the Internet as an index that spits back query results, but … “I don’t have any warm fuzzies about this technology yet. I just don’t have the [customer] references for this technology.”

Mobile BI applications: “The ubiquity of [mobile devices] makes me believe that this has got to happen.” He thinks there will be a huge explosion of analytic applications to the iPhone. For now, the most users can expect are static reports.

Data mashups: Let’s just say this is coming if Microsoft has anything to say about it. Microsoft PowerPivot for Excel comes out next month and will give users a free tool to download up to 100 million rows of data from different sources. Microsoft aside, users are going to grab hold of the ability to mash up data sources to create their own content. The best bet is to create sandboxes, or isolated areas, in which users can play and not prohibit the use of such tools, he said.

Scenario modeling: Is great for what-if scenarios: What if we moved sales to another region? What if there is an economic recession? Companies have to rely heavily on IT to go in and create alternate scenarios, but with scenario modeling, more business users can create their own what-if scenarios. Toyota is a classic example of why what-if scenario analysis is needed, he said, given its recent product quality issues.

Analytical master data management: IT typically tells the business what dimensions are being measured across a company and how they are being measured. In the future, Schlegel believes, users will be able to create their own data modeling environments and measures, submit those measures to an approval process and not have to rely on IT to make changes. Some tools that are starting to enable this capability include Oracle Hyperion Data Relationship Management and IBM Cognos Business Viewpoint.

This is a lot to take in, when many companies already have several BI tools in place and are looking to consolidate. Many are also grappling with how to get BI in the hands of everyday workers, although several of these technologies seek to address this dilemma.

Email me at ctorode@techtarget.com to let me know what technologies are on your radar.

“For the industry, we’ll progressively move towards more of what I call variable pricing, so the heavy-[use] consumers will pay more than the lower-[use] consumers,” Stephenson said at an analyst conference this week.

A lot of analysts have seen this coming for a while. More mobile customers are sharing information via text messages, e-mails and even Skype on their smartphones rather than by making traditional phone calls, driving down their need to purchase pricier phone plans. (I speak from experience: A combination of these factors — especially Skype — has allowed me to remain with AT&T’s 450-minute calling plan, where I otherwise would have needed to trade up.) This could be viewed as a reflection of the cloud computing model that’s gotten so much buzz in the IT sphere, where you pay for what you use, rather than paying a flat rate.

These changes could drive up costs for big-time corporate users, who — like most mobile users — not only download and edit documents for their work, but also are inclined to surf the Web on their work phone during idle time. And why not? It doesn’t cost anything extra. But should IT start paying for mobile data based on usage, corporate mobile phone management policies might have to change.

Would a data-usage-based payment approach for mobile devices change your organization’s mobile phone management strategy or your mobile procurement decisions? What sort of mobile phone policies would you put into place for corporate users who also want to surf the Web?

“Balloon boy” was hiding in his family’s attic. The Sidekick data was not lost either; it was hiding somewhere as well. Yesterday Microsoft announced that it had recovered most, if not all, of the customer data.

Despite the good news, we’re seeing evidence now of storm clouds when it comes to cloud storage. The Sidekick data failure was attributed to a storage area network (SAN) upgrade gone awry. In this case, there appears to have been a difference of opinion about whether a backup was necessary in order to go forward with the SAN upgrade. According to sources of blogger Daniel Eran Dilger, instead of doing a backup that would have taken six days, Microsoft management is said to have decided to curtail the process two days into it. What then ensued is not yet clear, but the implication is that an Oracle system responded to some abnormality in the SAN upgrade that caused the data’s “disappearance.”

Whatever the cause, this scenario highlights the enormous complexity of cloud storage and the inherent risks involved with such a new data-handling approach. Indeed, another recent cloud mishap, in which a hacker was sending spam through an Amazon email server, elicited another calamitous response: Amazon EC2 subscribers had their email put on a spam blacklist by Spamhaus because of this one bad apple.

It’s not surprising these technology glitches are happening, given the newness and complexity of cloud computing. But I think what all three cases show — from the overblown police and media reaction to the image of an airborne balloon, to the software response to a SAN upgrade gone wrong, to Spamhaus’ Draconian solution to deal with a single hacker, is that we’re inexperienced. We don’t yet have enough understanding to deal with these unusual events in a calibrated — not exaggerated — way. The heart of the matter is that, in each case, there may have been an overreaction to an unexpected, but as it turned out not particularly serious, problem.

With all new things, there is a learning curve. Single hackers will be dealt with in a different way in the future. Microsoft will never do an upgrade without backing up first. As for “balloon boy,” it’s likely some adults will look in the attic before calling out the National Guard. And if the balloon incident was staged, a family conspiracy? Well, there are those who believe the Sidekick data wipeout was insider sabotage.