Leading off this week’s roundup, from our sister site SearchCIO-Midmarket.com, we have a CIO whose gold medal-worthy green tech innovation is truly energizing London’s Olympic Park. Also, read about how speeding to market with software could kill a trading firm, and read about the CIO’s role in IT transformation.

As chronicled on the SearchCIO-Midmarket.com blog, CIO Symmetry, the CIO of the London summer games scored big, lighting up Olympic Park with green tech innovation. And he didn’t even have to put on a Speedo.

Speed is great for sprinters and the like but can be downright dangerous for makers of stock-trading software. Perhaps Wall Street’s third stock-trading fiasco in five months will drive home this point.

Winning by changing the rules doesn’t sound very sportsmanlike. Unless we’re talking victory over network hackers — then by all means we ought to hear out the argument for changing the rules of writing code.

Think social collaboration is a frivolous pursuit? Perhaps this bar graph can convince you otherwise.

Finally, be sure to check out this week’s CIO Matters column, in which SearchCIO.com’s Editorial Director Scot Petersen looks at the role of the CIO in the midst of IT transformation.

I even took a peek at the value of ERP going forward. But there was one thing I didn’t have a chance to hit on, and that’s the predicted place of ERP going into the 2020s. Sounds like a long way off, doesn’t it? Like around the time we should finally have our jetpacks and flying cars. Well, analyst Phil Murphy of Forrester Research couldn’t comment on possible Jetsons-style transportation innovation, but he did share a vision of the future that includes ERP.

Murphy, whose focus is business applications, agrees with industry pundits who believe that as we hit 2020, we’ll be in the golden age of software and the “frictionless enterprise.” Manufacturing provides the best illustration for the frictionless concept as businesses leave behind the old push model in favor of lean to keep up with demand. We now have the technology, through social media channels and the like, to sense demand, he said. Nike is already doing this, he added. It aggregates that demand and negotiates with manufacturers to build to it.

“If we accept that this frictionless enterprise is going to happen and that it will happen in many industries, it will need lightweight, on-demand ERP that is consumable as the frictionless enterprise needs it,” Murphy said. “[Businesses] won’t care what server this is on, or what operating system or database. They just want their applications to work, and they’re happy to pay a monthly fee. They might even be happy to start an annual contract, but they want it to be somebody else’s problem.”

In a recent report Murphy penned with colleagues on the topic of business technology in 2020, he also suggests that ERP vendors won’t sell software, they’ll house processing. In this scenario, a business would pay for an ERP capability that houses business rules and data. That information will always be the most recent and will be built to operate globally. In 2020, he predicts, there will only be a handful of ERP instances around the globe.

“I think it’s safe to say the stuff we’re consumed with today — what server are you on, what databases — in the 2020s that will be someone else’s problem,” Murphy said. “Business people don’t want to be tied down with technical jargon that doesn’t matter to them … everything we do has got to be understandable in a business context, and when it is, the wars between business and IT fall away.”

Now that sounds like a peaceful vision.

My anticipation quickly dissipated when I learned that many iPhone OS 4 features — including, most notably, multitasking — wouldn’t filter down to the 3G (nor to the original iPhone and iPod Touch versions that preceded it). Yes, I might still have access to application folders (so I won’t need five full screens of apps) and the upgraded e-mail functions, but no multitasking for me. I immediately started to consider whether the software update would make it worth my while to trade up to a snazzy new iPhone this summer, 3GS or otherwise. TBD. Let’s see if my tax refund materializes.

It dawned on me that this is what enterprise CIOs must debate when it comes to computer hardware upgrades, and I expect the issue to be particularly pertinent in 2010. A recent Morgan Stanley survey of 150 CIOs found that technology budgets will be up 3.2% in 2010, a 1.5% increase from January, when the same survey was done. Computer hardware upgrades lead the spending spike, with a planned 4.1% increase, followed by a 3.7% increase in software spending.

I suspect a lot of this jump represents delayed demand. Many enterprises held off on computer hardware upgrades last year, when the recession was in its deepest doldrums, as they hunkered down and did more with less. Why buy new desktops when the old ones would do?

But while hunkering down and holding the line might have worked in 2009, it likely won’t fly in 2010, when companies are under increasing pressure to not only survive, but to show increasing revenues as well. So, what happens if a new software or delivery model is the key to building your revenue, but you don’t have the hardware to support it?

I’m guessing a simple tax refund won’t be enough to buy all those new desktops or laptops in your organization. What’s your strategy for computer hardware upgrades in 2010?

Wow.

Big bad-a** Oracle is back in court over third-party maintenance, using the same puffed-up language found in its 2007 lawsuit against SAP’s TomorrowNow, which accused the now-defunct third-party-maintenance provider of “corporate theft on a grand scale.” Get ready for Round 2 in the battle to protect the golden goose of Big Software — double-digit annual maintenance fees.

In the case of Oracle USA Inc. v. Rimini Street Inc., Oracle’s sharp-tongued lawyers accuse Rimini of illegally downloading Oracle’s software and support materials “in a scheme that is vast in scope.” Oracle alleges that Rimini uses “‘robots or ‘crawlers,’ in intentional violation of Oracle’s Technical Support website terms of use.”

According to the lawsuit, Rimini’s “intrusions” have damaged Oracle’s support service business by causing the databases that host the software and support materials to freeze, to the detriment of Oracle customers. The phrase “massive illegal downloads” appears liberally throughout the suit.

Rimini’s Ravin has stated that the firm will fight the case. (For anyone interested in hearing Ravin in a less-scripted mode, I did an interview with him about the touchy topic of third-party software maintenance shortly after Oracle filed its lawsuit against SAP.) What I’ll be following and following up on is what the lawsuit means for the perennial third-party maintenance arguments, as well as for CIOs.

When Oracle sued SAP in 2007, I consulted lawyers and IT experts, who thought the suit carried a warning for CIOs. They advised CIOs who had moved or were considering a move to third-party maintenance to be mindful of how they transitioned from one provider to a competitor, and to review their contracts about nondisclosure restrictions. That risk to CIOs in that case was explicit.

In the 2007 case, Oracle called out Honeywell International Inc. as an example of how TomorrowNow used Honeywell’s passwords to allegedly download Oracle support materials beyond the scope of products “that Honeywell had licensed and to which it had authorized access.” Gartner also issued an advisory for CIOs. 

Legal merits aside, I wonder whether we’ll see a backlash to this latest Oracle suit by customers, given the enormous pressure CIOs have been under to cut costs. I’ve talked to a number of CIOs this year who have dropped maintenance, and others, like Bill Yearous, who actually dropped Oracle after pricing went up.