Last week we hosted in Israel Gemini's annual CIO Advisory Board meeting. In the coming days we’ll be blogging quite a bit about our CIO Advisory board - comprised of senior CIOs from leading international firms such as Texas Instruments, Assurion, OmniCare and MoMa - and about the takeaways and insights from the annual meeting. Hint: Innovation and Israel’s competitive advantage were high on the agenda.

In preparation for the annual meeting, we conducted our annual IT Trends survey. Participants of the survey included CIOs and CEOs as well as a few VCs. The results, while not in any way a representative sample of the industry, are quite interesting.

2009, the survey indicates, was clearly the year of virtualization and SaaS. In parallel, efficiency, ROI-driven decision-making and productivity considerations guided the decisions of CIOs. Green IT and the Mobile Enterprise took focus while cloud computing was not as big in budgets as one could expect. Open Source has clearly made its move from an ‘IT Trend’ to day-to-day reality.

What does 2010 hold in store for the CIOs? More of the same, at least vis-à-vis SaaS adoption and the mobile enterprise. Consumerization (i.e., the move of technologies and trends from the consumer market to the enterprise), globalization and remote services were among the trends ranking high on the CIOs agendas. The survey also indicated that CIOs are still keen on experimenting with (and adopting) innovative technologies.

Tune in for the coming blog posts from Gemini’s CIO advisory board annual meeting – lots more to come.

A few days after the Mobile World Congress, it is time for reflections and conclusions. We figured the best way to reflect on this event would be to have a proper debriefing session.

We invited key execs from about twenty of Israel's leading mobile companies and several members of Cisco's corporate development group who visited Israel after the MWC, to discuss some of the main takeaways from the event.

2009, as one guest commented, "separated the men from the boys". The industry may have suffered, but survivors are more fit to face the challenges and opportunities in 2010 and on. Alex Yu, head of wireless in Cisco's corporate development, mentioned that 2009 was the year in which mobile data traffic exceeded voice packets, never to look back.

There was no argument about the key part played by apps and the app model in this year's show, but there was less unanimity around the identity of the winners. Some claimed that the operators are deemed to become a dumb pipe (and may have already conceded), while others were adamant that carriers are still better positioned than the Internet players to monetize on the mobile data revolution, leveraging their billing relationships, their data and their infrastructure. In any case, commented Lak Ananth from Cisco, the value chain is disintegrating.

Who knows the end user better? Is it the carrier, holding all the demographic and location data (but often not on prepaid users), or the Internet giant who can serve pretty good location-aware ads and services even today? Again, there was no consensus but it's clear that Google are - despite their offer for a truce - a competitor more than an ally to the mobile operators.

Android is emerging as the big winner of the 2010 MWC. The good buzz generated around the operating system is complemented by a convenient development platform and a buoyant developer ecosystem. The next battle-ground is around owning the user experience, and Google has certainly done a great job in catching up with the Apple UX, at least from the developer's point of view. And how about Symbian? “Symbian is a great operating system for making a mobile phone work; Android is a great operating system for a making a cool device”, said one participant.

China is clearly an emerging power in the mobile infrastructure realm, and will soon leave some of the handset guys behind. A lively (though slightly bleak) discussion revolved around Israel's ability to compete with the Chinese economies of scale with innovation and agility. Alex Yu mentioned a few Taiwanese vendors who made it big in China in areas you'd expect mainland corporates to dominate. Is innovation enough? Clearly there's more to succeeding in the new cut-throat reality. Even corporates like Microsoft and Cisco are finding it harder to justify the excess expenditure on an Israeli development center. Identifying gaps and addressing them quickly is a means of survival, but will it yield large companies?

Several other topics were raised and discussed, but we were far from done. If you took part in the round-table, please take a minute to fill the survey. Whether you were present or not, feel free to share your MWC takeaways and insights!

It appears that the biblical proverb "There is nothing new under the sun" (Kohelet/Ecclesiastes 1:9) holds true even when it rains. Not a lot of news, certainly nothing exciting.

"No news is good news" is not a biblical proverb, but if you came to MWC to do networking (personal, not Layer 3) it is also true. No news means you can network with people more effectively. The Network Equipment Providers (NEPs) are certainly open to discussing their newest, yet to be proven strategies for regaining the leadership in a market now dominated by the Chinese.

As one corporate executive from a leading NEP told us, "we can compete effectively on pricing with the Chinese vendors, since we also design and manufacture in China". So what is that NEP up to? Services. A large chink of their revenue is now attributed to network services - and apparently margins are not bad, as everything is automated and centralized.

Yes, there are emerging businesses and business models, but operators are still early in discovery phases. Our conversation with that particular executive soon took a sharp left turn.

Israeli innovation is not enough, says our friend (who knows a thing or two about Israelis and innovation, being on that side before being acquired into the NEP). Without proper execution - even before effective marketing, just pure execution - it will be hard to sustain a climate in which global players and investors prefer Israeli innovation over India, China or Eastern Europe. If Israeli companies cannot deliver on their innovation, Israeli startups may lose its advantage over their developing countries' peers. To an extent, he continues, this is already happening.

What can we do to withstand this trend? Plenty. Focus on market needs and customer pains, not on technology innovation. Focus on product and productization, not hand-stitched innovative alpha versions. Learn to pitch the ROI and value, not the technology. Not very hard, and yet very hard for the average Israeli entrepreneur. Business education in Israel is lacking, and the results are evident.

I'm sure there's a flip side to this story. Many Israeli companies deliver and excel. Nevertheless, it is our role as 'industrialists' to make sure our brain-power does not get lost in translation. When the Go'yim get tough, the tough guys from Israel should mobilize. There is room for improvement in the way investors (institutional as well as private) work with the companies they are investing in. But it also takes acknowledgement and willingness to learn and improve on part of the entrepreneurs. If we want to maintain our leadership in the communication space, we need to act quickly.