ITech@coloradobiz Takes a Bow.

• Author: LEWIS, DAVID
• Position: Brief Article

We are smart here at ColoradoBoz. Smart enough to spot a bandwagon when it runs us over.

The bandwagon that left tire marks all over us is called e-commerce, or e-something, or i-technology or i-something, and it is the reason this month's issue debuts our new central section, ITech@coloradobiz. "I" is for information technology, and "I" is for Internet. I is also for "I can see the future when It Insists on rolling over my head."

The ITech idea is simple because our motto (which we swiped from Sun Microsystems) is KISS: keep it simple, and help make the digital information age accessible to Colorado business owners and managers, that is, our readers, that is, you.

We are doing so with the help of a couple of East Coast experts from our sister magazine, Software, veteran computer journalists John and Paul Desmond, guys who, we admit, are really smart.

The need for a publication like ITech@coloradobiz hit home a couple of weeks ago on a Silicon Valley trip with Colorado's best and brightest, the winners of the 1999 Company of the Year Awards. Six of the big winners -- executives from Celestial Seasonings, Village Homes, CIBER Inc., Wild Oats Markets, Wilderness Aware Rafting and Colorado Business Bank -- were kind enough to share their red carpet with us. Our co-sponsors, UMB Bank and Deloitte & Touche, also came along for the red carpet ride. (Special thanks to UMB CIO Jim Matteoni, who arranged this once-in-a-lifetime itinerary.)

What a trip. In two days and change we listened to presentations by three futurists and e-biz experts, and toured three of the world's biggest, swiftest, most agile and astonishing high-technology companies: Oracle Corp., Intel Corp. and Sun Microsystems Inc.

All of it brought home to us the amazing times we live in, at least here in the U.S. of A. Things have gotten so good that futurists are actually predicting good times.

Take one presentation, by scenarist Jay Ogilvy, vice president of the Global Business Network, whose latest product is the book "The Long Boom."

"Writing positive scenarios is a lot harder than writing negative scenarios," Ogilvy explained. With a negative scenario, all you do is "take the future and kick it apart." An upbeat scenario, however, requires "seeing solutions you never saw before," Ogilvy said.

If so, practically everybody out there is seeing solutions. Take Intel and Oracle, which have the enviable problem of sustaining high growth...