John Lamb's Week: homes and databases of the future

The premature announcement last week of a management buyout of royalblue technologies was followed by frantic phoning to reassure customers they could still get help from their help desk supplier. royalblue technologies' existing management team, Graham Ridgway and Lee Chadwick, will lead the purchase by a newly established company.

Among hot trends, peer-to-peer (P2P) or distributed computing has got to be on fire, so it will be asbestos gloves all round at the P2P International Forum in Munich on Monday and Tuesday.

What's to be made of this new take on distributed computing, or distributed resource management, as some commentators call the enterprise version of P2P? Well, the idea of sharing files or spare processor cycle time through organically created links sounds attractive. Although there are already plenty of management tools on the market designed to share resources, more choice is always welcome.

However, whether many organisations will want to brave the security risk of P2P remains to be seen. At a time of maximum uncertainty in technology, who wants to add yet more unstructured mechanisms to the IT mix?

Wednesday will see Cranfield School of Management unveil some interesting sounding Microsoft-sponsored research into the workplace of the future. Home working, the time wasted searching for information and training are among the topics that fall under the Cranfield microscope.

Having sat through enough Bill Gates-hosted presentations on the office of the future to fill a Windows error log, I hope Cranfield resists the temptation to hype some hopelessly unrealistic vision of the liberating force of technology.

Many of the features of current workplace technology such as universal messaging, hot desking and web-based applications are double-edged swords, improving efficiency at the expense of increased stress among workers.

There is a chance on Wednesday evening to catch up on the latest legal twists in the IR35 saga at a Best International Group presentation. The recruitment company will be surveying the results of the IR35 judicial review and what this may mean for contractors.

Some freelancers may soon find themselves working at a new network management centre at Sunbury-on-Thames due to be opened on Wednesday by Dimension Data. The company, which has spent millions on a global network of 36 such centres, caters for large-scale corporate networks. Dimension Data will be putting its centre through its paces and talking about trends in networking.

Thursday brings an opportunity to catch up with the Simon Williams anti-relational database bandwagon. The chief executive of Lazy Software has devised an Associative Model of Data, which he claims is the first major advance beyond the Relational Model for 30 years.

"Every new relational database application needs a new set of programs written from scratch," says Williams. "This is expensive and labour-intensive and unmaintainable in the growing skills shortage." Instead of using rows and columns to identify stored items, in an associative database links are created organically between stored objects. You can argue with the man at The Black Horse Pub, Rathbone Place, just off Oxford Street from 6.30.

Finally, on Friday Lord Sainsbury, Minister for Science and Innovation, will be among the luminaries gathering in Cambridge for the opening of a new HQ building for Virata, another UK high-tech success story.

The company, which claims to be the only supplier of semiconductors and software for DSL and broadband wireless equipment worldwide, grew almost five fold in terms of revenue last year.

Founded by Hermann Hauser, the Silicon Fen entrepreneur, and Charles Cotton, Virata has installed more than four million of its flagship Helium processors.