This is one of the busiest—and most satisfying—times of year for me. Later this week is the annual Wolfram Technology Conference. And in addition to bringing together a fascinating group of Mathematica users and developers, it’s also a time when many of our key corporate partners come to visit and interact.

Here’s this year’s group:

The list is always growing. And every one of those logos represents a living, breathing effort! Which is my group’s responsibility to nurture.

Wolfram Research has a distinguished history of deep computer-industry partnerships. In fact, the list of speakers at Mathematica’s original product announcement in 1988 is quite a Who’s Who of computer visionaries: Steve Jobs (then-president of NeXT), Gordon Bell and Sun cofounder Bill Joy, to name a few.

We’re still working with many of these people and companies today. In fact, between people, companies and their successors, three-quarters of this list will be represented at the Technology Conference this week.

For nearly 20 years, our company has been at the cutting edge of computer technology. In fact, it’s become almost a joke in some circles that Mathematica seems always to be the first major software application that’s ready to demo on new computer platforms and systems.

How does this happen? First, of course, is that as one of the world’s most respected software companies, we’re deeply connected throughout the computer industry. Equally important, though, is that we’re well known to have some of the world’s best software engineering—so that we can take our vast (and diverse) codebase and quickly optimize it for the latest environments.

Our offices sometimes seem a bit like computer exhibitions, with all the latest pre-release systems. For many years, Mathematica has been a key part of benchmarking and testing every new release from essentially all the leading processor, hardware and operating systems companies.

We’ve always had many different kinds of partners, from computer hardware companies to application developers to publishing companies and more. But now, particularly with Mathematica 6 (as well as with technologies like gridMathematica, webMathematica and Wolfram Player), we’ve been developing a tremendous range of new partnerships.

Some of them have to do with the latest in high-performance computing. Some with the latest user interface and output technologies. Some with new forms of educational and other content distribution.

It’s always great for our users that Mathematica and our other technology is deployed so quickly and effectively, so that they can immediately take advantage of the latest and best that the industry has to offer.

But one of the things that’s always a particular pleasure in my position is that our partners in the computer industry find it so great to interact with the technical user community around our products.

Our Technology Conference attracts top technical talent from many fields—and it’s very useful to our computer industry partners to get feedback not only from us but from the users of our technology.

And who knows—if history is a guide, an offhand comment at our Technology Conference this week just may lead to something big in the computer industry in the coming year…