As Gabriel Byrne sauntered on stage to address 4000 fans at TechEd in Madrid, three words on a giant screen summed up his position.

Enter stage left.

Having achieved this, Byrne then had to remember the rest of his script. Which was made easier by the fact that this was also projected onto the giant screen oppostite.

Byrne hit his mark and proceeded to act out his passion for enterprise resource planning, cloud computing and in memory transactions.

He seemed to be speaking off the cuff, complete with pregnant poises, while he gave each statement enormous thought as he opened his heart to the audience of customers, journalists, analysts and bloggers.

Who’d have thought that the star of Hollywood blockbusters like Miller’s Crossing, End of Days and Treatment, would be so concerned about the future of corporate computing. But clearly he was sitting in his trailer, performing his own form of data analytics and predicting the future.

“We have two quantum leap opportunities ahead of us,” he said, “Cloud Computing. And In Memory Computing.”

Like many an IT executive, he had a theory about what Einstein would say if he was on the board of an IT company today. (Mind you, he’d have to get his haircut)

The great man would have re-written the theory of relativity to include In memory computing and cloud, apparently.

“E equals IMC squared,” said Byrne.

[PAUSE FOR LAUGHTER]

“You should have seen him in Orlando,” said one witness. “He was all over the place. I wonder if someone wrote a script for him this time.”

I don’t think so. Steven Fry is a big techie. So is that bloke from Father Ted. Maybe this is evidence that technology is in the mainstream now.