CIO, cloud computing, innovation

Fantastic Cloud Expo West … Again!

by  •  • 1 Comment

Cloud-Computing-ExpoThis past week I attended the 13th International Cloud Expo West out in Santa Clara. Once again it was a fantastic event. I had meetings with some really interesting start-ups in cloud, attended several excellent sessions, met with some great friends from years past, and made some new friends too.

Apart from all that, I was there to present too. My session was on “Harnessing APIs to Deliver Competitive Applications in the ‘Cloud Of Clouds’”. You can read the abstract here, or you can download a PDF of the whole deck here.

I guess it was perhaps an overly SEO-heavy title, but in all seriousness, the intersection of rapid innovation, cloud computing, API economy, and devops – the core of this presentation – is a critical space that I am very excited about.

In this preso, I explained the modern consumer-driven world of IT, where customers and staff expect everything at the speed of business. I talked about how these expectations are driven by new demands for mobile, social, and cloud access. This drives the need – but even more so, opens up the opportunity – to source great capabilities both internally and from the cloud via APIs – with a few examples of simple mash-ups to give some context.

However, I posit that you also need to be able to incorporate these new approaches into faster SDLC processes, to meet the demand for business innovation. This emphasizes the importance of new approaches like DevOps. In addition, if you want to harness these new approaches with an enterprise-grade approach, you must find the right solutions to manage the APIs themselves, make them available and usable throughout the organization, and enable better innovation with enterprise-grade security that doesn’t get in the way.

We used to say ‘faster, better, or cheaper – choose any two (or one)’; in this presentation I explain how the intersection of cloud, devops, and APIs enables application development to be all three! It is a deep rabbit hole, and the deck does not explain it all, but if you are interested in hearing more, I would love to take you on the journey sometime. Meanwhile, you can download my preso here (PDF).

I was also privileged to be invited up on stage by the illustrious Jeremy Geelan (@jg21) for the Cloud Expo Quiz. It was a metric boatload of fun, and I was humbled to join some good friends, some new friends, and some real clouderati (or, as one of them described, cloudaholics!).

OnstageForQuiz

The cast included (from left to right):

  • Joe Weinman (@joeweinman), SVP of Cloud for Telx, author of Cloudonomics
  • My humble self
  • Tom Lounibos (@Lounibos), CEO and Co-Founder of SOASTA
  • Vanessa Alvarez (@VanessaAlvarez1), Head of Marketing for Scale Computing
  • Tim Crawford (@tcrawford), CIO Strategic Advisor at AVOA
  • Ross Brouse(@rossbrouse), COO of Fortress ITX and Solar VPS
  • Larry Carvalho (@robustcloud), Cloud Computing Analyst and Advisor

While Larry was apparently the most cited in a Google search for cloud, it was ultimately Vanessa who won all the clouds with an unassailable knowledge of cloud computing businesses from Estonia! Yep, told you it was fun!

I spent a good deal of time in the Expo too. Lots of interesting exhibitors, from large mainstream vendors like EMC and IBM, to the many fascinating niche startups. The Expo was jumping all the time, with a steady stream of people creating quite the buzz:

LotsOfExpoBuzz

Although, sadly, while there were queues of people at most of the booths, not all were quite as popular as others: 🙁

NotAllBoothsWereBusy

One of the great sessions that I attended (and live-tweeted) was Microsoft’s Tim Park speaking on the Internet of Things (IoT) in his session titled, “The Rise Of Things”:

The Rise Of Things - Tim Park

From my Tweetstream, some of the highlights of this session:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Altogether, it was another great Cloud Expo, as only Cloud Expo can be. I will be looking forward to the next time, back our East.

 

1 comment for “Fantastic Cloud Expo West … Again!”

  1. Pingback: Harness APIs to Deliver Competitive Applications in the ‘Cloud of Clouds’ | Cloud Computing Journal | Andi Mann – Ubergeek

Comments are closed.