Today, James M and I attended TIF's Cloud Computing Conference in London, Victoria Park Plaza, 2 floors underground.
The opening Keynote today was delivered by an enthusiastic geneticist and was very, very good. The presenter focused the opening session around the theme of commoditisation, kicking off the conference with an abstract model of how innovation turns into products which turn into commodities depending on their ubiquity vs. certainty ratio. Sounds geeky? Oh yeah ;-)
On an even geekier note, he also took us through the concept of how products, when they turn into commodities, will not only enable further innovation in their space but also accelerate the product's development itself. This is because as a product gets more stable, so does its capacity to undergo major disruption. To quote him, "the rate of evolution of a complex system is dependent on the organisation of its subsystems" eg. if we look at the computing stack (infra, platform, software) the reason software has been able to develop so fast is because infra and platform have themselves turned into commodities over the years and therefore have been able to support and accelerate development of software.
Which kind of made me think about the Domino vs. Microsoft debate again ... yes I know this is now history, but it did remind me of how IBM seem to have got to a point where they are now evolving the development of the seamlessness & usability of their technologies whereas Microsoft seems to still be focused on getting the technology itself right ... base layer stability anyone? : )
Anywho, back to the real world, it will definitely be interesting to see where innovation takes us once cloud computing becomes a commodity.
He also dispelled a couple of cloud computing myths upfront : 1) That the customer has a choice. According to our presenter, the only thing an enterprise will achieve by not moving to the cloud is to increase the competitive gap between their IT service and the market and this pressure will only keep increasing as cloud services costs go down through in-market competition. And no he was not a vendor. 2) That cloud computing is green and it will save customers money, which made me nod in agreement ; )
He wrapped up his keynote by confirming what has been our opinion in Mars all year : that the question about cloud computing is not IF, it's WHEN. Hmm, 2010, apparently :D
Overall, exceptional (if geeky) keynote.
Content Relevance : 4/5
Delivery : 4/5
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