Once again the ROD team were out and about at the 4th Annual Cloud Computing World Forum event held in London. Theresa Durrant, gives us her opinion on the two day event.
Whilst the attendance was good, I was slightly disappointed with the lack of attendance from the likes of Google & Amazon. However, the two day event was packed with talks from some of the leading specialists, which saw the conference theatres struggle to find room to accommodate everyone.
The exhibitors were dominated by Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) Providers, Virtual Desktop Service Providers and those offering Cloud Security Solutions, which backed up the promise that this event was not aimed at technical people; but more at IT Managers and CIOs as a way to plan their future cloud and IT strategy.
I managed to attend several of the conference speeches and demonstration, including the Google App Demo by Jon Watson, and came away buzzing with ideas.
I was even fortunate enough to find a seat in the Microsoft theatre to listen to Matt Ballantine, Principle Evangelist. His topic was about Cloud & the Future of IT, but whilst the topic was very tantalising, the prediction proved to be very elusive. At the very start Ballantine informed us that his speech would reflect little on what his predictions were, and was merely a response to fit in with the title of the presentation. Slightly perturbed by this development, we sat on anyway, and listened to Ballantine outline his 5 practical approaches to his green field thinking strategy which included “Avoiding Stupider faster” and “Providing a service”. Not by any means ground breaking topics, but still very interesting and engaging none the less.
To sum up, strategy is no longer about IT projects with a business element, but is about business projects that have an IT solution. The future of any project should start with a holistic view of the organisation, before talking about systems. And whilst it might be tempting for CIOs to lock-down the desktop, beware this could be counterintuitive as it restricts innovation and experimentation.
All-in-all a very productive couple of days, with plenty of food for thought.