While I was in the Bay Area recently for Cloud Connect, I took the opportunity to spend half an hour or so recording a podcast with Ed Saipetch from Savvis and Margaret Dawson, newly appointed VP of Marketing and cloud evangelist at HP. We borrowed a hotel suite, cracked open a bottle of wine and spent time talking about some issues that all of us are genuinely passionate about. It was the first time I’ve met Dawson in the flesh, and came only six weeks after her appointment to the HP role. She’d formerly worked for awhile with some startups and previous to that had been at AWS – her varied history, and the freshness of her role at HP made for an interesting interchange – AWS wasn’t, at least when she was there, anything of an enterprise company and HP is on completely the other side of the continuum – it’s always interesting to hear the thoughts of someone who’s entering the enterprise space in that way.

Anyway – considering it was late at night, and the aforementioned bottle of wine, the conversation was understandably varied – we talked about a bunch of different things including:

  • Enterprises’ adoption of PaaS systems. Microsoft Windows Azure, Amazon Web Services Elastic Beanstalk and the Google App Engine are examples of PaaS providers.
  • PaaS resistance in the workplace – is it “technology for the sake of technology”?
  • Does PaaS introduce more risk and lock-in? Forget Bring Your Own Device, this is Bring Your Own Code.
  • Similarity of evolution of PaaS and Infrastructure-as-a-Service.
  • So, who is adopting PaaS and Opensource?
  • Building bridges between IT departments and business units.

My concepts around how business and IT can find ways of sharing common goals and break from the often toxic and dysfunctional relationship they currently hold are certainly fairly revolutionary. That said they seemed to resonate with Dawson and Saipetch and actually made their way into Dawson’s Cloud Connect keynote the next day. It’s a topic I need to expand upon in the future. As the world outside of business changes – through economic changes, societal changes and hyper-competitiveness, it simply won’t be acceptable for IT and the business to spend time arguing about externalities – rather they need to find ways of striving over common goals.

Anyway – more on that in time. For now take some time out of your day to listen to the podcast.

Speaking in Tech Podcast

 

Ben Kepes

Ben Kepes is a technology evangelist, an investor, a commentator and a business adviser. Ben covers the convergence of technology, mobile, ubiquity and agility, all enabled by the Cloud. His areas of interest extend to enterprise software, software integration, financial/accounting software, platforms and infrastructure as well as articulating technology simply for everyday users.

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