Mid June will see me winging my way to New York City to attend Forecast 2012, a one day event arranged by the Open Data Center Alliance (ODCA). Forecast is touted as an opportunity to share knowledge and expertise through presentations, technical workgroups and the all important networking opportunities. I’ll be joined at Forecast by a veritable who’s who of my Cloud colleagues – folks like Chris (Beaker) Hoff, Deb Salons, George Reese, Krish Subramanian and Ruv Cohen. Alongside us pundits though are some interesting industry folks – people from Capgemini, Intel, Walt Disney and BMW.
I’ll be taking part in a rapid fire panel that aims to articular Enterprise Cloud Best Practices. Joining me will be;
- Mario Müller, Vice President IT Infrastructure at BMW
- Matt Estes, Director, Data Architecture at Walt Disney
Das Kamhout, IT Cloud Lead from Intel Corporation
The topic of the panel is something I’m very interested in – over the past few months I’ve been involved in roundtables, interviews and advisory assignments that have, at least in part, looked at different issues that enterprise cloud raises. Some areas of particular interest that I’d like to cover off in the panel include;
- Adoption models – some cloud vendors are engaged with IT and following a top down adoption approach while others are aiming for a more viral bottom up adoption. What issues do these different approaches raise and how do we navigate this path while ensuring agility and compliance?
- Visibility – with business units being empowered to self implement solutions, how does the CIO get clear visibility over what his internal customers are using, and what implications that has?
- The opportunity for open – how important is “open” in the cloud. And how do we all define what open actually means. So long as an enterprise gets a solution that works, should they be interested in the openness or otherwise of that solution?
- The role of the IT pro going forwards – Most people agree that the face of IT will look completely different in five or ten years, but what of the IT practitioner. What will their role look like and what will the balance be between technical competency and analytical business skills?
- Public/Private/Hybrid – While our panel is specifically looking at enterprise cloud, that can mean different things to different people. What will be the mix that determines where stuff physical resides in the future. The naysayers are adamant it’ll all be on-prem while the evangelists say it’ll all be up in the ether – where along the continuum is realistic for different types of businesses?
I’m really looking forward to the conversations we’re going to have at Forecast 2012 – feel free to leave a comment here to be in for a chance to win a free ticket.
