Yesterday, we opened up the Delivery Strategies track at Enterprise 2.0 with a session called, “apps don’t deploy themselves.” The basic idea was that IT managers have many more options to consider when deploying applications, from the platforms on which things run to the economics of building versus buying.

Here’s the deck in Slideshare.

We’ve been in Boston this week at the Enterprise 2.0 conference (which got a great writeup in the Wall Street Journal today.) It’s been an interesting series of discussions about next-generation IT applications. Here are some of the lessons we’ve learned over the week.

[Read more]

On Tuesday, I had a chance to talk with government cloud users in DC about clouds. Rather than the usual “echo chamber” of clouds and IT, this was a more introductory session, and it gave me a chance to cover the broader trends in IT — the shift from a monopoly model to a free market, and the cultural changes it entails.

Here’s the slide deck, with speakers’ notes.

Over the coming weeks we will be transforming Bitcurrent from a blog into a site that represents more what we do – produce events, content and research.

The first step of this transition is that from now on, all Cloud Computing related blog entries will appear on our new cloud-centric blog.

We call it Rented Metal. Head on over and read about what’s happening at Cloud Connect.

In a few weeks, we’ll hold the inaugural Cloud Connect in Santa Clara, California. It’s actually the continuation of a series of events David Berlind launched around cloud computing, plus a spinoff of last year’s Enterprise Cloud Summit, plus a bunch of new content.

We’re pretty excited, because this is the first time Bitcurrent has helped build an event from scratch (unless you count Bitnorth, that is, but Cloud Connect is a beast of a different magnitude.) There are four days of content, built around three audiences: those who buy and finance cloud decisions; those who build cloud applications, and those who have to run the cloud platforms.

Getting here has been an interesting experience. Here’s what we did, plus an easter egg for reading all the way to the end. [Read more]

Recently, some journalism students from the American University in DC asked if they could interview me about cloud computing. As I wrote back to them, I realized that the discussion was different from what I usually talk about when it comes for clouds. These are journalism students, and they likely have a different view of “cloud computing” from the technobabble we technologists enjoy. It’s also about how schools will use on-demand applications. So I figured I’d re-post the thread here.

One of the biggest things I realized was that “clouds” can mean “elastic, on-demand compute platforms” or just “stuff that runs on the web” depending on who you’re talking to. And while these seem like two separate definitions, ultimately, they’re the same thing.

The Q&A, below the fold.

[Read more]

For anyone who missed it, Alistair had an interesting (and popular) post on watchingwebsites.com about how speeding up performance improves online business.   The data was gathered through some experimentation that Alistair helped us run with some Strangeloop customers.  Through the experiments, we were able to draw a direct link between web performance and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) of the business, getting us closer to the holy grail of showing, in business terms, why performance matters.  Alistair presented the data in a joint webinar with Strangeloop in October.

Next tuesday, December 8th, I’ll be revisiting the data and presenting them again at the Velocity Online Conference, which is O’Reilly’s online version of the Velocity Conference.   The online version is also co-chaired by Steve Souders and Jesse Robbins, will run for half the day, and includes some pretty interesting presentations on topics that range from Varnish to SPDY to Steve’s impressive Browserscope initiative.  I’m excited to be a part of it and am looking forward to playing Alistair’s proxy in presenting the data, not to mention listening in on the other presentations.

I encourage all to attend.  And knowing how much Bitcurrent’s inquisitive readers will surely be interested in the event, I got us a bit of a discount too.  Here are all the pertinent details:

• URL: http://en.oreilly.com/velocityfall09
• Cost: $149 (25% off with discount code “velfall09pcd”)
• When: Tuesday, December 8th, 9am-12:40pm PT

Hope to see you there.

I’m at IGT09 this week, put together by the energetic Avner Algom. Yesterday, I gave a presentation on the ROI of cloud computing (including some data that IDC and Peter Van Eijk were nice enough to let me use.) We started off with a panel on enterprise cloud use, with four panelists from very different backgrounds:

• Steve Rubinow, EVP and CIO of NYSE Euronext
• Yosi Shneck, CIO, Israeli Light Company
• Eyal Waldman, Co-founder & CEO, Mellanox
• Liam Lynch, Chief Security Strategist, eBay

Here are the slides, including panel questions.

We’re headed to Israel for IGT09, and while we’re there, we’ll be meeting some of Israel’s startups. The folks at Israeli VC firm Gemini have set up a two-hour session entitled Crowdalytics and lean startup metrics on November 30, as well as one on cloud computing on the 1st.

The overall focus of the session? Startup acceleration and community monitoring. Startups need to learn fast from their mistakes, and they do this best when they have a complete perspective of their online presence. Today, that presence extends far beyond their own website, out into the communities and platforms of the web. We’ll look at analytics for lean startups and the emerging field of community monitoring, and discover how watching the web can help fledgling companies build the right business faster.

A bunch of local firms are going to be there, including EyeView, Mintigo, Collecta, Outbrain, TwitWit, Footbo, Ekoloko, Clicktale, and Confidela. Bitcurrent collaborator and Syntenic CTO Dan Koffler will also be joining us.

Lots of good conclusions from the Hybrid Cloud panel at Interop; too many to see on one slide, so here they are.

• Hybrid isn’t one app in two places; it’s internal and external apps talking to one another
• Migrating for new apps is easy; for already deployed ones, it’s much harder
• In the new world, the developers are the admins and ops toolsets are changing
• The 2010 platform will be
  • Infrastructure-aware; parallel; split between dev and ops
  • Not really PaaS; but not IaaS either
  • Runs both in-house and externally
• Increased focus on making it easy for developers to transition to on-demand environments
• Portability becomes a bigger concern (in/out and between clouds)
• Where enterprises will initially embrace it:
  • Collaboration, messaging, things “just above” infrastructure
  • Areas that don’t add strategic value
  • Leverage utility model of what’s there now (apps with inherent burstability)
• Ideological battle in infrastructure
  • Bottoms-up focus on primitives (storage, queue, compute); we build things from easy-to-connect, RESTful functions
  • Top-down modelled approach, which we reduce down to the underlying patterns and can generate code from them (policies, etc.)
• Growth of 2 kinds of technologies
  • That make this easier for developers (Ruby on Rails) ➜ This will win
  • That help to migrate legacy systems into cloud-compatible containers
• Enterprises about 5-7 years behind consumer/public Internet (Web tech, Hadoop, enterprise mashups)
• Let us not forget: All big web businesses use a ton of Oracle
• Huge $ to be made solving enterprise migration: Discrete components or specific apps
• Standardization is 15% of the problem; standards bodies are still arguing taxonomies
• Internet standards are built on rough consensus and running code; whoever produces a useful product that is available to many people quickly will win