sys-con

Normally, riding a mechanical bull would have been the highlight of any conference for me.  And it might have been except for the fact that absolutely no one with me watched my cowboy debut. They were too busy talking with each other about the day's events at Sys-Con in New York.

The allegedly distinct conferences were 1.) Cloud Computing, and 2.) Virtualization. In practice, the distinction was .... well ... indistinct as attendees moved fluidly between the two.  For good reason.  While you can have virtualization without cloud computing, the cloud without virtualization would be a very lonely place instead of the gold rush anticipated by analysts, pundits, and investors.

Some general observations, in no particular order:

• Apparently, the Cloud - just like beauty - is in the eye of the beholder. Vendors define the cloud in terms most favorable to their value proposition, others use "cloud" and "datacenter" interchangeably, and some just mean a modern take on hosting. It reminds me of the early days of client/server when the term could mean anything from cutting-edge development on a new architecture, to screen scraping with a GUI. This fluidity of meaning is a classic field mark of innovation and a necessary step on the path to mainstream ... and eventually to legacy. The conversation is process - and it's interesting too.

• On Day 2, Michael Hill, IBM VP of Enterprise Initiatives - a long-time, former CIO himself - fronted his presentation with a slide asking, "What is Cloud Computing?" My first thought was, "Shouldn't he know the answer?" My second thought was that giving that question front-of-mind real estate is probably not a bad idea for navigating this time of transition and evolution.

• Amazon's Dr. Werner Vogels, VP and CTO at Amazon.com was a keynote speaker. His topic: "Ahead in the Cloud: The Power of Infrastructure as a Service" was a no-brainer for a company that aims to be the universe's IT department. But, I found this line from his synopsis interesting: "The focus will be on state management which is one of the dominating factors in the scalability, reliability, performance and cost-effectiveness of the overall system." His pre-Amazon incarnation as a research scientist at Cornell University investigating "the scalability and robustness of mission critical enterprise computing systems, reminds us that this cloud world is at least two parts rocket science to one part marketing.

• The Open Cloud Manifesto made its debut here. This swashbuckling name is the banner over some general agreement on the goodness of the principles of openness and interoperability. For industry titans posturing for dominance in defining the manner of achieving these noble goals, the current semantics have meaning. For the vast world of the rest of us, there are many miles between the concept and execution. In the meantime, the goal is a good one informed by lessons learned.

• Last of all, I have to say that the level of interest at this conference was very high. Traffic at our expo booth/card table with plastic tablecloth was high, intense, informed, and engaged. People were not tire kicking; they were building and honing strategies for doing - and they had a high interest in offerings such as ours that do real things of real value today. (RightScale had lots of the same type of traffic as well). A telling indicator of this intensity is the fact that sessions scheduled at 7:00 pm at night were just as packed as the ones at 11:00 am. Plenty of time for riding the bull.