In my previous post, I talked about the takeaway from the Day 1 of Gluecon. In this post, I will discuss about the takeaway from Day 2 and, also, about some of the companies I found exciting.
The day started with a fabulous keynote by Mitch Kapor. He walked us through the evolution of computing and, finally, completed his talk with Social Web and Cloud Computing. I will list out some of the takeaways from his talk without going into the details. He was comparing Twitter with Facebook and argued that Twitter’s approach to open communication will make it successful. He went a bit philosophical about the Twitter phenomena. He talked about the new way of doing computing in the Clouds and emphasized how it has allowed startups to innovate on cheap. Another takeaway from his talk was his call for the use of open architecture while implementing HealthCare IT. He wanted the government to do HealthCare IT like how they released internet to the wild and allowed people to innovate on top of it. He said such an approach will help push innovation in HealthCare and eventual reduction in costs. It was a fresh start to the day and his keynote was followed by a neat talk by Phil Wainewright who gave an overview of SaaS industry and how to glue the loosely coupled web.
Cloud Security Alliance was there to talk about the best practices in the world of Clouds. There was a panel on Cloud Database Standards with Alex Iskold as one of the panelists but, unfortunately, I couldn’t attend. If any of the Cloud Ave readers attended the session, please add your takeaway from the session below in the comments section. This was followed by a panel on implementing a open web.
The afternoon session had a panel moderated by me titled “Living in the Post Cloud World – Interop, Integration and Federation. I had Kyle Roche of Appiro, Mike Donaldson of Ping Identity and Sunir Shah of Freshbooks in the panel. The title was given to us by Eric and the meaning of Post Cloud World was ambiguous. We decided that we will consider it to be the Post Gartner Hype Cycle and then discuss about issues like integration, interoperability and federation. The discussion started off with the panelists identifying various problems they face including the existence of information silos even in a Cloud based environment. This was followed by a discussion about how to integrate different apps so that they talk to one another. Mike spoke about the role of Single Sign On (SSO) in doing this. He also briefly touched upon how SSO takes prominence in a federated Cloud ecosystem and talked about how OpenID and OAuth is going to play a significant role in this. Then there was a brief discussion about how platforms and infrastructure can interoperate with one another. The session ended with a brief remark by the panelists on how we can glue SaaS, PaaS and IaaS together.
There was an interesting talk about how APIs can be leveraged in today’s world and the conference ended with a keynote by Bob Frankston of Visicalc fame.
Along with the deeper insights offered by various keynotes and panel discussions, I was pretty happy to find many vendors and talk to them about their products and services. In fact, two companies stood out in the crowd and I have to mention them here. The first one was Alchemyapi.com. They are doing some really exciting stuff. They take unstructured data (including text from scanned documents) and add structure on top of it. I am always curious about how we are going to completely transform from the current unstructured web to Semantic Web and this company offers huge promise in this area. If you are interested in Semantic Web, please check them out. The other company that excited me (and also Ben) big time was Gist. They offer a way to make some sense out of our out of control Inbox. I am planning to talk to their CTO soon and I will write a detailed post after that. The other companies of interest to me are Mashery, Boomi, Gnip (they offering something similar to Gist) and Linxter. I am planning to look deep into their offering in the coming months and offer my analysis here at Cloud Ave.
I hope these two posts along with Ben’s series of posts offered our readers a chance to catch up with what went on at Gluecon 2009. I am looking forward to this event next here and I hope we will be able to offer our readers discount to the conference tickets like this year.
