Only eight weeks lie between now and the next US Presidential election and the next Internationl Cloud Expo – the latter to be held Nov 5-8 at the Santa Clara (CA) Convention Center.
Politics often become part of cloud discussions, particularly in the areas of open source and its unloved cousin, cloudwashing. But where said alleged cloudwashing was a big topic of discussion in the aisles and after-hour parties of the recent Cloud Expo in New York, I think that topic is being washed away, so to speak, but a few other large items:
The importance of software-defined networking, or dare I say it, cloud networking
The continued importance of Big Data – how to define it within the context of your specific organization, whether and how to handle it, what to do with it
Social media and social networking – the topic just won’t go away, despite the schadenfreudistic plunge in Facebook’s stock over the summer. Most businesses still have no clue about how to use SM/SN effectively, whether its effect can truly be measured, and how it can drive new, perhaps useful Big Data streams
Standards. Whoops, almost forgot, we’re nowhere near standardized ways of doing things throughout the ideotypes of cloud computing. And I’m not talking about what NIST does. The cloud industry is almost willy-nilly erecting new silos of babble
The last topic seems to be the most important, by far. Where’s the standard electrical outlet or USB of cloud APIs, not to mention user interfaces? When will we have “brake on the left, accelerator on the right,” in Scott McNealy’s timeword phrase about the enterprise IT industry? Will we be able to stop the madness before Oracle simply buys up everything and puts a rude end to all this idealistic cloudy talk?
I’ll be roaming the halls of the SCCC in November, after having duly voted early and often in my Illinois hometown.
Will I see you there? Let me know.
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