I’m just doing a final planning session around the agenda for next week’s Burton Group Catalyst Conference in San Diego. As ever it looks like I need to be at least three tracks at the same time so I’m going to have to hedge my bets on the content and hope for the best. based on the experience of previous interactions with Burton Group Analysts, starting with Chris Howard at The Open Group Conference in Glasgow a couple of years ago, I’m pretty sanguine that it will work out just fine.
John Seely Brown, formerly Chief Scientist for the Xerox Corporation at PARC, is one of the keynote speakers this year and so I’m looking forward to broader-based session that takes the conversation away from straight technology (John’s keynote is entitled “forging ahead: navigating the new normal”). Equally Werner Vogels, CTO Amazon.com will be running a session entitled “head in the cloud–the power of infrastructure as a service” which I’m hoping will touch upon some of the themes were looking at this in the current changing economic climate and the push/pull towards cloud computing initiatives.
There’s probably something in Chad Sakac’s presentation on “rethinking storage for the virtualised datacentre” that we should be taking note of too given we are majoring on VM Ware for our consolidation program. Hopefully some of this will be timely imports into our current thinking and will help with action plans for the next couple of years.
Overall, there are eight tracks on offer this year:
- life after SOA: Next Generation application architecture
- leveraging information to gain insight
- enterprise ready clouds: realistic strategies
- virtualisation: transforming IT infrastructure
- of the new identity architecture: getting there from here
- networks in motion
- Security in context: new models and new business
- collaborate or perish: the business value of relationships
Looking quickly across the sessions has released a half day devoted to Microsoft 2010 and pros, cons and alternative is there room. I think this will be useful reflection point for us at this point in time looking at our own delivery of numerous collaboration tools set against the context of the changes in requirements for access to information and end-user devices. Thursday morning provides an assessment of social computing in the business, headed by Mike Gotta of Gartner (née Burton group) and includes a session from Gia Lyons of Jive Software fame entitled “design, for community’s sake!”. I’m expecting that this stream will provide affirmation or issues, opportunities and challenges in driving adoption of social technologies in the enterprise. I also think that it will help in providing a broader view of adoption strategies undertaken by people based on competitor products to those that we have in place at the moment. Certainly it will be interesting to hear a presentation from Gia Lyons given Sheffield’s use of SBS for their collaborative platform–something to compare and contrast at a future date.
This is a new departure for a summer conference for me which takes me away from ’straight’ enterprise architecture and talk of specific frameworks. I must say that I’m looking forward to the change of scene this year.
I may live blog from the key keynote sessions, assuming the conference doesn’t have the same sort of mi-fi issues Apple had at the iPhone 4 release 
, so that folks back at the office can get their kicks asking questions.
Related posts:
Paul lives, rides and works in Cardiff, South Wales. His work seems to largely entail fixing things and keeping wheels on. Officially, he is actively engaged and interested in Enterprise Architecture these days, but has a secret past that involved standing around on glaciers collecting meltwater samples, and walking through endless fields of wheat taking radiance measurements. 