Thursday 31 January 2013

Powering the Cloud 2013 - ‘The Dawn of New Ages’


This is my first year as content director for Powering the Cloud and I am proud and slightly daunted to be taking over this role from Paul Trowbridge, who has led the event for many years. Paul will still be involved with Powering the Cloud but has passed over the mantle to me of steering the content.

Despite over 40 years in the IT industry I am still learning every day and welcome this new challenge. I also welcome your feedback and ideas as it will help me ensure that the content for the event is stimulating and relevant to you and your company.

Powering the Cloud 2013 is set against an economic backdrop of austerity but in Information Technology terms a period of rebirth, rebuilding and new opportunities. With this in mind I would like to open your thinking to embrace the idea of this period as ‘The Dawn of New Ages’.

While companies across Europe have been addressing challenging market conditions IT solutions have come to the fore as a tool for them to recreate their ‘go to market’ strategies, simplify and automate business processes and most importantly develop more agile, mobile, leaner and responsive organisations.

The role of Information Technology is no longer just as a support operation for the business. IT is now at the heart of how every organisation operates and is the catalyst for change and innovation.

Though tough economic times have made many organisations rethink their use of IT the real driving forces causing companies to embrace new IT technologies are far subtler and revolve around the new ‘Ages of the Customer, the Cloud and the Platform’.

The first of these ‘the Age of the Customer’ is completely changing business thinking and altering the way organisations view their internal and external customers and the way they should communicate, motivate and build relationships.

Technology over the last few years has changed forever the expectation of the customer. They now feel they should be able to buy or consume a service at the touch of a button. They expect technology to be intuitive and easy to use. They also want to access their company applications, local government services, entertainment, favourite applications and web sites on any device and from any location.

Most importantly they feel empowered to comment on their likes and dislikes and influence the quality, price and service of what they purchase. This extension of social networking into the heart of the marketing cycle is making organisations completely rethink their sales models and strategies.

Behind much of this change in user attitude is the influence of ‘the Cloud’ which has changed the traditional delivery mechanism of most industries, changed the economic models of organisations and removed the barrier for entry for new competitors with more agile and dynamic ways to address customer requirements.

‘The Cloud’ is a phenomenon that cannot be ignored and most importantly must be embraced.

The third major trend, which has been termed ‘The Age of the Platform’ by Phil Simon in his book of the same title, shows how Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google appear to have created a new business model that challenges traditional thinking and is making other major multinational organisations completely re-evaluate their go-to-market strategies.

By using new technologies and a deep understanding of how to build relationships with today’s customers these organisations have been able grow at phenomenal rates whilst ignoring traditional well established organisational models.

Powering the Cloud 2013 will address ‘the Dawn of New Ages’ phenomena by looking at the underlying technologies, solutions and thinking that is enabling organisations to meet the requirements of this new age with vigour and enthusiasm.

To this end we will build on the success of last year’s Spotlight sessions and enhance the format to combine ‘Thought Leadership’ presentations, technology insights, market leading case studies and perceptive panel sessions addressing the reality of implementing technologically advanced solutions.

There will be five main themes to these Spotlight sessions:

‘Business Outcomes - driving Big Data & Analytics’, ‘Securing your data’, ‘Enabling new & old world enterprise scale applications’, ‘All about the management’ and ‘Rethinking your datacenter architecture’.

Over the next few months I will explore all these five themes in this Blog to set the scene for this year and stimulate ideas and debate which will hopefully make the event in October more rewarding for everyone.

Powering the Cloud 2013 is your opportunity to explore what is possible in this new IT world, debate with your peers the issues you all face, listen to people and organisations who are successfully adopting change and most importantly absorb and embrace the opportunities this all represents to you and your organisation.

So I look forward to hearing your comments on this Blog and would also like to point out that we are now entering the period where we call for papers from those persons and organisations who feel they have a contribution to make to the event through thought leadership presentations and real life case studies. If you are interested in contributing then details can be found at http://poweringthecloud.com/speaker/information.

Look forward to meeting you in October.

John Chapman.