Speaking in Philly next week

I’ll be at the Emerging Technologies for the Enterprise conference next week in Philadelphia, giving two talks:

• The Pragmatic Cloud – the keynote on the second day: In the IT industry 2009 was apex of cloud promises and hype. The early, now cliché successes captured everyone’s attention and many vendors turned on a dime to deliver something – anything – with the word cloud in it. At the same time, the aging hype-silos of development like Agile development, rails, open source, and Java were cut back on their meal-rations unless they could connect with “cloud.” We’re hardly “done” with the cloud, but there are now endless deployment options, taxonomies, technologies, and distractions that are more smoke filled rat-holes than clouds. This talk deals with the state of things now and how you can take start pragmatically getting along with things in the current, cloud-injected development-scape.
• From Ramen Startups to Quarter-end white-knuckling – in the “management track: The tone of technology coverage and advancement has changed to follow the darlings of the consumer web word: Google, Facebook, iPhones, and the whiz-bang du jour. “Enterprise Software” is hardly the source of new technologies that can help mainstream business: the bulk of valuable innovation now occurs and comes from the consumer world. The dynamics of that consumer culture are much different than typical business concerns, and the result software tends to be a “leaky abstraction” that reflects that difference. This talk with cover these innovations and then explore how new consumer technologies like social networking, cloud computing & SaaS, mobile access, and new work habits fit in with the business world.

It’s always nice to give a talk and discuss it afterwards with the audience, and I haven’t actually been to Philly before. As an added bonus, I’ll get to run my mouth along with James Ward (who always has something interesting to say) on a Chariot TechCast podcast episode at the event. If you’re around, it’d be great to say hello.