Last night I attended the annual Renaissance Dinner at the Graham Hotel in Port Melbourne. This is a tradition started several years ago by Peter Stubbings aimed at getting a number of like minded IT professionals together to share a meal talk about their experiences and generally have a good time. The people in attendance represented a pretty broad cross section of the industry including IBM, Oracle, SAP, Ingres, Oakton, Unico, Business Objects to name a few.
What was encouraging was the relative upbeat mood regarding the economy, although this did get a little heated when economics and politics started to cross. The general feeling is that we have been trading off a boom cycle for quite a while, and given that we live in one of the only developed economies with a budget surplus and sound economy going into this Global Financial Crisis there is a good chance we can buffer the storm.
Time will tell...
I was reading Micheal Specht's blog Cloud/Grid/Utility Computing what is it & must you have it? and It got me thinking, it is true that the various buzzwords that the industry offers up can sometimes be confusing, however, maybe it would help if we boil it down to bare essentials. When Micheal and I caught up recently we had a long discussion that centered around these decisions being horses for courses - what is the best architecture for your application? Try to see through the buzzwords - whether it be cloud, utility, or SaaS or whatever. What is the underlying architecture and most importantly can it deliver for your respective application on the following criteria to the degree that you need:
- Performance
- Business Continuity (i.e., back-up and recovery)
- Security, privacy and compliance
- Service Level Agreements
- Business Integration and processes
- Affordability
That is what is important. What the solution is ultimately called is not important as long as you are getting the computing resources you need, when you need them at a price point that suits.
Last night I attended the annual Renaissance Dinner at the Graham Hotel in Port Melbourne. This is a tradition started several years ago by Peter Stubbings aimed at getting a number of like minded IT professionals together to share a meal talk about their experiences and generally have a good time. The people in attendance represented a pretty broad cross section of the industry including IBM, Oracle, SAP, Ingres, Oakton, Unico, Business Objects to name a few.
