According to a weekend TV news item snippet, a professional yo-yo player is in the UK promoting the ’sport.’ I know what one of those objects feels like. The last few weeks have seen me bouncing between Spain, UK and the west coast of the US. I’m becoming mighty friendly with SeatExpert. TripIt is keeping the schedules, hotels and flights in order. Which is more than I can say for my body. It feels like Ray Wang and I are following each other around. I don’t know whose travel schedule is worse. Before anyone starts feeling sorry for me (reserve that for ‘er indoors) it’s my choice to be traveling as much. It’s important. And it ain’t over yet.
One of the major problems for those following or supporting trends is that they’re often only seen through the lens of the market in which they operate. It’s all too easy to get caught up in the myopic world of whatever tech trend is catching your fancy. Traveling provides a way to get out of the bubble. Hearing other points of view, observing where different country representatives are on the adoption curve and seeing the concerns of others adds huge value for me that no amount of surfing the Internet can provide.
My friend Vinnie sees these things through a slightly different lens, noting that the difference between packaged software as we’ve known it and SaaS/cloud is bringing seismic changes. He’s right but there’s a lot more to both learn and understand.
By the time most people read this piece I’ll be on my way to London. It’s a three part, 2 day gig. First up is a meeting to discuss how the industry, buyers and independent bodies might work together in new ways that provide a win-win-win and solve some of the problems that are lurking just around the corner. Is it possible? I dunno. I’d like to think all three have a shot at getting this right. It’s not been tried before so who knows what might emerge?
Next I’m hoping to meet and film customers talking about massively scalable IT. This is a topic that will become of increasing importance as SaaS/cloud computing starts to scale across business applications and as vendors find that what they thought was a scalable multi-tenant architecture starts to run into brick walls.
Finally, I’m attending the Business Cloud 9 Summit as a vendor guest. The event has an eclectic mix of vendors and UK practitioners. Beyond the prepared material, I’ll be touring the halls to hear what UK customers really think of the SaaS/cloud hype and what’s motivating them to attend events of this kind. I’m hoping the event will provide me with the insights needed to come to a balanced assessment of what might happen in 2010. We’ll see.
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