Friday’s Massachusetts Technology Leadership Council’s (MassTLC) UnConference on “The Future of Software and the Internet” was a tremendous success because it brought together over 250 area executives and entrepreneurs for a free-wheeling set of discussions about a wide array of industry trends and opportunities.

Some of the sessions were open debates about the meaning of current trends, such as cloud computing and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS). Others were open-ended explorations about how companies and individuals can capitalize on these trends to create new business opportunities, such as “cloud-solving”. Still other sessions turned out to be useful tutorials about the realities of the marketplace, such as one I attended about the inefficiencies in today’s capital markets that are discouraging tech IPOs and reshaping the way start-ups evolve.

Dealing with the unstructured nature of an unconference can be unsettling for folks like me initially. And some sessions … Read More »

I started this past week in Las Vegas attending the two-day Enterprise Cloud Summit at Interop where a crowd of 200-300 people converged to learn about the rapidly evolving cloud computing phenomena from a cross-section of speakers from established players and virtual start-ups. 

This might not seem like a lot of attendees, but it was about ten times as many people as those who attended the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) track of Interop. And, the cloud crowd grew even bigger at the end of the first day of the Summit when an ‘unconference’ CloudCamp was held which featured a variety of ‘birds-of-a-feather’ style discuss groups fueled by plenty of oversized cookies.

The cloud computing theme also extended into the main-tent portion of Interop with the keynote sessions on the first day of the conference also focused on the topic. These sessions permitted HP, IBM and SAP to … Read More »