CloudFair 2012 ended yesterday and I was lucky enough to see about a dozen of the presentations. It was a good show with many well thought out pitches. Some were more educational, some more evangelical, some fell flat.
I find it interesting to find the theme in any convention. Here is what emerged for me during CloudFair 2012:
-
The Cloud is Real: It scales, it is cheaper, it slices, it dices.
-
IT Departments are Dinosaurs: Some presenters tried to defend IT departments by explaining why they are in a tough spot. But everyone agreed that IT departments are in the way.
-
Some Cool App Runs on our Stuff: Google had the royal wedding, AWS has Netflix, Everybody has a validating customer. If you doubt it, here is a juicy chart about traffic or here is a customer quote about how we saved the day.
Who attends these conferences? The premise is that the audience is the potential customer. Which could be either the IT Department or the end user inside a business. If not that maybe channel partners that already work with the potential customer. The potential customer is the IT department. How it got to be cool to blast the customer is beyond me. Last I checked, the IT department still had the budget.