A somewhat imperfect YouTube screencap of Simon Wardley presenting a keynote at OSCON
HostingCon 2011 takes place August 8-10 in San Diego, California. In the weeks leading up to this year’s event, the WHIR will be taking you inside the program, posting interviews and features relating to specific sessions from the program. Follow our complete coverage before and during the event at the WHIR’s HostingCon coverage feed. Click here to attend HostingCon 2011.
(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — Since acquiring HostingCon (www.hostingcon.com) in 2009, technology publisher iNET Interactive (which also acquired the WHIR earlier this year) has been working hard to build on the existing event, both in terms of its size, and its role as the place where the agenda is set for the hosting industry.
A big part of that, according to Kevin Gold, director of marketing at iNET, and the main force behind the development of the event’s program, is gathering the feedback of attendees – particularly the feedback of attendees at the 2010 event, the first year with iNET fully at the helm – and then acting on that feedback.
In the case of the keynote, the call was for something more motivational, inspirational and a little philosophical. The answer was Simon Wardley, a researcher at CSC’s Leading Edge Forum, and a highly regarded speaker in the technology world – a big draw at events like OSCON and CloudCamp – and widely considered one of the leading thinkers and presenters in the cloud computing space.
The day-one keynote, scheduled for Monday, August 8, at 4:00 p.m., is entitled “Situation Normal, Everything Must Change,” a kind of mantra for Wardley, who specializes in examining the intersection between emerging technologies and IT strategy. During the presentation, Wardley, a truly engaging presenter, will discuss the evolution of technology, from a product to a service, in the context of cloud computing.
Part of the purpose of the opening keynote, says Gold, is to get attendees thinking, get them excited and get them pumped about what they can take away from the rest of the program. He’s confident Wardley will impress.
CSC, of course, is as about as well known as technology organizations get. A systems integrator at the largest end of the scale – a 50 year old company with close to 100,000 employees – the company has a hand in technology at just about every point in the ecosystem. Its Leading Edge Forum is a research organization and think tank, for which Wardley is a key contributor, focused on delivering analysis and insight on technology to businesses.
The organization’s work focuses on questions surrounding how evolving business and IT functions will continue to interact, creating new roles for IT within enterprises, and looks for answers about the role IT will play in those organizations in the future.
Wardley’s keynote will help hosting providers to understand the role they’ll play in the delivery of the cloud, and the space they’ll take up within the organizations that use their services, offering a clearer understanding of what hosts should strive for as a provider of IT services generally, and of cloud computing specifically.
About Liam Eagle
Liam Eagle has worked as a contributor to the Web Host Industry Review since its inception in 2000, and as editor since 2003. He has been editor of the WHIR's print magazine since its launch. His daily involvement in the gathering and reporting of Web hosting news and his regular interaction with Web hosting leaders gives him an uncommonly broad appreciation of the issues and tends facing the business. Through his WHIR blog, Liam spots Web hosting trends and offers opinions on the industry-wide impacts of major developments and the motivation behind big announcements. Follow him on Twitter @liameagle
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