It’s great seeing the #e2conf stream come alive - folks are pouring into the Westin Boston Waterfront from all around the globe to gather at Enterprise 2.0 with one common objective: to listen, learn and share their stories about collaboration in business.

Just as Enterprise 2.0 brings together like minded E2.0 adopters from all parts of the world, the World Cup 2010 in South Africa simultaneously has fans glued to their screens to support their talented countrymen play the beautiful game. Good news for all you soccer fans at Enterprise 2.0 - the Westin has set up a massive screen for the games in the Lobby, and you can grab a schedule from the Concierge (I’ve already snagged mine).

Tomorrow the conference begins at 8:30 am with workshops running till 4:15 pm, and afterwards we have a special program taking place on Monday night starting at 4:30 pm called Evening in the Cloud.

For all you #e2conf veterans, Evening in the Cloud will be a familiar program as this is our 3rd year doing it in Boston. Each year the format has changed slightly, and this year the topic is Which Collaboration Backbone is Right for You?

David Berlind will open the program with a 30 minute overview of the cloud collaboration market, the major players in the market, and touch on why the market is changing so rapidly. After his overview, Sean Poulley from IBM will provide a 15 to 20 minute demo of LotusLive Online Collaboration Services, and then join Bill McNee, Founder and CEO of Saugatuck Technology and Yuvi Kochar, Vice President of Technology / Chief Technology Officer of The Washington Post Company for an hour long discussion about choosing one’s cloud collaboration partner.

Panel Moderator:
David Berlind
Chief Content Officer, TechWeb

Panelist:
Yuvi Kochar
Vice President – Technology, Chief Technology Officer, The Washington Post Company

Panelist:
William S. McNee
Founder and CEO, Saugatuck Technology

Panelist:
Sean Poulley
Vice President, LotusLive Online Collaboration Services

After the panel concludes, a cocktail reception will begin and the audience will have a change to grab a drink, mingle with the panelists and get a closer looks at LotusLive. Evening in the Cloud is open to all registered Enterprise 2.0 attendees. Look forward to seeing you tomorrow night!

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Today we take the wraps off of our conference agenda for Enterprise 2.0 Boston. Our program will be a bit larger this year but more importantly, it has been organized differently, and now has track chairs for each of the major conference themes. By doing this we hope to create a more complete and cohesive set of sessions within each track on important trends, challenges and opportunities. This agenda also reflects an Enterprise 2.0 life-cycle approach, from strategy setting and vendor selection to application deployment, adoption and performance analysis. Below are my thoughts on the tracks we’re announcing today but we’re not done yet! Over the coming weeks expect some additions to our Keynote program, the start of our Enterprise 2.0 Launch Pad program and some evening fun we have in the works as well.

Strategy: From a “track” view on the agenda we plan to set the tone for the week with a newly created “Set Your Enterprise 2.0 Strategy” series of sessions. This track tackles the “why” of Enterprise 2.0 with an underlying theme of how to use Enterprise 2.0 to bring specific value to business, how to execute on a strategy and how to measure the results. The track explores the intersection of Enterprise 2.0 with different functional areas in business, from sales to supply chain to HR and product development. As an industry we have made tremendous progress in introducing social and collaborative strategies into business. The good news is that businesses are taking notice and making initial investments in people and technology. The better news is that this is just the beginning. Now that social and collaborative initiatives are showing up on the corporate agenda, the next opportunity lies in applying them to the traditional applications and processes that form the backbone of business. There’s a tremendous amount of ground yet to cover in Enterprise 2.0.

Tools: With clear objectives established we can explore the options for “Social Business Applications and Platforms”. As our industry has matured, so too have the tools and platforms that drive it. Enterprise 2.0 is rife with vendors and applications to pick from - from startups to major vendors, point solutions to software suites and full-blown platforms. Navigating this ever-changing landscape of innovation, software features, partners and platform ecosystems is no simple task. This track is invaluable in helping you avoid missteps and future-proof your technology investments. Within the social applications and platforms theme, we’re also calling out two related tracks on search and video. Search is often overlooked in Enterprise 2.0 but is ever more important as the volume of information explodes. Search in the context of Enterprise 2.0 is extremely powerful and is an area we wanted to dig into a little deeper this year. Be sure to check out our track on how to “Use Search to Tame Complexity and Discover Opportunity.” And there’s no question that video continues to grow in importance in business as it already has in the consumer world. Our track on “Emerging Video Applications and Enterprise Collaboration” looks at the latest trends from “YouTube” style video usage to high-end telepresence systems.

External Community: Now more than ever businesses are looking outside their organizational boundaries for a competitive edge. The track on how to “Integrate Social Media and Community Approaches” into an Enterprise 2.0 framework addresses this head-on. While most social media discussions tend to revolve solely around marketing and PR, we believe the value of social media goes well beyond these functional areas into other parts of the business such as customer service, sales and product development. Extending social media for marketing, PR and beyond is a key theme this track explores.

Application Delivery & Integration: With a well thought out strategy and a complete understanding of the available tools, we shift to a track we’re calling “Delivery Strategies: Deploy, Connect and Mobilize.” This track weighs today’s application deployment options such as the cloud and SaaS against traditional, on premise hosting. There’s no question that the software world is going through a radical transformation as enterprises gain acceptance of infrastructure, platforms, software –and everything else as-a-service. Understanding these changes in the context of deploying social and collaborative applications is vital. With new choices comes increased complexity and more heterogeneous application environments. Connecting these applications requires new skills and an understanding of development environments, APIs and the integration glue required to make it all work together seamlessly. And with the volume of Smartphone devices being used by the workforce, businesses must also understand how vendor choices and deployment options affect the availability of applications to a mobile workforce. This track explores important developments in mobile but from a deployment standpoint, assessing the options across native mobile enterprise applications, mobile middle-ware, web-based and widget-based access to applications.  The development of this track is in direct response to attendee requests for more technical sessions.

Adoption: There is no better way to learn than to hear from practitioners. These are the pioneers of Enterprise 2.0, forging a path that can often lead to unforeseen challenges and frustration but also to great lessons learned and hopefully success. The “Adoption in the Enterprise for Practitioners” track is chock full of case studies and best practices on all aspects of Enterprise 2.0 with the goal of driving executive and user support and deeper integration into the fabric of the business culture.

Workshops: The tracks are each complimented by related workshops.  We have some fantastic new workshops this year as well as a couple of the most popular courses from our last conference. These are deep dive sessions and generally more instructional in nature.

Call for Papers: Lastly, a big congratulations to the people selected to present from our call for papers.  We have announced the following sessions and have a couple more awaiting approval.  We also have a number of panel discussions in the works and will be sure to consider the people who submitted through the call for papers for those sessions.

Extending MITRE’s Reach: Business Networking for and Beyond the Enterprise- Donna Cuomo, Chief Information Architect, The MITRE Corporation and Laura Damianos, Lead Artificial Intelligence Engineer, The MITRE Corporation

Using Chaos Theory Principals to Overcome Information Overload within the Enterprise and on the Web- Thierry Hubert, President, Darwin Ecosystem and Bill Ives, VP of Social Media, Darwin Ecosystem

Joining E20 Apps Together for Better Integration, Productivity and Measurement - Lee Bryant, Director, Headshift

Enterprise 2.0: It’s no Field of Dreams (CSC Case Study)- Claire Flanagan, Senior Manager, KM and Enterprise Social Collaboration, CSC, and Simon Scullion, Service Development Manager, CSC

Enterprise 2.0 Lock Down in a Highly Regulated Environment - Abha Kumar, Principal, Information Technology, Vanguard and Andrew Lazzaro, Manager, Information Technology, Vanguard

The Dark Side of Enterprise 2.0 - Redux - Greg Lowe, Social Media, Alcatel-Lucent and Kathleen Culver, Transformation Architect, Alcatel-Lucent

Innovation Through E2.0: Three Case Studies that Make the Business Case - Mark Fidelman, EVP, MindTouch

Social Learning 2.0 - Marcia Conner, Senior Enterprise Strategist, Pistachio Consulting

We’ll have many more updates in the coming weeks.  I look forward to seeing you all in Boston!

So Larry Ellison took the opportunity at a recent presentation to go off on a rant about cloud computing. He basically thinks it baloney.

His points (such as they are, when you pull away the Valley girl inflection he ascribes to a cloud computing advocate) are these:

1. Salesforce and Netsuite have been around almost ten years, and Oracle’s world hasn’t come to an end. (So I guess we are supposed to conclude that cloud computing doesn’t represent a future?)

2. He’s tired of people saying that they have been ‘doing’ cloud computing for years. (Huh?)

Of course Ellison wants to defang cloud computing as much as possible: it is a threat. The spectre of Amazon, Google, and applications running in the cloud on top of someone else’s technology platform has got to be the largest long-term strategic threat to his business. To the degree that the enterprise wants to get away from managing their own hardware and close source software — and who wouldn’t if they can get security and scaling issues resolved? — that is the hard stop in Oracle’s future.

Enterprise 2.0 San Francisco’s Call for Papers closed on Tuesday after receiving a mind blowing number of submissions - 446 to be exact. It’s great to see the community is as enthusiastic about the San Francisco show as we are, and really reinforces the need for Enterprise 2.0 on the West Coast.

Some highlights and prevalent topics include:

• Tons of case studies and tales of adoption
• Mobility
• Cloud computing
• Micro-blogging & emerging platforms in the enterprise
• Driving the social media bus
• Building an Enterprise 2.0 culture
• Internal & external communities

A big thank you to all that took the time and effort to submit an abstract. Steve and the Advisory Board have got some reading to do.

Cross posting from CloudAve - specialist Cloud Computing and SaaS blog.

If you’re moving towards cloud computing, what’s your shortlist? What questions should you ask? What answers should you demand? Join this panel of analysts and cloud computing experts as we build a selection criteria live, arming you with the facts you need to pick a cloud solution that’s right for you.
Speakers:

Cross posting from CloudAve - specialist Cloud Computing and SaaS blog

First session of the Enterprise 2.0 conference 2009 and how could I resist this one… “Cloud Computing, A Real World Guide”.

Alistair Croll, Co-author, “Complete Web Monitoring” and Principal Analyst, Bitcurrent

“Cloud computing is like modern art – I can’t describe it but I know it when I see it”. Apparently Amazon Web Services has over 60000 customers of which the majority are (somewhat surprisingly) enterprise level. An interesting analogy that cloud computing is either like soup or stew – either very configurable or easy to digest but “one size fits all”. Google app engine is soup – you can code in any language so long as it’s Python or Java – but if you fit to their rules – it’s easy, quick and simple. Amazon as an example of stew – more complex but more flexible.

Why to switch to clouds;

• Better economics (but not always – and unhelpful to only seel cloud computing based on cost savings)
• Developer empowerment

Croll gave the example of when The Washington Post got access to Hilary Clinton’s diaries during the election and compared the time and cost of making those diaries searchable on a local processing base versus in the clouds. They used cloud computing to convert more than 17,000 pages into a searchable database within twenty-four hours.

Croll talked around the case of Coghead – the PaaS provider that is now in the deadpool. He pointed out that developing for an agnostic PaaS provider makes no sense – leveraging a user base (a la force.com withsalesforce.com, the Intuit Partner Platform with QuickBooks) makes much more sense. He also reminded people that thinking about mobility is important for startups – building an application that is inherently tied to any one particular platform is risky in that it very much limits the possible exit strategies that can be followed.

He told the story of one massive financial services company that is considering moving all of its IT infrastructure over to Google – he wasn’t prepared to divulge details (not surprisingly) but indicated that this enterprise was adamant that Google could do it better than they themselves could with internal infrastructure.

Pick the right battle – the best place for an enterprise to use cloud computing Croll suggests are;

• Places where traditional IT wasn’t used before because of cost, time or process limitations (witness the Clinton diary example above)
• Where lower concerns exist around security, configuration and control

Croll pointed out a CapGemini study that found that “over 80 percent of the information a worker needs to complete their job is held outside of the organisation” and as such we should embrace being more porous with the outside rather than siloing data. He contrasted it to a similar report done 20 years ago where the figure was 20%.

A cautionary tale: the Ada language that NASA used in the eighties to replace some Fortran… While the results that Ada could bring where very attractive, it never achieved critical mass – the naysayers blocked adoption of something new while the evangelists promised too much, too soon.

An amusing metaphor – Croll pointed out that in the early days of electricity those who worked with its generation and distribution where superheroes – now they’ve been relegated to being smelly dirty workers as electricity moves to being a core utility. He contends that the same will occur with those he calls “server huggers” – as the cost of computing trends towards zero, the infrastructure behind that will become a complete commodity utility.

Croll then went on to try and refute Nick Carr’s assertion about cloud computing being a utility item like electricity – he pointed out lack of standards, low levels of interoperability, compliance requirements and the sheer number of services that a business may be able to use as being reasons that cloud computing should be thought of as different. To be honest I think his points were somewhat flawed – much of the issues he brought up are symptoms of an immature market rather than failings with cloud computing per se. In essence he was contrasting the entire cloud stack with only one level of electricity as a utility. A fairer contrast would be contrasting generation only with cloud processing.

Croll spent some time discussing the concerns and unknowns around the use of meta-data. He used the example of the image view data that Flickr has with individual images – possible a better example (given the audience) would have been the use of aggregate data for benchmarking as we’ve discussed recently with regards to mint.com.

And lastly the kitchen-aid analogy – it used to be that motors were expensive and attachments were cheap – hence buying a kitchen-aid and a bunch of attachments that go with it. A similar thing is happening with computing – once processing was expensive but attachments were cheap. Now everything has its own processing as the cost of processing plummets. Now what is important is the synchronisation, it’s an evolution towards ubiquitous computing where everything should be available everywhere – the ultimate move from a device centric world to a data-centric one.

Evening in the Cloud hosted by TechWeb’s David Berlind will take place from 4:30-8pm in the Harbor Ballroom.

Don’t miss this innovative after-hours program where leading cloud computing vendors explain how best to leverage existing IT investments while getting the benefits of the cloud. Afterwards, solutions will be demoed and attendees will get to invest a virtual $1M in their favorites.

You must be registered to attend this special evening program. For inquiries or to upgrade your pass, please see our registration page.

Last week we had our call for our “Twitter Pitch” Round 1 for Launch Pad 2009, presented by the Enterprise 2.0 Conference.

We screened through the fabulous tweets - removing duplicates and RTs (the community support is great but unfortunately only 1 entry per company is allowed). Of the final round 1 submissions, we’d like YOU to vote for the company you’d like to see progress to Round 2 (videos)

Voting commences now and ends at on midnight PST Friday, May 15th. There will be a total of 3 online rounds, and the final 4 companies will present live on the main stage at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference. The winning company will receive a Demo Pod for the 2010 Conference, valued at over $7,500.

Please see our Launch Pad page for a full schedule and more details.

ADD YOUR VOTE NOW!

[Only 1 vote per person. Please note that any suspicious voting patterns will be monitored and removed.]

And a special thanks to the folks at PollDaddy for helping provide this very sexy embeddable poll.

I had a chance to speak with Niall Kennedy, who has written quite a bit about cloud computing recently, making sense of the jargon and clarifying the issues. For example, see his The Anatomy Of Cloud Computing, and Measuring Efficiency In The Cloud posts.

I am particularly obliiged to Niall for his observation that companies thinking about moving to the cloud should pick solutions that best match their non-cloud stacks, in order to minimize costs and breakage.

Hat tip: Justin Jarvis