Who: Michael Topalovich and Edward Schlicksup
What: Tech in the Middle 2010 Chicago
When: Saturday, September 11
Where: Herman Hall at Illinois Institute of Technology
Why: You are a Chicago-area developer, entrepreneur, or technologist looking for insight on cloud computing and mobile trends

http://www.techinthemiddle.com/Register
https://titm.eventbrite.com/

What is Cloud Computing and how can it help my company?

Presented by Delivered Innovation and SilverTree Systems

Overview

Delivered Innovation and SilverTree Systems are teaming up to provide business executives with an informative overview and peer-to-peer roundtable discussion of Cloud Computing and how this leading-edge technology can be leveraged to achieve breakthrough business results. Topics to be discussed include:

• What Is Cloud Computing? How did we get here?
  • How does “The Cloud” help me?
  • Benefits
• Risks and Mitigation Strategies
• How does Cloud Computing change the way we do business?
  • Time to market acceleration
  • Business model enablement
• Who are the players in Cloud Computing?
  • Amazon
  • Google
  • Microsoft
  • Salesforce.com
• How do I determine my Cloud strategy?
• Customer case studies
  • Adobe Systems
  • Polycom
  • School of Rock
• How do I get started?

All attendees receive a copy of Jonathan Sapir’s book, Power in the Cloud : Using Cloud Computing to Build Information Systems at the Edge of Chaos.

Seating is limited to 12 business executives, so order your ticket today to reserve your place at the table.

Agenda

Friday, February 19

8:00 – 8:30 Continental breakfast and networking
8:30 – 9:10 Michael Topalovich, Delivered Innovation
9:20 – 10:00 Jonathan Sapir, SilverTree Systems

Location

Regus Park Ridge Plaza
350 S. Northwest Hwy.
Suite 300
Park Ridge, IL 60068

About the Presenters

Jonathan Sapir is the CEO of SilverTree Systems and the author of Power in the Cloud : Using Cloud Computing to Build Information Systems at the Edge of Chaos.

Michael Topalovich is the founder and CTO of Delivered Innovation. Prior to Delivered Innovation, Michael was a senior IT leader with Siebel Systems where in 2003 he spearheaded the systems management team for Siebel CRM OnDemand, one of the first enterprise Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) offerings.

• The “big announcement” revealed during Marc Benioff’s first of several lengthy keynotes was Salesforce Chatter, a social platform designed to drive collaboration within the Salesforce CRM environment. I can’t say I was all that excited about Chatter until I went to the salesforce.com area of the Expo Hall and got a first-hand look at it. Even though we won’t see it generally available until mid or late 2010, the deep-dive demo that I got helped me to understand the business value of Chatter and how Delivered Innovation will be able to design next generation Salesforce and Force.com systems around a real-time social and collaborative paradigm.
• The session that I was most looking forward to was the discussion on integrating Google Wave with Salesforce.  Unfortunately the Google Product Manager was unavailable, and despite the best efforts of his replacement the session was a disappointment. I’m still trying to wrap my head around whether Wave will be able to provide business value or if it’s just a new toy with a lot of buzz around it.
• The best session that I attended gave a sneak peek of new packaging and patch management tools for commercial applications.  Today, any customer that downloads a package from the AppExchange has to explicitly download and install updated packages in order to upgrade a commercial application; in the near future it will be possible to push patches and version upgrades to customers directly and instantaneously.  The other impressive feature that I did not realize was already available was the ability to apply conditional logic within Apex classes to create branching based on the installed package version in a customer Salesforce org…for all intents and purposes this creates an in-line code branching solution that avoids the complexity of managing multiple class instances within a package.  But for when a situation does call for a code branch to address critical issues and distribute patches, salesforce.com has created a paradigm of parallel development orgs that can be used to branch code and merge it back into the core code base of the original development org for version releases.
• I will chalk it up to growing pains and West Coast time management, but almost nothing ran on schedule during Dreamforce, and I found that to be frustrating at times. Lesson learned – leave some flexibility in your itinerary and be prepared to make choices regarding sessions because Dreamforce was pretty chaotic at times.  And if you’re planning on grabbing some food from a sponsored lunch, get there early.
• I realize that events are huge marketing opportunities, but I walked out of a couple of sessions because I felt like I was being hard sold on messaging that I had long bought into. There may be a fine line between education and indoctrination, but let people drink the Kool Aid by choice…not brute force.
• My biggest takeaway was the genuine enthusiasm that I got from current and potential Salesforce customers that had “found religion” in cloud computing.  It was very exciting to have the opportunity to talk to so many people that had made the conceptual leap and understood the importance of the cloud.

In a broader context, the energy that I felt in San Francisco last week was like nothing that I had experienced since I lived and worked there almost ten years ago.  There were times when I felt as if I had stuck my finger directly into an electrical outlet and kept it there until I boarded the plane home. 2010 is going to be an explosive year, and whether it was Dreamforce itself or just the timing of the event, many of us will look back at this week in San Francisco as the start of a golden era of technology.

Additional speakers will discuss cloud computing technologies such as: Google App Engine, Microsoft Azure, and Amazon Web Services.

For more information, visit http://www.dayofcloud.com