Delegates arrive.
Get to know the other study tour participants on a tour of some of the fascinating sights of San Francisco, followed by lunch overlooking the city’s beautiful waterfront.
In the evening, identity management guru Dick Hardt will share his experience in addressing this critical issue. Dick founded identity provider Sxip and recently spent a year at Microsoft helping to roll out OAuth WRAP (Web Resource Authorization Protocol). We highly recommend that you take a look at his important OSCON speech on identity 2.0. See http://identity20.com/media/OSCON2005/.
Following this presentation, there will be a drinks reception and informal buffet dinner – your chance to talk to other delegates and exchange views on this year’s theme.
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Along with new LEF recruits Simon Wardley and Adrian Seccombe, Study Tour Director and Research Fellow Doug Neal will discuss the LEF’s latest research on Consumerization, Mobility and the Cloud. We will also hear from LEF associate Mark Masterson. |
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Gia Lyons Gia Lyons is Program Manager, Jive Communities, at Jive Software. Jive is a leader in the emerging enterprise 2.0/social business software market, and is used by companies such as Intel, VMware, Nike and CSC. Before joining Jive, Gia was a Social Software Evangelist at IBM. In both companies she has been deeply involved in helping organizations adopt new social tools. Her personal blog is at http://www.giatalks.com/ |
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Oliver Marks Oliver is a highly regarded expert on global business collaboration and a founding partner at the Sovos Group, which provides strategic and tactical collaboration guidance to help accelerate business performance. Previously, Oliver ran the Sony PlayStation WorldWide Studios international collaboration environment across Asia, Europe and North America despite that giant global corporation’s political landscape, and is very familiar with the realities of what it takes to realize the business value of modern workforce collaborative techniques against entrenched interests and silo thinking. Author of the highly regarded Collaboration 2.0 blog on ZDNet.com, Oliver is also on the advisory board of the US Enterprise 2.0 Conference and speaks on strategic thinking at this and other conferences. He also has an amazing garage of vehicles in downtown San Francisco that he may be persuaded to tell us about. |
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Who in IT doesn’t know of Salesforce.com? The company has confounded the Software-as-a-Service sceptics and become a dominant player in the sales force automation market. With its Force.com platform, Salesforce.com has enticed other business software vendors to adopt the SaaS model and provide their products on the Salesforce infrastructure. We have visited Salesforce.com frequently since its inception and are always impressed with the company’s willingness to engage in down-to-earth discussions with enterprise IT executives, answering questions that competitors often refuse to discuss. Last year, we were fascinated to learn how the Japanese postal service supports 60,000 workers with Salesforce systems, leapfrogging a whole generation of software. |
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Last year, the study tour had a memorable demonstration of Google Wave by Lars Rasmussen, the leader of the Wave development team based in Sydney, Australia, and a co-founder of Google Maps. This year, we anticipate an equally interesting session. Google has become a major player in the mobile computing market with phone manufacturers around the world adopting its Android operating system. These new phones create new possibilities for augmented reality and location-based services. |
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For a long time EMC has had a close relationship with Cisco, and both have been allies of VMware. In November 2009, the trio formed a joint venture to pursue the enterprise cloud computing market via a new company – Acadia. Recently, Michael Capellas (formerly of HP, Compaq and First Data) has taken the role of chief executive, reinvigorating interest in the venture. We expect to hear from all four members of the coalition (EMC, Cisco, VMware and Acadia) about how they expect data centre virtualization and private cloud infrastructures to evolve. |
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James Hamilton For the past several years, we have had an update on what is happening in the Amazon.com cloud computing world from Jeff Barr. He has helped us understand Amazon’s aggressive technology strategy. This year, our speaker will be James Hamilton, who is well known for helping first Microsoft and now Amazon build high-efficiency data centres. This session will be of particular interest to the many of our clients who are looking at implementing private clouds, with an eye to being able to ‘burst out’ to other, more public clouds when necessary. |
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The questions we get asked most often about cloud computing are “is it safe?” and “is it dependable?” CohesiveFT provides a very interesting answer to these questions with VPN-Cubed and Virtual Network Service (VNS). Essentially it makes your cloud deployments behave like a simple subnet extension of your datacenter. Connecting to the secure cloud network is done via your existing firewalls, gateways, and DMZ arrangements – no major topology changes are needed. It is available on a range of cloud/virtualization providers, including Amazon, GoGrid, Terremark, Rackspace, Flexiant, vCloud Express, private Eucalyptus and private vSphere. VPN-Cubed has led our colleague, Mark Masterson, to suggest that what we can do now is create Redundant Arrays of Independent Clouds (RAIC). |
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Geir Ramleth Geir Ramleth, CIO of Bechtel, is a study tour favourite. The accolade is earned by presenters who discuss topics of high interest to the study tour participants in a knowledgeable way, and with such frankness that the audience feel confident that they have a useful understanding of the challenges involved in deploying a particular strategy. Geir talked to us last year about Bechtel’s deployment of a modern Enterprise IT architecture and network based upon the strategies of Google, Amazon, and Salesforce.com. This year, Geir will introduce a user of Bechtel’s new infrastructure to discuss with us the productivity improvements it has delivered. Previously, when a new construction contract was secured, it took three months to implement the IT systems needed to manage the project. With the new infrastructure, “we can be ready to go the Monday following the contract signing!” |
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Verizon Business Security Systems Peter Tippett Peter Tippett is Vice President of Technology and Innovation at Verizon Business. Peter created the first commercial anti-virus product which later became Norton AntiVirus. Most recently, Verizon Business has conducted an annual data breach study that provides an excellent empirical view of the threats. See http://www.verizonbusiness.com/resources/security/reports/2009_databreach_rp.pdf. The Verizon Business Security blog is at: http://securityblog.verizonbusiness.com/. Peter will help us understand the potential monsters in the deep that can be threats to an unwary surfer. |
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Jamie Taylor Jamie is ‘Minister of Information’ at Metaweb and is co-author of the book Programming the Semantic Web. He holds a PhD in Behavioural Economics from Harvard. Metaweb is chaired by computer legend Danny Hillis and supports Freebase – a socially managed semantic database. Jamie believes that strong semantics combined with high start-up costs yield low adoption, whereas ‘good enough’ semantics with low start-up costs drive easy adoptions. |
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Workshop At this point in the tour, we will take the opportunity to spend some time discussing what we have heard so far, and what we feel the implications are for us. Be prepared to share what you have learned. There is huge value in hearing what others have picked up or are troubled by. |
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Time to relax, reflect and recuperate Drinks Reception and Dinner |
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Obopay is a true Silicon Valley start-up. It was founded in 2005 in Carol Realini’s kitchen; $76 million later, the company provides a mobile phone payment capability to thousands of people in India and Kenya. Obopay delivers an open, secure and interoperable mobile payments service that makes it easy for all mobile phone users to securely send and receive money, top-up their mobiles, buy online, and pay bills. The company believes the power is in the network and has established global partnerships that include Nokia, MasterCard, Citi, AT&T, Verizon, Essar, Yes Bank in India, Blackberry and Société Générale. We will also be hearing from one of their customers. |
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Analyzing a really large volume of data has been so time-consuming and expensive that for many companies it is not a viable option. The emergence of Hadoop, an open source database management system based upon the Google MapReduce principle of moving the processing to the data, has made it possible to apply off-the-shelf servers to the analysis of the kind of volume of data generated by Facebook, supporting 400 million users, or the call data records of China Mobile, with 500 million subscribers. Cloudera are a leading provider of Hadoop-based data management solutions and have worked with small and large enterprises to successfully harness this technology. |
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Discussion of cloud computing inevitably gives rise to security concerns. Can we afford to allow our employees to store particular kinds of corporate data in the cloud? Can we afford not to? If we must, how can we ensure that unauthorized users cannot access the data? These are the issues that VeriSign can help us discuss. Since 1995 it has been enabling trusted communications and commerce for companies, governments and consumers using its SSL, identity and authentication, and domain name services. We will be interested to hear VeriSign’s views on the renewed interest in PKI (Public Key Infrastructure), identity management, and fraud detection. |
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Facebook continues to make headlines as it probes the future of privacy and sharing. Most recently, it has wrestled with the question of complexity and user experience. Giving users fine-grained control sounds great, but not if the complexity overwhelms them. On the technical front, Facebook is making progress in the use of semantic web constructs, and its new ‘Like’ button uses RDFa to append preferences to a user’s profile. A lot has changed since we visited Facebook two years ago. It will be fascinating to get an update on its thinking. |
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PayPal is a wholly owned subsidiary of eBay. Its success is evident and has resulted in its increasing involvement in the development of industry standards addressing security and identity management concerns. Of special interest is the work PayPal has done with mobile transactions, https://www.paypal.com/mobile, which can work both as a smartphone app and via text messages. PayPal also leverages collective intelligence through a programme of prizes for developers who build innovative applications on the PayPal X Platform. |
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Workshop The tour will conclude with an intensive discussion among the delegates of what has been learned and what actions they expect to take. Real-time notes will be taken of delegates’ comments. These are extremely useful in assembling trip reports upon your return. Following such a workshop at the end of previous study tours, delegates reported that this session put the whole week into context, and highlighted the issues that still needed research. |
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Transport to San Francisco Airport will be provided for delegates flying out on Friday evening. Arrival time at the airport will be approximately 3.30pm. |