October, 2009
by Bill Jouris, Program Chair
This year's program includes a major track on Cloud Computing, beginning with our Keynote and Plenary speakers, of course. But the program also includes papers by a half dozen CMG members who have already started to deal with this hot topic in real situations, and will share their experiences with you.
With this part of the program, we hope we have demonstrated that CMG can deliver to you content that you will be hard pressed to find elsewhere: no matter what your personal opinion of Cloud Computing, there is something here that you can use. (Of course, that goes for several of our other hot topics as well!)
For example, you may be thinking "Cloud Computing is going to be big here, and I'm going to have to support it. But how??? We have speakers who can take you from barely recognizing the term to being able to address the sort of Capacity and Performance tasks that fill our working days, but which are now happening in the Cloud.
Alternatively, you may think: "This is just another marketing fad, and it will soon be replaced by something else." Well, maybe. But if you think back over other fads that have blown thru our industry, you will remember that you ended up having to support some of those fads for quite a while before they faded from view. CMG'09 is where you can find out how to do that.
Of course, you may just be looking at Cloud Computing and saying: "For four decades, IT departments have been providing other parts of their companies with services. The other units didn't know or care whether the mainframes were in the next room or the next building (or, as network capabilities improved, the next city or the next state). They just entered something at their desk, got a response back, and (at the end of the month) their department got a bill based primarily on how much resources were used. This idea may be new to Windows, or even UNIX users. But how new is this stuff really?" Well, here is where you can catch an expert, perhaps at the breaks between sessions or at PARS, and ask them. There are real issues with managing processing in the Cloud that don't occur with simple mainframe processing - and here is where you can find out how to work thru them.
The critical part in all this is that you can learn from people who have actually had experience with Cloud Computing. In real companies, doing real data processing work. Their experiences, and the lessons that they learned, can save you a host of problems when the real company that is trying to use Cloud Computing is yours. Come join us in Dallas and find out how.