Speaker Name(s): Peter Coffee, Director of Platform Research, Salesforce.com; Former Technology Editor, Eweek (PC Week)
Description: Enterprise IT leaders face a clash of expectations: an array of mandates to deliver more innovation with fewer resources, to meet more varied and mission-critical needs with less infrastructure, and to make richer data more available to more users despite demands for stronger security and better governance. “I have no more rabbits in my hat,” they say: there’s little more to be squeezed from past approaches, no matter how well they’re executed. Visionary IT leaders recognize the need and the opportunity to maximize economies and improve technical leverage using software as a service. Many are already exploring the next step: the move to a general-purpose platform as a service, an architecture of “computing in the cloud.” Peter Coffee, former Technology Editor at the enterprise IT journal eWEEK, will share with attendees his perspectives based on 18 years as an internationally published analyst and 25 years of guiding the development and introduction of new computing models and techniques. Now working with Salesforce.com as Director of Platform Research, Peter will explore the fundamental trends that are moving the center of IT thinking toward the service-delivery model—not only for the enterprise, but also for entrepreneurial application development in today’s increasingly global markets.