Cloud World Forum 2014 Wrap Up

The week before last, I made the journey from the West Coast to attend the 2014 Cloud World Forum and Enterprise Apps World event at The Olympia National, London.

Progress sponsored the Hackathon at the event, gave two presentations, participated in four panel discussions, met with hundreds of attendees and heard the buzz on the latest trends emerging within the cloud space. It’s safe to say the team was energized by the activity at the end of the event!

The event provided a good opportunity to take the pulse of the industry and keep an eye on some emerging trends. Many attendees were asking about the latest hot trend of develop your own application (DYOA) - a ‘trend’ that is reshaping the way we work, riding hot on the tail of bring your own device and bring your own application. It’s no wonder we saw lots of enquiries on this topic. Mirroring this, the research we launched at the event found that there is a growing demand for Platform-as-a-Service technologies; with 85% of IT decision makers demanding a reduction in the time it takes to develop and deploy applications. Additionally, businesses are planning to invest an average of $260,653 on this architecture before the end of the year.

This investment includes new container-based technologies such as Docker, based on LXC. This represents a more efficient model than traditional hypervisor virtualization and is poised for massive growth, changing the way cloud platforms are architected, used, and sold.

Containers are also well suited for modular API-first architectures in which purpose-built components can be provisioned and scaled on an as-needed basis. Node.js is a rapidly emerging server-side JavaScript technology that encourages a modular design. It also encourages a natural separation of the backend UI layer from the backend business logic of web architecture, allowing front end developers and backend developers to focus on what they do best in the languages and frameworks of their choice.

Citizen developers have sparked a demand for technologies to support the growth in PaaS architectures and our research also found that 47% of DYOA is now completed by sales and marketing teams and 44% by finance teams. This illustrates the desire for available platforms in which to easily and rapidly build apps on.

In a fate which couldn’t have been written better, the ease of use and functionality of the Progress Rollbase platform, as well as its ability to enable rapid development was highlighted through the hackathon we hosted. The overall winner of the hackathon had no previous programming or developing experience, proving the growing ability of citizen developers.

Over the course of the event, we met many people who have challenges with:

• Building applications faster ... and deploying them to any mobile device or web, without having to rebuild them
• Integrating on-premise or cloud data into an application quickly
• Deploying applications in a private cloud for security reasons
• Building an application with little or no developer experience

The interest around these topics led to a fantastic turn out at our sessions. Mark Troester spoke about how to create enterprise web and mobile apps, Jeff Reser participated in a panel on how to create a big data ecosystem within an organization and I spoke on Trends in Platform and Application Architectures.

The event was also a great opportunity for us to demonstrate our mobile offerings, following our acquisition of Modulus, a PaaS for easily hosting, deploying, scaling and monitoring data-intensive, real-time applications using powerful, rapidly growing Node.js and MongoDB technologies.

The Modulus cloud platform is designed to simplify and speed development of the new generation of scalable, always connected business and consumer apps that are constantly monitored and optimised for the best experience.  The Modulus platform is ideally suited for real-time mobile, SaaS, social and Big Data apps that run across distributed devices and can seamlessly handle floods of data requests with built-in performance monitoring and analytics.

It was great to talk with a wide variety of enterprises and companies who are all looking for new approaches to designing enterprise applications. Hearing the different perspectives at the event was inspiring and it also helped get direct feedback from each person who attended.

On a final note, I’d like to thank all those involved in making the event such a success and look forward to attending again next year.