Cloud Expo Conference Short On Innovation, Still Provides Value

I have attended Sys-Con’s Cloud Expo conference several times both in New York and Silicon Valley over the last few years, but last week’s installment at Manhattan’s Javits Convention Center seemed a mere shell of its former self.

Unlike the many thousands who attended the shindigs of the past, this one billed a count in the low thousands – although the keynote room held 500 at best. Furthermore, the show is no longer simply Cloud Expo – Sys-Con also bills it as Internet of Things Expo as well as a DevOps and Big Data conference, not to mention a bit of containers and microservices added to the mix.

Over the years, Sys-Con has proven adept at riding the wave of the latest hot buzzword, having timed their transition from SOA Expo to Cloud Expo just as interest was shifting to the Cloud. Why then the drop-off this year?

Perhaps it was lack of focus. To be sure, there are DevOps conferences as well as Big Data conferences that continue to attract interest and attention. On the other hand, there are quite a number of DevOps conferences these days, so the audience may have too many choices.

My guess, however, is that people are simply losing interest in attending Cloud conferences, and this conference still gives Cloud top billing. Don’t count Sys-Con out, however – they may decide to push the Cloud to the undercard for future conferences, but my sense is that they will select a headliner for future installments that will continue to draw people in.

While the crowds were smaller, the exhibitors I spoke with were largely satisfied with the quality of the turnout. Sys-Con has always focused on the needs of the exhibitors and other sponsors, giving out most of the speaking spots to them. While much of the content leads to a sales pitch as a result, attendees are now accustomed to this fact, and thus attend vendor sessions if they want to hear what the vendor has to say.

The result: a reasonably well-qualified crowd of enterprise influencers and decision makers, leading to an acceptable number of leads for exhibitors. So if attendees are satisfied with the content and exhibitors are happy with the attendees, then we can consider the conference to be a success in spite of the subdued atmosphere and smaller crowds.

As for the stories the exhibitors themselves were telling, there was little novel or interesting to report. However, there were two vendors whose stories made the cut for this article: Kintone and Stratoscale.

Kintone

Kintone offers one of a number of low code/no code platforms taking advantage of a rapidly growing market (see my recent articles on QuickBase, ServiceNow (NYSE:NOW), OutSystems, andMendix for a look at some of the others.)

Kintone is actually a subsidiary of Japan-based Cybozu, although Kintone’s strategy is decidedly international – and its platform is predictably internationalized.

As with other no-code platforms, Kintone provides the ability for non-technical business users to assemble business applications. Kintone, however, offers a variety of approaches: application templates, conversion of Excel files, the assembly of apps and components from a cloud-based marketplace, modifying an existing app, or from scratch.

Kintone is fully cloud-based and also responsive, leveraging its mobile app to run customer applications with support for push notifications. It integrates with enterprise identity management and other security technologies, and offers full audit capabilities – a must for enterprise customers in particular.

A particular strength: the user-friendly process configuration interface, supplemented by its notification-based case management capabilities.

Stratoscale

The ‘private cloud in a box’ business model has had its share of bumps in the road, as Citrix’s CloudStack-based offering failed to take off and the Nebula hardware-based cloud appliance crashed and burned.

Stratoscale, however, has turned the corner with its product, which offers compute, storage, administration, and user provisioning in a software-only configuration customers can install on as few as three commodity servers or as many as several hundred.

In essence, Stratoscale packages the most essential elements of the software-defined data center in a single, easily installed package, suitable for midsize firms, managed service providers, as well as larger enterprises who want a simpler, less expensive option than building their private clouds with VMware VMW -1.23%.

Stratoscale also offers solid advantages over OpenStack, which has proved to be more of a collection of modules requiring time and expertise to integrate than the single solution Stratoscale offers.

Where to Find Innovation in Cloud and DevOps

If you want to put your finger on the pulse of innovation in the Cloud you should perhaps attend Dockercon later this month, while innovation in DevOps might draw you to ChefConf in July or theDevOps Enterprise Summit in November.

Of course, there are plenty of other conferences to choose from, and innovation is easy to find. Innovation, however, isn’t always the top priority for today’s conference attendees, as mature products that solve real problems will always trump innovative, but immature products – even though they don’t sport the same hype and excitement as the hot buzzwords du jour.

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Intellyx advises companies on their digital transformation initiatives and helps vendors communicate their agility stories. As of the time of writing, Chef Software, OutSystems, and ServiceNow are Intellyx customers. None of the other organizations mentioned in this article are Intellyx customers. Image credit: Dion Hinchcliffe.

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