I had the pleasure to attend the IBM Think conference in wet and chilly San Fran from Feb 11-14th of this year.
The event overall was very interesting, thought provoking, and provocative. I'll be posting the event materials as well as some of my notes and thinking of the specific events and conference.
What's New In Dev Ops
On the first day, I didn't actually make it to this event due to traffic, but I was interested in it. Here's the material:
Core message: Devops is not about software development, it's about improving the economics of software delivery. Various IBM toolchains for DevOps are discussed. Worth a look, but a bit of an attempt to sell IBM tools in this space.
A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words: Designing for Today's Business Needs
This was an absolutley fantastic session, and it's unfortunate it wasn't recorded. A great demo of design thinking with developers, architects, and business folks.
New software designs start with many whiteboard sessions to sketch an idea, get insight from peers and ultimately total buy-in from stakeholders. How are you handling the likely re-architecture as you drive your cloud strategy? This can be laborious, time-consuming and often frustrating. Development teams need to agree on a new breakdown of capabilities, logical flows between services, and interaction with external services. Communicating this strategy can be complex within the team and with all stakeholders and LOBs. What's needed is a shared design space where teams modernizing applications can collaborate effectively to design and communicate an architecture as it continuously evolves.
Access the Future Today: Quantum Computing
Quantum computing takes advantage of the laws of quantum mechanics found in nature and represents a fundamental change from classical information processing. For two years now, IBM has enabled more than 100,000 people around the globe to access quantum computers for learning, research, and tackling new problems. While still early, we believe it’s just a matter of time until we start using these devices to solve certain problems better than we can today. IBM’s Dario Gil will discuss this radically different approach to computing built on the laws of quantum mechanics and how the roadmap for mainstream adoption of this new technology is being forged today by IBM in collaboration with a global community across business, academia and research.
How to Realize the Value of DevOps
I'll be honest: I didn't get a lot out of this session. There was some good encouragement that DevOps is the way to go, but little in the way of actually tackling it, or the business value it unlocks.
Join experts in a discussion about the challenges and direction of DevOps.
Speakers:
IBM and SAP Cloud Platform: Agility to Intelligently Transform and Innovate Your Business
- Andrea Martinez, IBM
- Alan Shimel, Media Ops Inc (DevOps.com)
- Matthew Crabbe, QA Media
- Mick Ahmad, FannieMae
- Eitan Azoff, Ovum
This was a pretty good discussion on leveraging good end user experience to unlock both digital transformation, but also enabling new channels for delivery.
Digital transformation demands an enticing customer experience across all channels independent of underlying data, and a flexible IT landscape that provides a comprehensive suite of integration tools. SAP Cloud Platform provides an enterprise grade business Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) to help customers address those requirements. IBM GBS has enabled high-value use cases for how companies can extend and personalize their SAP S/4HANA deployments, both on-premises or in the cloud, and has built innovations side-by-side leveraging SAP Cloud Platform. Hear how IBM is providing a design-led approach with Apple iOS and is leveraging next-gen technologies like Blockchain and Watson with SAP Cloud Platform to create a unique value proposition.
Think 2019 Chairman's Address: Building Cognitive Enterprises
The linup for this event was far too long to even think about getting inside, so many of us caught the video from the restaraunt around the corner. A great networking opportunity nonetheless! Worth a look.
Join IBM Chairman, President and CEO Ginni Rometty and some of the world’s top CEOs and leaders as they share their journeys to the Cognitive Enterprise.
