The most important cloud event in the world happened in San Francisco from June 28-June 30. It is the most important because it gathered under the same roof business analysts and business users, multiple C-type executives, technologists, data professionals of all kinds, and the biggest players in the world for cloud services, including Microsoft, Oracle, Workday, SAP, IBM, and Google Cloud.
The event had 100-plus speakers, 40 hours of content, professors, authors, podcasters, business leaders, and decision makers. All of them with a common topic in mind: how to move business forward – and accelerate innovation – considering the current state of the world. Many original ideas were suggested, with special focus on how to solve problems common to any business, any industry or any geography: supply chain, workforce retention, new priorities, digital natives, and more.
Top Takeaway 1: No Tech Talks, Just Business and Strategy
It may sound crazy, but in the largest cloud event, we heard almost no tech-talk at all. Nobody was explaining anything about ‘redundancy’, ‘scalability’, ‘distributed clusters’, ‘edge computing’, or anything like that. Everything was presented in a tone of pure business and operations. So, any person from the audience, technical or not, can always understand what was said or spoken.
Among many things discussed: What is, in fact, digital transformation, how does it impact businesses, and what is the overall trend for digital transformation that we see in the future? But most important, why should we care about data and how it is so relevant to all of us in a way that we never conceived of before?
One of the most epic comments at Cloud Wars Expo happened during the Fireside Chat with Goya Foods CIO and Head of Technology Suvajit Basu: Combating Supply Chain Issues, during which Bob Evans asked, “Do many people rely too much on data to know what to do?” and Basu replied, “Yes, there are many individuals waiting to see in data what happened to react, when they should use data to figure out what is the next thing to happen. Data loses value as it goes on.”
There is another epic insight from my colleague Tony Uphoff during day 2 of Cloud Ward Expo, where he stated, “too many businesses use data to justify what they have done when they should be using it to inform what they will do next.”
Top Takeaway 2: Understanding the New Scenario
In fact, we can name it ‘new world order.’ Since 2019, we have been forced to adopt new methods and ways to work, live, and interact that we never even imagined. And those changes remain. In fact, the consequences of events happening in a part of the world are so impactful and so drastic in many respects that they keep forcing all of us to reconsider how we live, how we work, and what to prioritize; even just when we all thought all those new factors were settling down.
This new world order touched perhaps the most fundamental aspect of technology and economy: the person. Yes, each person has reconsidered what is important and what is not important, leading to a new set of priorities.
The effects of this current tumultuous situation that we are all living is making us reconsider many things that we have taken for granted over the last two or three decades. Just to mention some of the key points covered during Cloud Wars Expo:
- The workforce is hyper flexible, valuing a lot more than just a salary.
- De-location of manufacturing and production of goods is also being reconsidered, valuing local production more than ever before.
- Supply chains are weaker than it was assumed, as they have too many links within the chain, adding a lot of complexity to the overall operation and management
This new world order led to answers on questions about how to navigate this highly changing situation, where:
- The workforce is now fully remote — and not willing to go back on site.
- We need more efficient and less complex supply chains.
- Companies need to produce anything anywhere as soon as possible and leverage cloud computing as the basic infrastructure where everything must happen.
- Companies became more efficient in terms of resource utilization, and became more sustainable in the process.
This is the new world order that is reshaping the economy and society. At Cloud Wars Expo, we heard something really shocking: ‘the fall of the S and P 500’ if we insist on continuing to do things as we used to do as recently as three years ago!
Top Takeaway 3: Power of Community
Yes, this was perhaps the most important takeaway from Cloud Wars Expo, in my opinion. At our event, thousands of people attended, even traveling from Europe, and many others came from within the United States and nearby countries in America.
The fact that we can all gather in person, meet each other, shake hands and interact, socialize and share our thoughts, our vision, and, most importantly, share our challenges, is what makes this event really powerful.
When such a diverse audience gathers in one place with many different motivations, but with a very clear goal in mind — how [cloud] technology can help navigate the current situation and help my business or my job to become more productive and more efficient — it makes this event unique.
Cloud Wars Expo is not a technology event per se, nor is it a business event per se, but it’s an event that discusses how using technology can solve business problems that impact individuals in everyday activities: from going to work to buying your groceries; from protecting your data on your cell phone or your database to implementing the metaverse in your business; from selling online to selling NFT’s; from protecting your financial records to your health information.
It’s worth mentioning the amount of innovation that we witnessed thanks to the many startups and entrepreneurs that participated in the event. The present moment that we live in is challenging, but we learned that during challenging times, people are capable of viewing beyond the immediate obstacles to create value and disrupt business, in that process creating create to problems and issues.
Big thanks to the community for gathering at Cloud Wars Expo. Looking forward to the next one!
