The joy of collaboration

I went to the IGT2009 conference. This was an international Cloud Computing conference. The conference went very well. It lasted for two full days with a lot of interesting speakers and a lot of things to think about.
I am planning a series of posts which will tell you about the things that were going on there and try to analyze them.

The first thing I would like to talk about is Yossi Vardi's keynote which was titled "The joy of collaboration".
I think it was very insightful talk. He actually didn't talk about Cloud Computing. He said he is talking about a deep reason we are all in the conference, and I think he was right in not only one plane, but in three different planes.

The first plane was explicit in his talk. The killer-apps of SaaS are collaboration applications such as Email, Social Networking and IM. We are social animals, and we get joy from collaborations. This was the main theme of the talk. Vardi showed some very nice videos showing collaborations in action. The nicest video I remember showed the patterns formed by a flock of starlings, see for example this video. At the end of his talk he tried to show us and talk about the beauty of collaboration. I think he somewhat missed the point with the videos at the end since they showed only few individuals collaborating, and the whole idea of the Cloud revolves around massive scale.

The second plane is the structure of Cloud Computing. Here we are talking about computing nodes that are collaborating. To an architect like myself this collaboration has its own inner beauty. The formations and patterns in the Computing Cloud can also be regarded as elegant and joyful like the formations of the starlings.

The third plane is the conference itself. Here again, we are talking about people's collaboration and it were two joyful days indeed.

Khen Ofek