Sitting in the last session of the conference — Ismael is going over the  tools used to run the entire operation — 500 physical attendees and a couple of thousand virtual ones. All planned and arranged in a couple of months — it's  been a whirlwind. Overall it's been great to be around a bunch of people who "get it" — understand the cloud and what it can bring to business going forwards.

If I had any criticism it would be that a lot of time was spent talking about where we are at — not so much time spent visioning the future. Obviously with a  number of vendors present this isn't a surprising fact — but nonetheless it would have been great to have some visioning sessions that were vendor agnostic.

Anyway... thanks to all the attendees, thanks a bunch to Ismael and his team, and I look forward to seeing you all again next year.

Now we're talking — the session I really wanted to see (apart from my own of  course!). Panelists were:

• Gadi Shamia (Revongo)
• Daniel Druker (Intacct)
• Doug Harr (Ingres)
• Robert Hull (Adaptive Planning)
• Jeff Schultz (Bill.com)

Not surprisingly the recent Debes article came up — the crowd was dismissive of Debes' contentions about the imminent demise of SaaS as a model.

The first question was why aspire for 100% SaaS? The panelists agreed that SaaS gives functionality to SMBs that they wouldn't have otherwise been able to access. There was also agreement around the enabling benefits of SaaS apps. Why build a data center or buy expensive traditional software, when it's so much more readily accessible and cheaper via SaaS.

In response to a question from the floor about whether or not SaaS is actually cheaper, or whether that is just a marketing spin, Doug Harr from Ingres gave the example of a Siebel implementation for 150 salespeople that cost $1.5M. His new company implemented Salesforce.com which cost $140K/year for 130 users.

Another question from the floor raised security concerns for large businesses — the panelists agreed that they had no real concerns about their data being in the cloud.

What sort of business is more likely to adopt SaaS? Not surprisingly the panelists felt technology companies were prime candidates, also service companies, young companies, and rapidly growing organisations. Phil Wainewright brought up the issues around large businesses not going with SaaS due to their already sunken costs — again Doug Harr gave a great example where true total cost of ownership analysis can bring up surprising results. The costs and  hassles with the old school behemoth software offerings are often sufficiently high to outweigh the monthly costs of a SaaS alternative.

Discussion around integration — feeling was at this point in time it's acceptable, but this is where the growth will come from — creating pseudo best-of-breed total solutions via integration of diverse offerings.

To be honest, given the fact that this conference is meant to be about visioning the future, it was a surprise that so much time was taken in justifying SaaS as a model. It would have been nice to see more time spent on a picture of what a truly 100% SaaS ecosystem would look and feel like — maybe next year...

Fellow blogger Zoli Erdos is moderating the panel. Panelists are:

• Dean Carlson (Viewpath)
• Andrew Filev (Wrike)
• Bruce Henry (LiquidPlanner)
• Mark Mader (Smartsheet.com)
• Guy Shani (Clarizen)

Everyone gave introductions to their products — interesting that there doesn't seem to be much differentiation in project management — they're all perhaps fighting for the same customers.

Comments around the end of siloed information. The change from a project manager being a silo of information to a position where everyone is a collaborative partner in the PM process. No one is a project manager anymore — everyone is a manager, responsible for tasks.

Differentiation between mass scale PM projects that need Gantt charts, top-down control, massive documentation, etc. However for 99% of PM work that isn't needed. New way of thinking about a federated PM model where users can work in whatever way is best for them, and behind the scene information is federated backwards and forwards between apps.

Project managers today spend their time battling with crappy software — Project Management 2.0 releases them to do real project management instead of being a project secretary.

The main takeaway, and one which I concur with, is that no one player will replace Microsoft Project. Rather, there will be an ecosystem of varied flavours of PM app that all have a share of the market.

10 things I can do in the cloud today, that I couldn’t do a year ago. Keynote by head of the enterprise applications team, Matthew Glotzbach. He’s drunk from the Kool-Aid big time! It was a very Google centric presentation - but cool nonetheless.

• Everything on the go - iPhone
• Search through all my email - Gmail search
• Chat with customers and partners - in any language- very cool live demo of inline translation of chat!
• Collaborate simply with sites and docs
• Organise travel - (the first non Google product today TripIt)
• Easily collect data from co-workers and customers using forms
• Build a scalable business application on the cloud platform
• Use online templates for docs, spreadsheets and presentations
• Run fast, secure and stable web apps (Chrome)
• Securely share video in apps

Lots of backchatter on Twitter here from attendees that it was very much a Google pitch - oh well… if Google is at the forefront of cloud computing then I guess that’s what happens

Session tled by Ruby developer Steve Bristol — What is the role of a UI?

• The goal is communication
• Intuitive/Expected/Easy
• Works for different users (novice/advanced)
• Built with empathy
• Makes users feel good
• Is simple

Crap Code + Good UI = Good App but Good Code + Crap UI = Crap App

Usability testing will really, really piss you off, but it will build empathy with the user.

Discussion about Facebook vs. MySpace — as a UI case study.

We discussed a need to distinguish between design and UI.

Visual factors vs. interaction factors

A cross post from diversity.net.nz