[ogf20pc] Thoughts on the OGF20 industry track

Tue Oct 17 05:07:50 CDT 2006

Dave,

Looks reasonable, but I don't see a compelling reason here as to why
someone from Industry would want to attend this.  What is the 'carrot'?
Whilst the items you are suggesting below are worthy in their own right I
think that it is perhaps too broad an agenda.  I guess it all depends on
who we believe the 'industry audience' is here.  Anyone that is doing this
sort of stuff already will look at this and see nothing that the don't know
(or believe they know) already.  Anyone that is a newbie might well find
value in this, but are they the sort of person to come to an event like
OGF?  Are they the sort of person who would know that OGF was running in
Manchester?  How would they find out?

Just to show the sort of thing that you're up against here.  This is the
sort of event that is going to get participation from Industry (in this
case Financial)
http://www.incisive-events.com/public/showPage.html?page=im_events_waters_citygrid06_home&tempId=343500

The two major advantages that this has...
1.  It is literally 5 minutes or so away from many of the offices of the
people who will be attending (maybe 20 minutes from the City proper).  As
such it allows someone to pop back to the office when they find a 'gap' in
the agenda that they don't want to listen to.
2.  The speakers are all from major players in the industry.  i.e.  it is
specifically aimed at their industry and they won't have to listen to all
the 'surrounding blurb' because they all know it...  i.e.  they can focus
on the content of interest to them

I realise that OGF is trying to be all things to all people, but therein
lies the problem.  There are a couple of alternatives I see (short of
running multiple industry tracks).  We assume that the audience will have a
very low understanding of the space and aim for an 'awareness' agenda - in
which case we can't expect anyone who is already doing this to give this
much of their time.  We assume that the attendees know a lot and hence
there is no need for all the 'intro stuff' and we dive straight into deep
content.  The issue here is that you immediately lose those people who
can't keep up.  It is a real challenge I know, but I do think we need to
start by identifying just who might attend this and hence tailor the agenda
to that audience...

Do we have a breakdown of what sort of people have attended the industry
track at previous GGF events?  Is that where we need to start on this?

Thanks,
John
Senior Consulting IT Specialist and Technical Staff Member
IBM Systems & Technology Group Infrastructure Innovation
Int:  7-313796.  Ext:  +44-1256-343796

             "Dave Berry"                                                  
             <daveb at nesc.ac.uk                                             
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                                       [ogf20pc] Thoughts on the OGF20     
             17/10/2006 10:14          industry track                      

Dear PC members,

I've discussed this industry track within the Grid Computing Now project
and we've come up with some thoughts on the general outline of the event.
These seem to be in line with what we discussed on the first telcon.  I'd
like to take this further on tomorrow's call, as I'm sure you will have
thoughts to add.  I think we need to agree on an outline at this level
quickly so that we can then progress to a more detailed plan.

1.  Audience.  We want to target IT leaders who are potential users of Grid
and related technologies.  The aim is to raise awareness of what these
technologies can do for business now, rather than to sell a grand vision
(although that can be there in the background).

2.  Marketing.  We believe the industry track needs to be marketed as a
separate component of the main event.  We don't mean this in the way of
establishing a separate annual event a la GridWorld, but the industry track
should have a name of its own and people should be able to register easily
for just the days of the industry track.  This target audience is unlikely
to be interested in the other activities of OGF20 (at least, not yet...).
E.g. we could call the track "Grids Mean Business", hosted by OGF & GCN;
the registration page would have "Grids Mean Business" as one option for
registration (and this would register people for the relevant days of
OGF20).

3.  Setting the scene.  We need an opening presentation (or set of
presentations) that give an introduction to modern computing
infrastructures (Virtualisation, SOA and Web Services, Grid), introducing
the key concepts and their relationships.  We should stress that we're not
purist about the meaning of "Grid"'; we use whatever works to solve
business problems.

4.  We need a mixture of case studies and discussion panels, covering
issues such as:  utility computing; data centre grids; software as a
service (perhaps leading to Grid markets), collaborative Grids (e.g. supply
chains).  These should focus on solving business problems.  Ideally the
case studies will cover several sectors so that we can market the event
within those sectors.

5.  Then we need to cover issues of scaling, leading to the challenges of
truly large-scale resource managment.

I look forward to hearing your suggestions and comments.

Best wishes,

Dave Berry
Technology Lead, Grid Computing Now!
National e-Science Centre, 15 South College Street
Edinburgh, EH8 9AA                  +44 131 651 4039
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