The big keynotes and general sessions energized and inspired all of us. We’re buzzing with new ideas, we’ve seen our concepts validated, and we see the direction we’re going in as we return to the real world to pursue our collective mission to keep the world’s important applications, and the enterprises they power, running at their very best. This last day of AppSphere 2014 finds our attendees immersed in a final group of speaker sessions and a full day of training. Here are some final highlights and thoughts from AppSphere.
Day Two: Big Ideas About Big Transformations
“People go to sleep with their iPhones and wake up with their iPhones.” That’s how Patrick McMahon, IBM managing partner and vice president for IT strategy & transformation, characterized the visible tip of the iceberg of cataclysmic change that is impacting everything everyone does in the realm of digital technology. In addition to the mobile revolution, he cited the social media explosion, hyper-digitization, and the power of analytics as the other drivers of technological and social transformation.
McMahon underscored his points with a video of IBM’s groundbreaking, data-driven, interactive coverage of the Wimbledon tennis championships, a massive mash-up of live video, real-time data feeds, analysis, and personalized viewer experiences. And virtually every line of code driving the whole experience is instrumented with AppDynamics.
People Are The Drivers of Change
Interestingly for a technology conference, the transformative role that people play was a recurring theme: People not only drive the technology, but drive the change within organizations that is absolutely mandatory for the technology to have its impact.
IBM’s McMahan pointed to a study that concluded, if you focus on the “change master” people, projects have an 80% success rate; if you don’t focus on the people, the success rate goes down to 8%.
Salesforce Marketing Cloud’s Kevin Siminski, senior director of global product operations, described a series of strategies — from finding new opportunities to collaborate on, to rolling out the red carpet for internal clients to a two-day offsite led by AppDynamics — all targeted at nurturing the change in people within the organization, which in turn drives the technological change that ensures success for users.
And in his closing keynote, Jonah Kowall, research vice president, IT operations at Gartner, cited a survey of infrastructure and operations leaders, in which 47% said “people” are the most important drivers of technological change — and with “tools” coming in at a mere 3%.
What Does the Future Hold?
So many AppSphere speakers and attendees are sitting in positions that have unique views of what’s on the horizon, which they shared with great insight. There are far too many to include here. We’re posting a ton of content from AppSphere online, but here are a few snippets that I heard throughout the conference that are going to make a difference to my thinking:
“We need to monitor where business happens: inside the applications, inside the mobile devices. Look at the users.
The consumer is the business.”
— Jonah Kowall, Gartner
“Mobile is the tether between the brand and the consumer.”
— Charles Manning, CEO, Kochava
“Everyone is afraid of what’s the next Uber that is going to affect my industry? But the next thing is already behind Uber and ready to knock it out.”
— Patrick McMahon, IBM
“Innovation is no longer a choice, it is a necessity…The left side of our brain is totally overused. What about the right side? What about driving imagination?”
— Rathi Murthy, American Express
“How do you get things accomplished? Passion, partnerships, positivity, persistence, and patience.”
— Spencer Schwab, Citrix Systems
“One second is the new one minute.”
— Bill Platt, Amazon Web Services
See You Next Year!
Thank you to our speakers, our customers and partners, and our staff for an amazing conference! Our first AppSphere was outstanding, and we’re already scheduled for AppSphere 2015. Be sure to check out the info on AppDynamics.com to take advantage of great discounts available until 12/31/14.
Thank you again, and see you next year!
The post AppSphere 2014 Wrap: Three Days of Transformation written by Dan Berkowitz appeared first on Application Performance Monitoring Blog from AppDynamics.