Hacking The Cloud, And Its Alternatives

I'm on a Forbes panel called "Optimizing IT for the Enterprise" this Thursday evening in Chicago. 

What's the market tension that might make an event like this remotely interesting?  In one corner you find the "old way" of doing things:  running your own infrastructure -- servers, storage, packaged apps you license, install, etc.   In the other, there's the "new way":  run your business using (e.g.) AWS/ S3/EC2, hack your own apps in PHP/Python/Ruby, on APIs from Facebook and Google.  In short man, the very soul of the IT organization, nay, the very industry, is in play! 

The challenge is to suggest what balance makes sense, when and for whom.  My frame of reference for addressing the "optimization" challenge is trying to reconcile accelerating "market cycles" with increasing "differentiation demands".  The former often pushes you to push as much of your stack to the cloud as possible.  The latter sometimes requires you to mine every nook and cranny of the stack for competitive advantage (there's a reason Google builds its own servers and runs its own server farms).  In my own recent experience with the client extranet we deployed at Marketspace, we pushed in both directions, with very happy results so far.  But your circumstances likely will be different.  I look forward to learning about them Thursday evening.

Hope to see you there.