Spark Las Vegas day 2

 

In the second day of Spark Las Vegas we focused on models in the morning and came up with four different models for the architecture of the future which were actually successive refinements of one another.

 

The first was the "Tree of life" which looked at architecture from a business centric point of view and had the concepts of consumer and supplier joined by business and content.

 

The second was very similar to the edge architecture that we have talked about in the past and has the concepts of Relationships, Content, Collaboration and Discovery joining the Web 2.0 and SOA spaces.

 

The third was a mashup of the other architectures and so I am calling it the Spark Architecture. It was based around users as consumers and providers and then had a services layer under a relationship layer which provided the base for the collaboration and discovery elements. Content drilled through all these layers being rich content at the top and meta content at each lower layer.

 

Finally there was the highest level or enterprise model which showed how the enterprise and the web were joined.

 

So we got four useful models or views onto the architectural space.

 

In the afternoon we tried to distill out some architectural principles, look at some strategic examples, some case studies and the inhibitors to progress. There was a lot of very interesting and fruitful discussion and we got some really good insights and data to work on.

 

I would like to take this opportunity to publicly thank all the really smart and enthusiastic people that gave up their weekend to attend spark and to try to improve our understanding of the architecture of the future. It was both enervating and humbling to work with such amazing people and to get some really concrete principles and models from the discussion.

 

Going forward I did a presentation of the output of spark at the Mix event which I will blog about in more detail and I know Norman is looking at what follow up we will be doing from spark itself.

 

Thank you all again for your time and effort.