TechEd 2013–Architecture Track (ARC)–What Do You Want to See?

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imageCan you believe it? There are only 19 weeks left until TechEd North America and 21 weeks left to TechEd Europe! TechEd is always a great experience. A real “shot I the arm” in the middle of the year when you really need it.

I’ve been able to attend and present at TechEd for 8 of the last 10 years by my reckoning. It’s the time of year where I can talk to friends that I only know online, and reunite with “TechEd friends” that I only communicate with when we’re at TechEd. It’s a week (or two weeks if you go to both NA and EU) of drinking from the knowledge fire hose!

Something new for me this year is the fact that I’ll be one of the track PMs for the Architecture Track at TechEd this year, together with Yuri Diogenes. This puts us in a unique position of going through all the submissions made for TechEd presentations and trying to pick the best mix of presentations for those of you interested in enterprise, cloud and solutions architecture.

This year we’d like to focus on a group of central themes. Those themes are:

  • MODERN DATACENTER: The “modern” datacenter will support applications that span on-premises and off-premises providers while solving management, identity and data security issues. This datacenter will be scalable and elastic, which will make IT more agile and responsible. The use of shared pooled resources will improve utilization and cost efficiency. Continuously available services will be norm, where there is no tolerance for outages or even maintenance windows, and automation and self-service will “take the work out of the job” by reducing manual tasks and enabling self-service for data center resources.
  • MODERN APPLICATIONS: Modern applications will need to be able to consume these modern datacenter resources by being able to scale, both up or down. They will need to be flexible and easy so that they can get to market quickly. Applications in the future will be able to integrate seamlessly in the new hybrid IT environments, and will address the realities of a dynamic development lifecycle that will allow you to improve services in near real time.
  • INSIGHTS ON DATA: These applications will tap into large data stores to provide insights never before possible as we enter the era of “Big Data”. The universe of data is expanding at an exponential pace and this will provide even more value to the modern applications of the future. This value will be delivered by providing users an immersive experience with their data, so that through visualization, they can see patterns, trends, and inflection points they would not have ever been able to in the past.
  • PEOPLE-CENTRIC IT: These changes in the data center and application development are coincident the “Bring Your Own Device” (BYOD) trend. IT will be expected to provide a personalized experience on a wide variety of devices so that users can get work done in a secure fashion regardless of device and form factor.

Given that these are the central themes, are there specific subjects that are part of these themes that you would like to hear about? If so, put them in the comments section or write to me directly at tomsh@microsoft.com

Also, we are always looking for good presenters who have something they can share from their work in architecting solutions around these central themes. If you have an idea for a presentation around one of these themes and are interested in presenting at TechEd this year as part of the architecture track, send me a note at tomsh@microsoft.com and let’s see about getting your hat into the ring!

I’ll be updating this blog periodically about what’s happening in the architecture track for TechEd this year, so stay tuned!

HTH,

Tom
Tom Shinder
tomsh@microsoft.com
Principal Knowledge Engineer, SCD iX Solutions Group
Follow me on Twitter: https://twitter.com/tshinder
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