The Debate - A Cloudy Future or Can We See Trends?

Kate is a multi-award-winning British technology entrepreneur, owner-manager of Memset, and a nationally renowned expert-advocate of green ICT and Cloud Computing. She is an officer of BCS’s (formerly the British Computer Society) influential Data Centre Specialist Group and is the youngest-ever main board member of Intellect UK, Britain’s high-tech trade association. Kate also chairs Intellect’s Climate Change Group, and currently co-leads the technical architecture strand of the Cabinet Office’s G-Cloud and App Store project.

Her company, Memset, is a nationally leading managed hosting and Cloud Computing provider. Memset was Britain’s first Carbon Neutral ISP, and has pioneered virtual machine technology since 2002.

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Dion Hinchcliffe is an internationally recognized business strategist and enterprise architect who works hands-on with clients in the Fortune 500, federal government, and Internet startup community.

Dion helps lead the industry by evolving the thinking for next-generation businesses in various social media including ZDNet’s influential Enterprise Web 2.0 Blog and the Web 2.0 Blog. He is extensively published in leading industry periodicals and journals including the Microsoft Architecture Journal, AjaxWorld Magazine, SOA/Web Services Journal, and is currently Editor-in-Chief of the Social Computing Journal. His thought leading work has been covered in BusinessWeek, CNET News, Wired Magazine, CIO Magazine, and other well-known news outlets.

In addition to helping organizations deliver large-scale Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 solutions as a Senior Vice President at the Dachis Group, Dion is also is a regular keynote speaker on the topics of Web 2.0, SOA, and Enterprise 2.0 and has presented or keynoted at Web 2.0 Expo, CeBIT, Business Integration Forum, Interop, JavaOne, SOA Web Services Edge, Enterprise 2.0 Conference, Office 2.0, and many other major business and software conferences. Dion has also been instrumental in pioneering ideas around next-generation SOA and Product Development 2.0, with many of those ideas being shared in his blog on Musings and Ruminations on Building Great Systems.

He is also the founder of the popular Web 2.0 University, the world’s leading education solution for Web 2.0 and next generation SOA. He can be reached at dion.hinchcliffe@dachisgroup.com and on Twitter @dhinchcliffe.

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Tim O’Reilly is the founder and CEO of O’Reilly Media. His original business plan was “interesting work for interesting people,” and that’s worked out pretty well. He publishes books, runs conferences, invests in early-stage startups, urges companies to create more value than they capture, and tries to change the world by spreading and amplifying the knowledge of innovators.

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JP Rangaswami is Managing Director, Strategy and Innovation for BT Design – BT Group’s design and delivery business. BT Design has total responsibility for designing, building and implementing BT’s network, IT and business processes, systems, networks (non-Openreach) and technologies.

JP is responsible for defining and executing BT Design’s strategy, leading a team that explores how to make the art of the possible a reality. JP’s reputation for innovation and collaboration make him ideally suited to a role that encompasses the development of BT’s 21CN web services, BT’s growing Open Source innovation group and other initiatives seeing innovation at the edge of the network. He has extensive international experience and is passionate about delivering outstanding end-to-end customer experience.

JP joined BT from Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein where he served as Global CIO demonstrating recognised market leadership in the use of innovative tools and techniques. He is a compelling advocate for community-based “opensource” development methods and practices.

He is a fervent blogger (www.confusedofcalcutta.com), a frequent tweeter (http://twitter.com/jobsworth) and a regular speaker at industry events, particularly on collaboration, innovation and opensource. He was named CIO of the Year by Waters Magazine in 2003, CIO Innovator of the Year by the European Technology Forum in 2004, European Innovator of the Year in 2005, and was named as one of the 50 Global Agenda Setters in 2007 by silicon.com. He is a Fellow of the British Computer Society (BCS) and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts (RSA). JP is also a Freeman of the Information Technologists Company (a London City Livery Company, also known as the Worshipful Company of Information Technologists).

Passionate about education, he is chairman of the School of Everything (www.schoolofeverything.com), a startup focused on social action through education. He also serves on the management board of Kings Church International (www.kcionline.org) and on the board of trustees of Byte Night, (www.bytenight.org.uk), the IT industry’s annual sleep out in aid of the National Children’s Charity (NCH).

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