Where is growth to come from?

In March 2009 Dennis Berman of the Wall Street Journal posed a question, in reference to the economy, “Where exactly is growth going to come from?” He pointed out that the finance, insurance, and real-estate industries were the greatest contributors to growth between 2003 and 2007, according to Bureau of Economic Analysis data. Considering the state of those industries right now, Berman poses an interesting question.

I’m at the Glue Conference today where I have been meeting with many innovators who are playing — or will play — an important role in the economic recovery. “Glue” is a nice metaphor: we’re talking about both the glue that connects and holds our applications together and also how we’re going to help glue our economy back together (through innovation).

With technology moving to the cloud, discrete data is being made more accessible, allowing developers to innovate through the interconnection of disparate devices and systems. Innovation through interconnection, I believe, will be the next big thing that helps transform society and advance economic growth. The cloud operating system (or services) model is reducing complexity and readily increasing adoptability of technology.

I found the work of John Giacomoni, LineRate Systems
on virtualized load balancers particularly interesting, and had a most enjoyable conversation with Elliot Turner, Orchestr8 on the complexities of secure, reliable communication. Yesterday evening, Tim Young, Socialcast and I had a chance to chat on how enterprises are adopting internal social networking tools.

I also chatted with Dave Drach, Microsoft Startup Zone yesterday on what the data center of 2015 will look like and this morning I spent some time with Eric Knipp, Gartner discussing the subject of cloud middleware.

All-in-all, this has been a great first Glue Conference , I look forward to seeing what these web-minded innovators have in store for us this year, and I will definitely plan on seeing everyone at Glue 2010.

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