Next Generation IT---Life after Jurassic Middleware

Dave Thomas (Bedarra Research Labs)

CSIRO ICT

DATE: 2007-12-13
TIME: 09:30:00 - 11:00:00
LOCATION: CSIT Seminar Room, N101
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ABSTRACT:
Despite IT best efforts business is frustrated with the lack of agility in both development and deployment of applications and services. The major product and platform vendors face similar challenges delivering their new products to market. Both are beginning to realize that the companies they want to emulate are taking a different road with respect to infrastructure, development and delivery which provides them substantially reduced operating costs and as well as faster time to market. Dave Thomas has a history of working with emerging technology, and project future IT from current trends in the international software industry. He will present a speculative look at emerging global trends shaping next generation IT including:

* Business Agility - The Driver For Next Generation IT

* Hardware and Software Infrastructures - Glass House to Googleplex

* Functional Services versus Complex OO middleware

* Business Driven Development - Do It Themselves Applications

* Enterprise Mashups - The Real SOA - Applications Assembled from Services
BIO:
Dave Thomas is the Founder and Chairman of Bedarra Research Labs - a company specializing in emerging software technologies, practices and applications. Dave is best known as the founder and past CEO of Object Technology International Inc. (formerly OTI, now IBM OTI Labs) where he led the commercial introduction of object and component technology. The company is often cited as the ideal model of a software technology company and was a pioneer in Lean and Agile Product Development with a process called Just-In-Time Software. He is a founding Director of the Agile Alliance and a Managing Director of Object Mentor a leader in transitioning large organizations to Lean and Agile Development Practices.

Dave has a wide spectrum of experience in the software industry as an engineer, consultant, architect, executive and investor. He has a unique ability to translate research breakthroughs into competitive products. He was a principal visionary and architect for IBM VisualAge Smalltalk and Java IDEs and virtual machines. OTI pioneered the use of virtual machines in embedded systems with Tektronix shipping the first commercial products in 1988. He was instrumental in establishing IBM's Pervasive Computing efforts. Dave and his partner Brian Barry played a major role in setting IBM's open source agenda with Eclipse.org.

Dave is a popular, humorous, albeit opinionated keynote speaker with an impressive breadth of business experience and technical depth. He is an adjunct professor at QUT and Carleton University in Canada. He has had a long-term relationship with the Australian software community having had a small development lab in Sydney and worked with the DSTC CRC and UQ and is a strong advocate for Australian innovation. It is in this regard that Bedarra is bringing the JAOO Conference to Brisbane and Sydney in May - June 2008.