Recap: Enterprise Development Workshop, London

“There is no such thing as a non-software company anymore,” states Geoff Hollingworth, Head of Product Marketing Cloud Infrastructure at Ericsson. “We are moving to a ‪digital world and the question that we all face is how do we build a ten times bigger economy?”

Hollingworth’s billion dollar question was the cornerstone of last week’s App Alliance Enterprise Development Workshop hosted in London in partnership with Intel, Ericsson, BlackBerry, Samsung, Softlayer, and the Mopria Alliance. The event convened industry influencers, enterprise developers, and IT professionals to discuss how to design, optimize, and operate the next generation of digital infrastructure.

Mark Boyt, Head of Solutions and Services Marketing for Xerox Europe kicked-off the day with a keynote exploring the power of print and cutting-edge solutions for enterprise developers. “Mobile printing is meeting the customers needs in the post-PC era,” stated Boyt who continued to reveal that a recent study concluded 75% of users say mobile printing has a business value equal to PC printing.

Next to the stage was Lars-Olof Allerhed, CTO for IBM MobileFirst in Europe, who explored the latest trends in mobile development and how enterprises are leveraging data and innovative cloud solutions. Allerhed highlighted the future potential of enterprise applications through a series of use-cases, including the inspiring example of a 12 year old developer, Thomas Suarez, who built EarthFortune – an app downloaded by millions – stating Millennials are pushing the envelope, “this is the future.”

Diving deeper into strategies for mobile enterprise development was Ed Bourne, Sr. Enterprise Solutions Manager at BlackBerry, who discussed approaches to building secure, multi-platform apps. Bourne explains that it’s critical for enterprises to test the limits to offer innovative mobility solutions. “In 2015 I expect that your mobile and hard-drive are encrypted. This is the basic – we have to go further,” stated Bourne.

Then Paul Guermonprez, Industrial IoT Application Engineer and Evangelist at Intel, looked into the code behind enterprise applications. Guermonprez highlighted the importance of CPU parallelism as a must in development. In addition, he quoted single instruction multiple data as an important factor that can increase the processors speed significantly.

Next, we were thrilled to welcome Vicky Ford MEP, Conservative MEP for the East of England and Chairman of the European Parliament Internal Market and Consumer Affairs Committee. Ford discussed the importance of the Digital Single Market to foster innovation and economic growth in EU.  She discussed the Safe Harbor agreement and explained that she is “marginally optimistic” that we’ll “reach a Safe Harbor 2.0 solution in the beginning of 2016.”

Following Ford, Urban Sanderek,  Telecom Software Specialist at Intel and Henrik Backstrom, Product Marketing Manager at Ericsson, explored how with the introduction of Intel® Rack Scale Architecture and related management systems, Software-Defined Infrastructure (SDI) is about to be realized. They lead the audience through SDI and how new technology enables greater performance and increased utilization of compute, storage and network resources.

After the introduction to SDI, attendees had the opportunity to experience the what it will mean to work in an SDI environment with a hands-on workshop with Intel® Rack Scale Architecture APIs, lead by Ericsson’s Jeremiah Bassett and Nevia Vidakovic. Alternatively, Hans Haenlein, Director of Innovation at Ericsson, lead a discussion based workshop for those less interested in hands-on hacking, to discuss the potential of SDI.

To wrap-up the conference, a panel of experts joined the stage to discuss how software is the foundation of the digital age and how enterprises must be competent with software in order to survive. “What will differentiate good companies from great companies is agility” states Jake Ward, President and CEO of the Apps Alliance, and moderator of the discussion. “The companies that embrace the idea that technology is ever changing and leverage future-proof solutions will be the winners.”

The opportunities for innovation in the enterprise space is undeniably limitless. The scale to which the economy is capable of growing is in the hands of developers – how they choose to leverage current and soon to be realized tools and solutions. The Apps Alliance is honored to work with industry leading companies to showcase solutions and help enterprise developers execute to their full-potential.

WORKSHOP PHOTO GALLERY

_____________________________________________

Recordings of the live sessions and exclusive interviews will be available shortly. If you’d like to be notified when the videos are published, please email Chelsea@AppAlliance.org.

The London Enterprise Development Workshop is part of a 2015 3-city tour. The last stop will be in Dallas, TX on December 10th. We hope to see you there! Also checkout videos from the first workshop of the series that took place in New York City.