The Cloud Comes to IT/Dev Connections

I’m sitting “in the clouds” on the airplane back from a wonderful IT/Dev Connections event in Las Vegas. With about 3 hours of the flight left, I’m spending some time reflecting on the week and realize that I have work to do to provide you all with some cloud newsletter content. So, with my Gogo in-flight subscription in hand, my cloud-enabled Microsoft Surface Pro on the tray table, and SkyDrive access, here it comes. All-in-all, I’m feeling pretty cloudy right now.

Related: What's Next for IT Pros?

This year we began to expand the Windows side of the IT/Dev Connections, providing content and community around Windows, System Center, and cloud. The new focus was a gamble, but the highly successful outcome shows that many of you truly are interested in learning more about the technologies that matter to the future of IT Pros.

The future of IT Pros?

In a Thursday session, the Mark brothers (Mark Minasi and Mark Russinovich) talked about cloud computing and in the session were asked if there is a future for IT Pros. Russinovich told the audience that IT is not dying, that it's changing and to survive IT needs to invest learning resources into cloud technologies. However, right after, he also boasted that a specific area of Windows Azure operations at Microsoft only requires two individuals to run.

Yeah. A bit confusing. So, IT is not going away, but it’s just getting smaller? Maybe we’ll hear new clarification on that later on.

Still, despite the Catch-22, the session really validates our intent to evolve IT/Dev Connections into a peer event that provides content that’s current and provided by real world experts. We’re already talking about how we will expand and improve the conference, building on feedback from actual attendees from this year.

I hope you start preparing now. IT/Dev Connections 2014 is going to monumental.