You can rehearse logistics as much as you like, but the truth is at MOTODEV we run podcasts as live events, so you can never really be sure how one will turn out. When the script starts the voice countdown, you've got to be ready to keep talking and deal with anything that comes up.
This tension adds a certain frisson to the podcasts I'm in. But I've got to say, today's podcast on "Building Cloud-based Enterprise Mobile Apps" went off without a hitch. The reason behind the smooth running was surely the high quality of the guest panelists who took part. In alphabetic order, our guest panelists were
- Sandeep Bhanot, cloud and mobile evangelist with Salesforce.com, one of the most successful cloud enterprises ever.
- Richard Rodger, COO of NearForm, who literally wrote the textbook on cloud and mobile. Richard is the author of Beginning Building Mobile Application Development in the Cloud.
- The Taptera team, with CTO Mike Janson and senior software engineer Mitch Lindsay. Taptera is a San Francisco-based start-up working on enterprise mobile apps and cloud services. Mike has been the architect behind a number of popular cloud-based services.
Figure 1: life can be lonely at the top
MOTODEV's own Randy Ksar ran the technical side of this podcast, including the cloud conferencing software. You might think that's a lot of people to get around a table, but this was a virtual panel. I was in a conference room by myself, on the 8th floor overlooking the end of Moffett Airfield runway. We were all using the cloud to talk together and collaborate.
And this podcast on cloud and mobile turned out to be one of our most popular podcasts, ever. We started with a description of "cloud" technology - it's a data center of servers, running web services, invoked and accessed via URLs. From there, we reviewed the different levels at which you can tap into the cloud - the so-called "x-as-a-Service" protocols, with "Software as a Service" as the most relevant to end users, and "Platform-as-a-Service" giving the most benefit to developers.
Some interesting new insights came out during the podcast. Mitch pointed out the close affinity between between agile technologies and use of the cloud. Mike gently cautioned a developer who wanted to open up sharepoint files from behind the firewall and publish them in the cloud. Richard provided trenchant guidance on accessing legacy data silos (wrap them with content provider web service APIs). Sandeep advised developers to ease into cloud use gradually, building on experience acquired with pilot projects.
If you'd like to hear more of the panel discussion, you can find the recording here. I hope you enjoy listening to it; we
certainly enjoyed discussing it. And the podcast went off without a hitch.
Peter van der Linden
Android Technology Evangelist
DJ_Ksar
on:
The Deathly Hallows of Mobile Security
