Day three of Layered Tech's third annual LT PACT started bright and early at 8:30 a.m. (perhaps a little too early considering it's Vegas, according to a few of the attendees) with a keynote by Tier 1 Research's founder Andy Schroepfer, someone we haven't seen as much of at hosting events as of late. But, as always, he was an absolute pleasure to listen to.
Insightful, engaging and well-spoken, Schroepfer's presentation "The $1.2 Billion Dollar Bet Against Hosting" took a look at the state of the declining American economy in general versus rising oil prices and how much of a game changer that has been for the IT industry.
Schroepfer talked about how rising oil prices affected business on the Web and encouraged a digital economy. What this translates to is the more expensive gas gets, the less people will want to go OUT shopping. Thus, they will be more inclined to turn to the Web to spend their money. So businesses need focus on being able to deliver their product or service effectively through the Internet.
The keynote also touched on one of the biggest topics throughout the event, cloud computing. Last year it was all about the grid, this year it's all about the cloud. Schroepfer expects the cloud to become relevant to enterprise very soon - much sooner than James Staten's projected timeline for when cloud computing would be embraced by the enterprise market - and believes it will eventually "kill" the dedicated market because end-users will be demanding a pay per play hosting model.
Other interesting highlights throughout the day included an interactive panel about the business of blogging (moderated by Aaron Phillips, VP of sales and marketing for FastServers and featuring Matt Mullenweg, founder of WordPress, John Pozadzides, CMO for Layered Tech and Lorelle VanFossen, a woman who was blogging about blogging before blogging was called blogging. Say that three times fast!) and The Nutbra. I'm not even kidding. It somehow pertains to intellectual property. But you quite possibly had to be there to believe it.
The event wrapped up with Layered Tech's annual Texas Hold'em Poker Tournament (which, I admittedly did quite poorly on) BUT WHIRtv producer/videographer Matt did the WHIR team some justice by placing in 6th!!
Check out the pics from the event from our Flickr page here.
