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2014: The condensed conference keynotes

We sit in the dark to bring you disruptive enlightenment

Reg hacks travel the world and then ignore the local sights in order to attend giant, dark auditoria and listen to "industry champions" deliver "thought leadership". After a trans-continental telepathy session, here's our collective distillation of this year's C-level wisdom, as delivered from our industry's biggest stages. - Ed.

Hi! I'm Larya Whitadellioff and thanks for joining us here today at MicroForceWare's DreamForumWorld 2014, here in fabulous New CiscoVegaLona.

Over the next few days we're going to explain how innovations like version 3.6 of our software will help you cope with the amazing wave of disruptive change sweeping the world.

I'm sure you'll all agree that coping with disruption is critical because the world is changing so very fast.

Consider, for example, the might of the poorly-educated, largely casual taxi-driving workforce. Uber disrupted that global industry, perhaps fatally, with just an app and a flagrant disregard for the law.

And I'm sure you all know about AirBnB, which made it respectable to take in boarders again. It also figured out how to shrink the margins on offer when you take in boarders.

Now that's disruption.

And who needs reminding about how cloud storage has effectively become free, because Microsoft and Google have decided it's the least painful loss leader because the more photos you have in the cloud, the more locked-in you feel?

Version 3.6 is all about helping you deflect that kind of disruption. Our design team's research found that your industry is static, vulnerable, and that your managers still think MySpace is where the cool kids hang out. Version 3.6 will help you deal with that. Somehow. We promise.

But things are changing so fast, we no longer think that disruption is all you need to worry about. Recent events mean we're all stretched in so many ways, so clearly it's not enough just to become more agile. Today, you need to be fluid. You need your business and the data that powers it to flow.

That's because disruptive forces are now putting so much pressure on every business that information is becoming liquid at room temperature.

And you don't want to be left sucking that information off the data centre floor through a straw.

That's why there's so much excitement this year about containers. You can't store liquid information in a virtual machine – it'll fall out! - but containers are built to hold things!

Here at MicroForceWare we think of our container strategy as being a bit like an ice cube tray. You pour in liquid information and an hour or two later it's available to melt into whatever other container you want to use. You can mix different types of containerised information. And our containers last for ages in a freezer. Or other form of cold storage.

Containers are going to go especially well in the cloud. When you throw liquid information into a today's business climate, it circulates and returns to earth - or the bottom line - as disruptive hail.

We're mindful that not everyone can operate a cloud. The hyperscale operations that the likes of Google, Microsoft and Facebook run aren't for everyone. But we've also seen a thirst for hyperconverged appliances that put storage, compute and networking into a single box.

We think we can do better. Which is why I today announce a partnership with two Scandinavian giants: LEGO and IKEA. Our new partnerships with these two leaders of the toy and frustration industries will see us deliver a modular, flat-packed, data centre infrastructure range that will reduce the time to do anything by days, and disrupt downtime by allowing you to rely on industry-standard allen keys and also make it inadvisable to walk barefoot in the data centre.

We'll deliver “bricklets” for storage, compute and networking sold discretely, or assembled into pre-configured “STÄKS” for rapid deployment.

STÄKS won't just be reference architectures: they'll also offer world's best business business process improvement templates in pictogram form, to greatly reduce the cost of deployment.

Bricklets will work inside a STÄK or as standalone computer. In the latter role, we think they'll be very useful for internet of things applications. Which is why I'm also announcing a new Big Data solution that will collect data from Bricklets, deliver that information to STÄKS and spit it out as containerised cubes you can melt whenever it suits you.

So thanks for being here in New CiscoVegaLona. We hope you enjoy the event, actually wear the revolting T-shirt we gave you at least once, survive the catering and find a way to justify your expenses when you get home! ®

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