In my writeup the other day of the O’Reilly Radar Executive Briefing at ETech, I neglected to mention one planned session.
As I’ve written before, one of the big things on our radar is the idea that the data center is the new programming platform. (Remember Debra Chrapaty of Microsoft’s injunction: “In the future, being a developer on someone’s platform will mean being hosted on their infrastructure.”)
Recently, Paul Kedrosky asked the question, “How do you invest around data center construction?” We invited Paul, the outspoken venture capitalist behind the Infectious Greed blog, and Rich Miller, the technology analyst behind the Data Center Knowledge blog, to join us to discuss this provocative topic.
In addition, Alec Proudfoot of Google and Allison Randal of the Radar team, co-chairs of our Energy Innovation Conference, will talk with us about what they’re seeing on the energy front as they’re evaluating technologies, startups, and the hacker frontier for the conference.
There’s more than a casual connection between these two topics. While there’s a lot more happening on the energy front than its intersection with computing, it has been conversations with Google, Microsoft, and other large data center players that first made us aware of just what a critical factor energy consumption was becoming in their strategic thinking. It’s become the new focus of many Silicon Valley VCs (Who would have thought that the investment focus of noted computer scientists turned VC like Bill Joy and Bob Metcalfe would be energy?)
And of course energy innovation is now becoming, at long last, once again a critical factor in the strategic thinking of our country.