I attended the Sun Startup Bootcamp in San Francisco last weekend - my first time!   I went to get an idea of what ENKI's competition is doing, what startups are looking for in cloud computing service providers, and to see if I could learn anything else that might help me serve my customers.  On the whole, I found that the conference was a wonderful effort in support of brand-new entrepreneurs, but that most of the sessions were too short to penetrate the details necessary to really create in-depth expertise.  As a survey of issues facing entrepreneurs, it was excellent.

Then, there were the vendors.  Many of  the breakout "unconference" sessions were run by vendors and despite admonishments from the Bootcamp organizers, the sessions largely became sales meetings, which was a disappointment.  And then, there was the biggest vendor of all at the conference - the sponsor, Sun.  The keynote address was made by Jonathan Schwarz, the CEO of Sun.  I was quite surprised to see that he had a practical and pragmatic approach to supporting open source and software startups, and a deep grasp of cloud computing.  But the highlight of his talk - and of the Bootcamp - for me was when a member of the audience stood up and harangued him to "just let me be a programmer!"

The programmer was upset about the difficulty of deploying code into a Java environment, but his frustration is echoed by many of my customers.  There are great solutions for developing software easily, and an increasing number of solutions for deploying it in the Cloud (in other words, to data centers located on the Internet.)  However, there is still a gap in which the programmer must know about the deployment technology and configuration in order to write, test, debug, secure, and manage the performance of her code. 

This is the space that ENKI works in - making deployment easy by offering it as a service without having to know anything about the deployment technology.  I saw an increasing number of deployment solutions (such as the new one from Google) at the Bootcamp which restricted deployment options in order to make it a turnkey process, but I believe that there is still tremendous value to be added to web applications by a programmer/architect who can design the architecture of their product to be optimized for their particular business.  This requires flexible deployment methods.