I recently sat down with AATC Platinum Sponsor and Program Committee member Russell Hertzberg, Vice President Technology Solutions for SoftServe, Inc. to discuss AATC 2013, their goals for the conference and what we hope to see from the program and our industry in the coming year.

Rhianna:Why was it important to you to be a part of the AATC Program Committee?

Russ: Being a part of the Program Committee helps SoftServe give input into the shape, structure, and content of the event agenda, while staying abreast of the latest developments with respect to the event plan.

Rhianna: What are your goals for the conference this year?

Russ: As always, to get some strong new ISV leads, or to further nurture existing prospects. We do this through networking, speaker presentations, and the sponsorship.

Rhianna: What is unique about AATC that makes it so valuable to ISVs?

Russ: AATC is the premier event for ISVs who are just entering or already leading in various segments of the Cloud Computing market. This event has it all: thought leaders, great panels, practical education, and how to content.

Rhianna: What are some of the topics you are excited to see in the program this year?

Russ: Mobile + cloud monetization strategies, the evolution of PaaS technology, a report card on Azure, and the role that Big Data platforms are playing in various SaaS offerings.

Rhianna: What are your industry predictions for what’s in store for 2013-2014?

Russ: 1. SaaS. Large ISVs are in an adaptive race to both build and buy SaaS capability. In this race, the course of 2013 will show increasing gaps between executing leaders and confused or denying followers. This race is the single most important determinant of the future value of the 100 largest ISV providers. The leaders will not simply make more SaaS acquisitions. They will also create hybrid solutions for current install bases. They will deliver new SaaS offerings in the SMB market by refactoring current on-premises technology. And they will adapt channel, sales and marketing models to the economics of the SaaS business.

2. DevOps. Cloud computing is changing the skill set and composition requirements of technical teams. Designing and developing software is now the front end for the long-run challenge: service delivery management and continuous application enhancement. Development operations (DevOps) are one of the critical disciplines for the new technical team. The skill set of a DevOps tech lead includes systems programming, build management, configurations management, service monitoring, security, backup, recovery and more. Over time, the technical team composition for a large SaaS deployment will trend towards an equal number of software engineers and DevOps engineers.

3. PaaS. PaaS remains a clever software technology for rapid application development or refactoring rather than a specific market. Small PaaS players can survive by deploying their technology primarily to create conventional and nimble SaaS solutions in established markets. PaaS technology will be combined with Big Data platforms to create new services and sites in several business and consumer markets.

4. Health Information Exchanges. The firmer establishment and acceptance of The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2009 (“Obamacare”) resulting from the re-election of Obama is driving acceleration in construction and deployment of Healthcare Information Exchanges and Health Insurance Exchanges. HIE construction and operation is attracting large hardware/software providers and major systems integrators. The cloud-based security and data integration requirements for HIEs will introduce new software and security technology like JSON and Oauth into the healthcare IT market. Other industry-specific community clouds may begin to develop in public education, finance, retail and manufacturing.

5. Social media. The technology behind the massive horizontal scalability of major social and search platforms is driving into the smaller-scale footprints of independent colocation facilities, hosters, ISPs, and enterprise data centers. Enterprises will refactor and redeploy more and more applications into hybrid and private cloud deployments, taking advantage of virtualization, multi-tenancy and horizontal scalability to become more competitive with public cloud-computing metrics and price points.

6. Mobile. Scalable back-end cloud services continue to be the anchor for mobile business and consumer applications. Mobility and cloud computing enjoy a virtuous synergy that can be seen in the rich native mobile applications for popular social networks, the hugely successful online store models for application purchase and delivery from Google/Apple/Amazon, and the overall growth in mobile device traffic on popular cloud-based sites and services.