The really exciting thing here is the number of players (Morph, Bungee, Heroku, RightScale) since the more the minds converge the more we see the benefits broaden.  At Exist we have been using Morph as a platform for our clients,  it allows us to immediately deploy client sites and then collaborate in a kinda UAT environment which is both easy and quick.  This kind of Infrastructure-on-demand is really a huge benefit – the virtual nature plays so easily in the hands of a collaboration based development company.

What is also important is it fits with out Web 2.0 tooling – as a company we actually choose the environment with the client (it can be anything from BaseCamp or JIRA and our dev teams are up on lots of tools).  The approach is always agile and that usually means a number of environments – Suddenly we are switching up from lots of servers to leveraging the cloud where it is a real blessing.  Real-time development without the hassle of deployment and administration,  giving our sys-admins the chance to work on strategic plans rather than operational needs.

With Morph getting ready to IPO in the Philippines it will be an exciting time to Rails developers looking to push products to market faster than ever.

I think that while this type of meeting is great – one of the problems faced was that many of the young technology entrepreneurs lack keen business and vision-leading experience.  Paco made note of this as he discussed the difficult subject of supporting application development companies – often seen as nothing more than BPO’s.

The truth is that application development companies like Exist (my employer) and Stratpoint (Paco’s investment) provide a bridge between many types of company leveraging software,  including VC backed start-ups and large scale enterprises.  It is more important than ever that teams working in the Philippines grow to see there connection with these companies as more than being a hired-development shop – and understand the partnership that is commonly in place.    Understanding that will help Filipino developers and architects connect with experience in places like the San Francisco, Los Angeles and New York – learning from them,  understanding how they are building companies out off the back of technical innovation (commonly being done in the Philippines).  I remember working as an architect and first understanding the workings of companies – and it was a valuable time when you start to examine the creativity you have in the light of how it will endure a business environment.

So what does 2008 hold for me,  well no less travel it seems :)  though I am becoming a more seasoned traveller (even if Brett still picked on me complaining when I can’t a business class ticket every time!).  Also it’s an opportunity to work with a wider range of projects and technologies (I have been picking up my RoR skills a little more again),  also working with a number of different customers in a services delivery model leveraging a lot of the open source technologies but also the development models.   I did get a day in LA meeting with a number of people in the outsourcing space and it was very interesting to learn more about the strategies that can be leveraged and also the models that are commonly being used by medium or large Enterprises.  Also, we are working with a number of smaller start-ups building whole product offerings – commonly based on many of the Web2.0/Social Networking technologies, which are the talk of the town.  I’m sure this will change the conference schedule for the year,  but I’m hoping I’ll still make it out to a couple of OSS events.