Last week was phenomenal in intensity: first we had the Jenkins User Conference (JUC), for which CloudBees was the platinum sponsor and key organizer. JUC was immediately followed by JavaOne and CloudBees’ semi-annual Technical Advisory Board (TAB) meeting. In between planning and execution of all of these activities a number of very important press releases were issued, along with associated media and analyst briefings.
Today it is Friday. I am back in Switzerland and it just started snowing: the perfect conditions to for me to take a moment to sit down, look back, reflect and appreciate.
First Up...Jenkins User Conference
Last Sunday, the first Jenkins User Conference was to start at 9:15am in downtown SFO. I arrived at 8:10am, thinking I was early and this would be a quiet start to the day: wasn’t it Sunday morning, after all? As I exited the packed elevator, I saw my fellow Bees already busy distributing name tags to attendees. At 9:00am, there were already more than 170 persons who had checked-in for the conference. In short order, we would eventually reach almost 250 attendees!
The speakers were very experienced and knowledgeable; as a result, the sessions were informative and of very high quality. All sessions were recorded and will be made available online in a week or two , so you’ll be able to judge their value for yourself. My only regret? There was one session I’d have loved to attend (“Continuous Deployment with Gerrit and Jenkins”). Unfortunately, it was taking place…while I was presenting mine! ;-) Oh well - I will catch the recording!
Probably the best part of JUC for me, though, was to see the passion of the attendees for the Jenkins CI platform and all that it has enabled them to achieve. This, along with their excitement at being gathered together from all over the world, made me realize how much Jenkins has grown – dare I say, exploded – over the last year or two. JUC attendees were from many countries, many companies – from start-ups to global enterprises, a myriad of industries and various cultures, but they all had the commonality of trusting the development and deployment of mission-critical applications to Jenkins. To me, that is proof positive of the robustness, quality and reliability of the Jenkins platform. On that very topic, in case you’ve missed it in the JavaOne communication frenzy, you can read about the Jenkins community and the formalization of their processes: rules of engagement, IP, trademarks, etc.
Kudos to the Jenkins Community for holding the first JUC! I'd also like to once again thank the other vendors who, along with CloudBees, sponsored an extremely successful conference: Liferay, Red Hat, New Relic, Sauce Labs, Chariot Solutions and eXo Platform.
...Onward to JavaOne
Wasn't it Tuesday? After all, we spent the previous day at the Jenkins User Conference. Oh, right. That was only Sunday. On Monday, JavaOne started up. In the scattered set of hotels that serves as the replacement for the glory of the vast Moscone Center, it is hard to get an accurate feel for the show attendance. Even with my pessimistic hat on, I really think this JavaOne was bigger than the past two JavaOne conferences. Either ORCL is doing a good job attracting developers or Java is not quite dead yet. Or both. All I know is, there was a robust turnout of multitudes of Java developers!
The attendance at the CloudBees booth was phenomenal, with lots of follow-up activities in the pipeline as a result. I'd like to think it was our staff and our solution that attracted the crowds, but in all honesty it might really have been the Angry Birds we were giving away. Nonetheless, whether out of interest for our PaaS or the Angry Birds, it was really good to see the level of interest in CloudBees and in our offering. It was also a great opportunity for me to have a little fun with my team .
...Followed by the Technical Advisory Board (TAB) Meeting
On Tuesday afternoon, we conducted our semi-annual Technical Advisory Board meeting. Even our TAB agenda offered up some excitement. I was proud to announce that Edouard Bugnion, co-founder of VMware, was now a member of the CloudBees TAB! He joins existing TAB members Eduardo Pelegri-Llopart, J. J. Allaire, Rich Friedman and Roman Stanek. We closed the TAB with a great dinner that ended very early the following morning.
...and News
In addition to these three significant events, in the last 10 days, we’ve announced that Steven Harris has joined CloudBees as SVP Products , that we’ve released the first production-ready EE6-Web Profile PaaS implementation and that we have issued the 2011 Fall Release of our cloud platform .
These news releases have all generated a lot of interest. Stay tuned, as we have more news coming down the pipe…
Onward,
Sacha
Sacha Labourey, CEO