Putting meat on the bones

While we're working on getting a readable first draft of the agenda up (hang tough, it'll be up shortly), I wanted to list our early sponsors as a way to illustrate how things are beginning to flesh out. So -Boomi describes themselves as the "integration cloud" company; think integration as a service for applications. It's a very interesting space, and one that Boomi is very unique in, in that they're so concentrated on the problem that they really don't have head-on "competitors."Gnip is relaunching in February, so I can't point you to exactly what they do, but if you're in the whole "real-time data" arena, Gnip is important to you.Alcatel-Lucent is making a push into the "cloud" space, and I'm glad they've chosen Glue as an appropriate venue for doing so.Ping Identity works in the "internet identity" space. I've personally been involved with Ping since it's earliest days (I was employee #1), and I've watched with pride as Andre and crew have become the absolute leaders in this space.enStratus is a great startup out of the Twin Cities (love the Twin Cities) that is focused on creating "confidence" (i.e., security and reliability) in the cloud.10gen is the company behind the open source MongoDB (NoSQL) project.Gist are those crazy guys (T.A., Robert) that have been hanging out around our conferences for years. Along the way, they started this awesome company that focuses on aggregating your personal data sources in ways that make your contacts much more valuable (I use gist all of the time).So, the cool part about looking at these sponsors is that it starts to form a nice outline of what we're going to talk about -- namely:Application integrationReal-time dataCloud infrastructureIdentity in the CloudCloud security and reliabilityProjects for internet-scale data (NoSQL)Linked DataGreat start -- and there's more on the way. Stay tuned for the first draft of the agenda --- and make sure to get your butt registered.