We've been doing a lot around Cloud lately, both as a middleware team and throughout the company. I believe that we have the best teams and software to deliver on the vision of Cloud (as well as actually defining that vision, which is still very much in a state of flux). However, the definition of Cloud today is likely to look very different to the definition of Cloud in a few years time, so we need to continually be looking ahead and researching those new frontiers. So it's with a lot of pleasure that I can announce we've teamed up with the University of Newcastle upon Tyne, a centre of Cloud excellence as well as fault tolerant distributed computing. Over the years I've worked at the University as well as with them through a number of companies, including Bluestone and Hewlett Packard. They are second to none in their fields of expertise and I'm certain that the combination of Red Hat/JBoss with Newcastle University will yield fantastic results!

Footnote: I'd like to thank everyone involved in making this happen, too many to mention them all but including Brian Stevens, Carl Trieloff, Professor Paul Watson, Professor Santosh Shrivastava and Barry Hodgson.

When JBoss World started back in mid-2000's it was definitely a conference by developers and for developers. My first ever exposure to JBW was in Barcelona and it was definitely a unique event back then. I'd been used to academic conferences/workshops or those that were heavily marketing driven, so JBW was a breath of fresh air. The next few JBoss Worlds were similarly heavily developer driven and I know the core developers really appreciated the opportunity to get to meet their community of contributors and users. However, as we have grown, and with the Red Hat acquisition back in 2006, the emphasis around JBW has shifted to embrace a wider audience, including users, partners and those people who may be dipping their toes into the open source waters. That progression is a fairly natural thing: JBoss reached critical mass adoption towards the end of the first decade of the 21st Century and our user base grew immeasurably.

However, as JBoss World changed we didn't want to lose touch with our developer-centric roots. For open source that aspect is critically important. So we've been thinking about what to do in order to allow us to continue with the new focus around JBoss World and yet try to get back to the old focus of the original JBoss World. For the answer we looked at what our colleagues in the RHEL/Fedora world have done and FUDCon came to mind. If you've ever been to FUDCon you'll know that it really is completely different to Red Hat Summit: it's by developers and for developers, which is precisely what we wanted to do. So was born JUDCon: the JBoss User and Developer Conference, which is what I'm announcing officially today.

JUDCon will be held twice a year initially, once in the US and once in Europe. If it's a success we'll look to expand the number of the events as well as their physical range. But for now 2 a year should be sufficient while we find our feet. For the very first JUDCon we'll be positioning it just before JBoss World, but that's just a happy coincidence. We'll be posting more on the agenda for JUDCon soon, but the format will be familiar (though not the same) as FUDCon. So if you've got presentations that you'd like to give in front of a large community of your JBoss peers, get ready to submit them. Or if you just want to come and hear about the latest and greatest projects we've got going (and very much in depth presentations at that), start looking to book your travel.

There'll be an official JUDCon page on JBoss.org soon where you'll be able to see the agenda, sign up to give sessions, sign up for sessions etc., so keep watching that site. As with FUDCon, attendance at JUDCon will be free, but guaranteed places will be on a first come first served basis. Plus this is our very first JUDCon so we'll be asking for feedback from attendees so that we can improve future events. So if you're looking for very technical sessions on JBoss projects, this is definitely the event to target. Of course with JBoss World being held straight after you can always go to both and get the complete product/project picture!