What's On: Our Next Valley View

The Valley View episode discussed in this article was filmed on March 28, 2012. The full archive of the show can be seen in the video embedded at the bottom of this page.

The goals we strive for with our monthly, live web TV show, Valley View, are variety and practical information in an entertaining format. That's why I'm particularly excited about the show we have planned for the March 28 episode, which features some pretty heady executives from interesting companies in some of the most interesting technology sectors.

We kick off with Andy Bechtolsheim, the Founder, Chairman and Chief Development Officer for Arista Networks, a company that, in some ways, woke up the data center market. It did this by using merchant silicon to provide a ton of bandwidth, low latency, and huge buffers in an affordable switch--just the kind of gear for things like high-frequency trading and big data analysis. The company is now on a mission to infiltrate cloud computing environments, and they're always working on something new and exciting. A couple of years ago, we awarded Arista a Best of Interop award.

Bechtolsheim is no stranger to disrupting industries. Thirty years ago he co-founded Sun Microsystems (he was its first employee), and headed up its hardware design (including the original SPARCstation). He was also the first investor in Google, in 1998. His track record in Silicon Valley is legendary.

Next, we'll shift gears to focus on one of the companies whose technology underpins most of the mobile devices we now take for granted: ARM. The company's system-on-a-chip design licensees include NVIDIA (makers of the Tegra 3 quad-core processor), Texas Instruments, and Qualcomm. (Windows 8 will also run on ARM, and there are ARM chips for servers, washing machines--no lie--and other devices.)

The company's lead mobile strategist, James Bruce will join InformationWeek's Art Wittmann at the whiteboard to explore aspects of ARM's technology that may fall a bit under the radar, but promise to usher in some substantial changes--like support for virtualization in hardware, and security enhancements at the chip level.

We'll then dive into the cloud for a while, starting with Parker Harris, Executive Vice President and co-Founder of Salesforce.com, where he's in charge of overall development. In other words, he's one of the main forces behind the technology of the high flying software-as-a-service bellwether. We'll talk about how Saleforce is doing with some of its newer forays into the social enterprise, and social analytics, among other topics.

Then we'll get a hands-on demonstration of Piston Cloud, courtesy of co-Founder and CEO Joshua McKenty. Piston Cloud is essentially the braintrust of NASA's Nebula, and McKenty was its architect, and one of the founders of the OpenStack initiative that Nebula spawned. Piston Cloud makes an enterprise distribution of OpenStack, focused on adding security, usability, and services. The company recently offered developers its Piston cloud OS on a USB stick.

Our final formal guest is one of my personal favorites--Phil Libin, the Founder and CEO of Evernote. Evernote is where the cloud and mobility come together to offer one of the most personal productivity tools that I've ever used. In fact, this note-taking, note-sharing tool has become the hub of much of my work, including collaborating with colleagues on everything from planning our event coverage to creating Valley View. I use it on iOS, Android, and my laptop.

A couple of years ago, Evernote launched its Trunk product, a set of APIs that allow developers to extend Evernote's functionality. There are apps to connect things like Salesforce and SAP, plus the output of tools like Livescribe. At Mobile World Congress, I saw a demonstration where notes were sent via NFC into Evernote. Less than a year ago, Evernote acquired another of our favorite utilities--Skitch. Libin is one of the most enthusiastic and approachable executives in Silicon Valley.

We've added improvements, like technology debates and whiteboard demonstrations on the content side, new equipment like big TVs for our live studio audience, and better production quality as we learn with each show.

For our March 28 Valley View, we've got a few additions. First, we're going to try our hand at an impromptu session. We're inviting our in-studio guests to bring along some executives, and we're going to randomly select two companies to talk to us on the spot.

In addition, we're adding to our production equipment with some improved gear for better audio quality, and another big-screen for our live audience.

We hope you join us for Valley View online, or, if you're in the San Francisco area, in studio at UBM TechWeb Headquarters. Just come by and join us for refreshments and a chance to network with other Silicon Valley folks and some of our editors. If you're watching online, don't forget to register for Valley View, because we always give away some prizes to some lucky viewers. We've even started giving away prizes to our in-studio audience.