MIKE MANEY

It’s not the things. It’s the things that make the things work.

That’s the core of Gluecon, one of a very select few conferences that are on my must-attend-at-all-costs list. Held every May in Broomfield, Co., Gluecon brings together a who’s who of the tech industry’s smartest people. You won’t find a Zuckerberg, Mayer or Brin, but you will find a Hoff, Merling and Cockroft — the sort of people who are building and running the core infrastructure that enables the world we all live. Household names? Maybe not. But high Q scores among those who follow cloud computing and APIs (and, I suspect, equally strong Little Bird influence rankings).

They’re all looking 4 next Facebook or next Twitter but no one wants 2 look 4 next Juniper or next Intel or next ARM trib.al/P6Xxcgt

— Om Malik (@om) May 21, 2013

As I looked through this year’s attendee list (using an awesome app developed by Full Contact), there was noticeable shift from year’s past in the type of developer and company attending Glue. Where past conferences had a healthy smattering of long tail developers, this year seems to have a robust profile of enterprise folks (something I also saw reflected in the agenda). The reason, in my opinion, is that we are finally seeing the enterprise wake up to power of things like the cloud and APIs. But instead of seeing power in apps, like we saw in the last wave, they are finding opportunity in new business models.