"The battlefront that I see as the one developing the most quickly in SaaS platforms is the one around cloud computing. We are seeing different approaches and different levels of the stack exposed by all the vendors - Amazon is a utility model (but proprietary queuing and other bits), Google forces Python and the persistent storage, Opsource wants to build lock-in through application peering, etc. We still don't know where Microsoft, IBM and others will enter - it will be a dynamic market for a bit yet."
Lars Leckie
-- Principal, Hummer Winblad Investment Partners

Keynote - 2nd International Cloud Computing Expo

Ahead in the Cloud - The Power of Infrastructure as a Service Building the right infrastructure that can scale up or down at a moment's notice can be a complicated and expensive task, but it's essential in today's business landscape. This applies to an enterprise trying to cut-costs, a young business unexpectedly saturated with customer demand, or a start-up looking to launch. There are many challenges when building a reliable, flexible architecture that can manage unpredictable behaviors of today's internet business. This presentation by cloud computing trailblazer Werner Vogels of Amazon will review some of the lessons learned from building one of the world's largest distributed systems: Amazon.com. Dr. Werner Vogels is Vice President & Chief Technology Officer at Amazon.com where he is responsible for driving the company's technology vision.

Cloud Computing: the Future of Enterprise IT as a Service

The future model for providing IT infrastructure and services in large organizations is what many today are calling "Cloud Computing" - a concept popularized by Amazon through its web services efforts.

Leading financial analysts for example reckon that by 2011 the volume of Cloud Computing market opportunity will amount to $160BN, including $95N in business and productivity apps (e-mail, office, CRM, etc.) and $65BN in online advertising.

Cloud Computing, through which massively scalable IT-related capabilities are provided as a service using Internet technologies, has many interpreters just now - and many interpretations. One thing is certain: it is the most dynamic new metaphor to hit enterprise computing since the creation of the "Web" by Tim Berners-Lee.

Over the next five years, IDC expects spending on IT cloud services to grow almost threefold, reaching $42 billion by 2012 and accounting for 9% of revenues in five key market segments. More importantly, spending on cloud computing will accelerate throughout the forecast period, capturing 25% of IT spending growth in 2012 and nearly a third of growth the following year.

Accordingly SYS-CON Media & Events is forging ahead and producing the 1st and 2nd International Cloud Computing Conference & Expos, to be held respectively November 19-21 in San Jose, California, and March 22-24, 2009, in New York City.

Top-Class Speaker Lineup Will Explore the Technical & Business Value of Delivering IT Resources as Services

Forrester Research analyst James Staten calls cloud computing "classic disruptive innovation - where the mainstream dismisses the product and small companies have time to create a real differentiated value." But there are so many offerings just now that what infrastructure architects are looking for above all is a set of organizing principles they can use to guide them in choosing between them all.

Such principles. and a host of associated topics, will be addressed in San Jose by a Top Speaker Faculty that includes:

Deploying into the Clouds: Concepts, Benefits, and Experiences

Cloud Computing offers significant benefits over traditional solutions for deploying production systems as well as for conducting development and testing activities. This session will distill the unique characteristics of clouds and describe how to best think about deployments in the clouds. Case studies and real experiences from Thorsten von Eicken's two years of cloud computing experience will illustrate the pros and cons of today's cloud offerings. His technical discussion will cover:

• Layers of cloud computing
• Cost breakdown versus traditional solutions
• IT management and development, testing benefits/examples
• Extreme, fast scalability at low cost - case study

On the Path to Cloud Nirvana

Today, offerings such as Amazon Web Services' Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) are providing a new model for on demand compute resources based on virtual machines. Virtual appliances are a natural deployment vehicle for this type of infrastructure, allowing a clean separation between the memory, compute, and storage resources managed by the appliance provider and the complete software stack managed by the end user. Virtual appliances also allow a simple transition from internal virtualization clusters to outsourced providers, enabling capacity spikes to be handled.

This session will showcase the tremendous flexibility, scalability, and financial savings that result from leveraging virtual appliances and cloud computing. Billy Marshall, CEO and founder of rPath will present a real life case study on KnowledgeTree, a document management provider, to examine the implementation of this strategy.

Speaker Bio: Billy Marshall is CEO and Founder of rPath.

The World Wide Cloud: Bridging the Data Center and The Cloud

As cloud computing becomes more commonplace, creating a secure method to bridge the gap between existing data centers and remote sources of compute capacity is being more and more important. The ability to efficiently and securely tap into remote cloud resources is one of the most important opportunities in the cloud computing today.

In this session Cohen will discuss some of the challenges and opportunities to deploying across a diverse global cloud infrastructure. Location, security, portability, and reliability, he will explain, all play critical roles in a scalable IT environment.

Speaker Bio: Reuven Cohen is Founder & Chief Technologist for Toronto-based Enomaly Inc. - leading developer of Cloud computing products and solutions focused on enterprise businesses. A thought leader in the emerging cloud computing industry, Cohen maintains a blog at www.elasticvapor.com. Enomaly's products include the Enomalism elastic computing platform, an open source cloud platform that enables a scalable enterprise IT and local cloud infrastructure platform.

Cloud Storage: A Paradigm Shift in IT

The demand for storage has increased exponentially, placing significant stress on current "in house" storage architectures and costly overcapacity build-outs. Factoring in pressures of power, space, large capital expenditures, global performance, and availability issues, companies are faced with an exploding challenges and costs to go with the exploding storage demand.

Bottom line, companies must take a new approach to storage. Companies need to move from the old and out-dated storage 1.0 model of "do everything yourself" to a new storage 2.0 cloud model. This session will show how Cloud storage delivers persistent storage on demand to applications regardless of location and pre-defined boundaries and meets the performance and scalability characteristics of the web applications and enterprise users.

Speaker Bio: Patrick Harr is CEO of Nirvanix. He joined from Enterprise Partners Venture Capital, where he served as entrepreneur-in-residence focusing on content, storage, and media services investments. His prior leadership roles include president and CEO of Preventsys Inc., a security risk and compliance management firm that was acquired by McAfee in 2006, and Vice President of the $300M Enterprise Products Group at McDATA Corp., an enterprise storage networking solutions company.

Trusting the Cloud: Timing and Adoption of Cloud Technologies

Cloud technologies offer many benefits over traditional IT systems, especially when managing the size and vastness of unstructured data and unpredictable growth in IT environments. But when does it make sense to adopt cloud technologies and migrate a set of your IT services to the cloud? The movement of information and services out of the data center and into the cloud can unleash fear in many of us. Trusting that your information is secure, accessible and protected is important, and deciding what information remains inside and outside of the cloud can be critical to the success of your business.

In this session, Mike Feinberg, Senior VP of EMC?s Cloud Infrastructure and Services Division will discuss how to optimize the deployment of cloud technologies and the options that exist for migrating information to the cloud.

Speaker Bio: Mike Feinberg is Senior Vice President of the Cloud Infrastructure Group at EMC Corporation. He joined EMC to lead the Technology Ventures Group which was formed in May of 2006 with the objective of addressing emerging customer and technology trends and delivering products and solutions that will revolutionize existing IT paradigms.

Clouds Are No Substitute for Competence

Just as people begin to understand the difference between web ops and IT, we are entering a period where clouds promise "Ops-Free" computing. Because it's easy, scalable, available and disposable, the cloud is well on its way to becoming "technology's next big thing." However, with recent outages from Amazon and Google Apps, the question of the cloud's competence, security and reliability have come into play.

In this session, Hyperic's CEO, Javier Soltero will address these issues along with the many others surrounding the cloud including:

• The emergence of web operations as a discipline
• How cloud computing simply changes, instead of eliminating the importance of web operations
• What tools are available to help better manage cloud environments?

Marketing a Paradigm Shift

Cloud Computing is the new buzzword in the technology industry. But even industry insiders don't agree on exactly what the term means. We shouldn't be surprised that mainstream business is approaching it with caution. Businesses have many concerns about moving their data to the cloud, some legitimate and some irrational. All these concerns need to be overcome in order for a widespread adoption of Cloud Computing to occur. This session will discuss the obstacles to getting customers to embrace the concept of cloud computing and how to overcome them.

The session will cover topics such as the dangers of preaching to the converted, why "better" isn't good enough when moving customers away from the familiar, and communicating the benefits without getting lost in the technical details.

Speaker Bio: Mike Eaton is Founder and CEO of Cloudworks and Atticus Information Systems. Based in Southern California, Cloudworks is a leading provider of hosted computing services for small and mid-market businesses.

Cloud Computing and the Next Generation of Enterprise Architecture

The Infrastructure-as-a-Service model of early cloud computing providers has focused on making the hardware layer consumable as on-demand compute and storage capacity. This is an important first step, but for companies to harness the power of the cloud, it should enhance the alignment driven by enterprise architecture, driving down the lead times for delivering IT value to business, from concept to deployment, and through maintenance.

An architecture-aware cloud computing infrastructure leads to IT services that are easily configured, deployed, dynamically-scaled, and managed in these virtualized hardware environments, while tied into business processes, data models, security services and the data center's service management, problem resolution, and compliance processes. This session will discuss in greater detail how this new approach to infrastructure operates and how to increase both alignment and agility through it.

Speaker Bio:

Stuart Charlton is the Chief Software Architect for Elastra, a provider of Cloud Computing software infrastructure. He specializes in the areas of systems architecture, RESTful web architecture, data warehousing, and is an avid follower of lean & agile approaches to business processes and product development. Prior to joining Elastra, he was an Enterprise Architect with BEA Systems Worldwide Consulting, was the lead integration architect for a major Canadian telecommunications company, and has been a consultant and trainer for over a dozen organizations in the United States, Canada, and Japan.