transition to cloud computing
Enterprise Cloud Summit at Interop: A Moment in the Cloud
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BuzzBy John Considine
Despite scheduling the first of day conference to start on Mother’s Day, there was a good turnout for the Enterprise Cloud Summit in Las Vegas this week. The presentations covered everything from how public clouds “work” to the future of private clouds. Sessions were brief and moved quickly, which kept things interesting, but at times felt a bit rushed for the speakers – as I can attest to after delivering a 15-minute talk on deploying enterprise applications in public clouds.
As you might expect from an Interop crowd, the audience was loaded with people who consider their primary job “IT,” and surprisingly very few who were active programmers; a sure sign that although the developers started the cloud trend, core IT is now getting in on the game. The audience reminded me that we are still in the early days of cloud computing, and the clever organization of the summit by Alistair Croll and team helped highlight this.
By mixing “under the covers with the cloud provider” sessions and real-life case studies with panels debating the various forms and futures of cloud computing, the audience got a full dose of the hopes and dreams of the cloud as well as the nitty-gritty of what is (and is not) working today; often one right after another. An amusing example – a panel debating the “private cloud = false cloud” taking positions on whether private clouds are real or just virtualization, followed a little later by Zynga talking about how successful their private cloud is…
My takeaways from the summit: The audience and speakers represented a true reflection of where the whole industry is on the transition to cloud computing. If you want to find reasons to delay and avoid the cloud, it is easy to debate and find use cases where it doesn’t make sense. However, if you want to embrace this transformative platform shift and take advantage of the clouds, there are plenty success stories, people, and products to help you get there.
