"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

Cloud Computing Keynote

Dr. Werner Vogels is Vice President & Chief Technology Officer at Amazon.com where he is responsible for driving the company's technology vision. Prior to joining Amazon, he worked as a research scientist at Cornell University where he was a principal investigator in several research projects that target the scalability and robustness of mission-critical enterprise computing systems. Vogels holds a Ph.D. from the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam and has authored close to 80 articles for journals and conferences, most of them on distributed systems technologies for enterprise computing.

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 buzz word 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.

Elastic Computing vs. Cloud Computing: What's the Difference and When Do You Use Them?

Cloud Computing, in its current incarnation, falls short on its promise to make computing as a whole as simple as plugging an application into a utility service. The ?cloud? model initially 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, complete application infrastructure needs to be easily configured, deployed, dynamically-scaled and managed in these virtualized hardware environments.

Thus "Elastic Computing" enters and enhances the cloud computing model by allowing companies to efficiently and cost-effectively configure, deploy and managing clustered, highly-scalable applications in cloud computing environments. This session will discuss in greater detail how these models work in concert and how to gain business value from them.

Speaker Bio: Kirill Sheynkman is Founder & CEO of Elastra Corporation. He was cofounder and CEO of two successful startups: Stanford Technology Group acquired by Informix/IBM in 1995 and Plumtree Software acquired in 2005 by BEA. Between startups, Sheynkman was EIR at Sequoia Capital. He holds an EE & Computer Science degree from Stanford and MBA from U.C. Berkeley.