I’m not sure what the answer to that question is, but that’s why I’ll be at Cloud Connect to find out.  I plan to attend the panel discussion from the keynote stage covering the hot topic of open source, which will be moderated by the highly acclaimed venture capitalist, Ann Winblad, Co-founder and Managing Director of Hummer Winblad Venture Partners.  Ann most recently was quoted in Wall Street Journal’s All Things D around IBM’s announcement that all of its cloud services and software will be based on an open cloud architecture. Good news for IBM customers, bad news for VMware’s vCloud or Citrix’s CloudStack, and representative that OpenStack is a key component to the software-defined data center.  As such, it only makes sense to bring an expert to the stage, from a firm that has had a long-term investment interest in open source software and open standards, to further discuss.  Ann will be joined by panelists from Citrix, CloudOps and Red Hat on Thursday, April 4 during the event.  Join me and we can find out together if clouds are indeed, the gateway drug.

But we can’t stop there because besides the excitement of welcoming Ann Winblad to the main stage, Cloud Connect also just announced their expanded keynote line-up, which includes the likes of Margaret Dawson of HP Cloud Services, Jim Davies of Mitel, Kit Colbert of VMWare and more. An impressive line-up of industry visionaries helping shape the cloud computing industry today.  And with a finger on the pulse of all key cloud computing trends – like big data, open source and PaaS – Cloud Connect has a new addition to the program: DEPLOYCON 2013, produced by Rishidot Research LLC, will be a one-day workshop on Tuesday covering all things PaaS.  DEPLOYCON is intended to bring together CIOs, enterprise managers, IT and developers to discuss how organizations can better leverage Platform Services to enable IT transformation to agile IT.

It’s a chocked-full line-up and will most likely make for a jam-packed schedule.  Cloud Connect is just over two weeks out, happening the first week of April, and with so much happening in the industry, you don’t want to miss it.  Time to start building your schedule now!

Joylyn Tanner
Senior Communications Manager
UBM Tech

Tags: Citrix cloud cloud adoption cloud computing cloud connect CloudOps OpenStack Wall Street Journal

A post from Cloud Connect’s Private Cloud Track Chair, Dave Roberts.

When cloud computing was young, most people theorized that the industry and foundational technology would develop very similarly to the early days of electric utilities. All this capital investment in enterprise IT, people said, would be replaced by the purchase of computing as a service from open market producers. Instead of buying and depreciating large hardware and software systems, we’d leave those purchases to the service providers and buy our computing “by the drink,” paying only for what we used. When we were done, we’d flick the computing equivalent of a light switch and the meter would stop. If you’re old enough to remember, before we called it “cloud computing,” we originally called it “utility computing.”

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Tags: cloud cloud computing cloud connect Cloud Connect 2012 OpenStack PaaS private clouds SaaS