Cloud Expo Crowded Amid Giants, Cloud Confusion and Product Pitches
Posted by Margaret Dawson on November 2, 2010
While the main attraction of the day was clearly the World Series final game, yesterday also was Day 1 of the 7th International Cloud Computing Expo. The event kicked off yesterday in Santa Clara, CA, with easily 30% more attendees than last year’s as well as double the sponsors/exhibitors. The conference center here in sunny Silicon Valley is packed, but I’m not yet convinced that the crowd is more end users than vendors or if the content will be truly cloud savvy or back to the old product pitches.
Yesterday’s keynote unfortunately met my cynical expectations, as the headlining sponsor, Oracle, went from what appeared to be a vendor-neutral cloud overview to an all-out Oracle product pitch. Call me old fashioned, but I really believe that product pitches are meant for INSIDE the exhibition hall at the booths and not in the sessions.
Maybe I’m a bit miffed, because I take so much effort in ensuring that any presentation by a Hubspan exec is vendor-agnostic and focused on the relevant issues, technologies, real-world use cases and helpful advice. So, from one vendor to another – save the product pitches for your booth or your own end-user conferences.
Aside from my soapbox rant, I’m pleased to see this show, or any trade show for that matter, obtain a strong turnout from both end users and sponsors. And it’s clear that there is still a lot of pain and confusion around when, how and why to leverage a cloud-based solution versus on-premise.
Hubspan’s chief software architect, Max Coburn, and I spoke on “Which aaS is right for you” – with aaS clearly standing for “as a Service”. In this presentation, we walked through some cloud basics and then dug into five major cloud platforms delivered as a service (IaaS, PaaS, SaaS, BaaS, etc.), outlining the benefits, when it makes sense to use the platform, and examples of solutions.
We had a nice turnout considering 100 feet from our room was not only the lobby bar but the fifth (and what turned out to be the final) World Series game. Who knew we’d be competing against a local fan base who clearly was more interested in the Giants than cloud computing for that three-hour window.
The good news is with the Giant’s win and the strong turnout at the Expo, everybody seems to be walking on cloud nine.
Tags: Cloud Computing Expo, Oracle, SaaS, San Francisco Giants
[...] Unfortunately, other speakers of the day spent more time giving product pitches, such as the session on “Defining your Cloud Strategy and Roadmap.” It should have been called “Microsoft Windows Azure Is For You No Matter What Your Needs Are”. This speaker spent no time discussing cloud strategy and roadmapping for success, but instead used his entire time reviewing Azure’s features and benefits. Now, I am sure Windows Azure is a fine platform, but this session exasperated the already product commercial heavy sessions at this conference about which I have tweeted and Hubspan has previously blogged. [...]
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