A Tale of Two Cloud Computing Conferences

Two weeks ago, I attended two conferences that illustrated the current chasm between cloud computing advocates and mainstream IT organizations.

On Thursday, I was at the Innotech CIO Summit in Portland, Oregon, speaking on cloud computing. I also participated in a cloud computing panel discussion later in the day with representatives of Salesforce and IBM. I would say that both audiences were aware of cloud computing, and even aware of its putative benefits, but were very skeptical about it, particularly with regard to data security and SLAs.

And certainly there was no sense of urgency on the part of the CIOs to do something about cloud computing. The questions I received were mostly about issues they perceived with cloud computing, and not practically-oriented questions regarding how to get started, or comparing the strengths and weaknesses of different cloud providers. And not question one about creating an internal cloud.

On Friday, I saw the other end of the spectrum at the standing room-only Under the Radar Cloud Computing event. This was the mother lode of cloud computing. The event had a general session in which several presenters gave their perspective on cloud computing. Besides the usual suspects (i.e., venture capitalists and a couple of cloud vendor representatives), there was a real live mainstream IT guy who is leveraging cloud computing today--Dave Powers of Lilly.

The general session continued with some company presentations. Interestingly, two of them, Eucalyptus and Abiquo, provide the ability to create cloud environments. These are aimed at internal clouds or at hosting providers that want to get into the cloud game. Both of them are open source, so provide a way for organizations wanting to create their own cloud to get started without licensing cost.

After the morning session, the conference broke into two tracks. I attended sessions on cloud computing system management and on cloud-based SaaS offerings.

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