I attended CloudExpoEurope '11 today in London and had high expectations for this event considering all the hype around the cloud. As expected, it was mainly a vendor led event. There were some new names (at least for me) that were exhibiting their services like OnApp, Onyx Group, Ping Identity, Cloudreach and Nlyte.
The mix of SaaS, PaaS and IaaS appeared to be slightly imbalanced on the floor. Interestingly, there were significantly more IaaS related vendors than SaaS and PaaS. The IaaS vendors exhibiting were Carrenza, Claranet, Savvis, Rackspace, Peer 1 and Redhat amongst others.
I discussed the impact of Open Source solutions like OpenStack with OnApp MD Carlos Rego and also understood the service model behind Ping Identity (Cloud SSO Solution Provider) from Travis Spencer of Ping Identity. Rik Ferguson's (Trend Micro) talk on securing cloud instances was interesting as well. SaaS solution on system monitoring by CA's recently acquired Nimsoft seemed robust.
There were exciting Open Source projects (OW2 Consortium, Open Nebula) that I would have liked to review but couldn't because of time constraints. The Open Source developments in cloud are of particular interest to me as the development in OpenStack project are steadily improving and shows promise at the moment to deliver the much required integration in this novell and rapidly changing ecosystem.
And, I also witnessed some IaaS 'cloud' providers selling virtualisation as a 'Cloud' service!
To summarise, the experience at CloudExpo could have been better with more variety of players from SaaS, PaaS and IaaS arena in Europe or Worldwide for the visitor to have a comprehensive view of the ‘Cloud’ ecosystem. It seems that the hype around Cloud is very real but so are the clear business benefits from utilising the various services in the Cloud ecosystem.
Ideally, businesses going to such Cloud events should have a clear understanding of their requirements in terms of what their processes are, what systems they use and what software, platform and/or infrastructure of the business would they like to transfer to the cloud. As a bad analogy, the current cloud arena is like a phone app market with no recommendation/feedback system. There are too many apps but the user needs to know what suits their requirements. But with Cloud it may not be as easy as deleting the app!
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