The Cloud Computing Conference in Santa Clara, CA (11/2/2009 – 11/4/2009) was well attended and featured a number of companies.
There were a number of large players offering cloud solutions. They are not just dipping a toe in the water, instead many enterprise players are putting significant efforts behind their cloud offerings.
Some of the large players included:
- Intel
- Oracle (yes, even though Larry said cloud computing was vapor)
- EMC (focusing on storage, disaster recovery)
- Unisys
- Yahoo
- Microsoft
- SAP
- Sun
- VMWare
There were a number of cloud vendors, ranging from large to small startups:
- Rackspace
- RightScale
- 3Tera
Amazon did not make an official appearance, although Jeff Barr tweeted that he would be in attendance.
Major takeaways:
- Vendors smell large opportunity. Agatha Poon of the Yankee Group thought large scale adoption was a number of years out, with adoption varying by sector. Interestingly, she stated that the healthcare sector was more optimistic on cloud adoption, ahead of both manufacturing and finance.
- Still working on “closing the deal” – many discussions about overcoming “myths” and having to educate potential customers about public/private clouds, security, etc. The cloud has not entered anything close to the mainstream yet.
- Major selling points revolve around economics (perhaps a sign of the times): pay-as-you-go, no depreciation, etc
- Cloud portability and service interoperability will not happen in the near term.
Agatha Poon captured the state of the cloud at the end of her presentation quite well:
“Make no mistake, cloud services are still evolving”