Cloudbeat 2011 – What to Expect #cloudbeat

Looks like there is another Cloud conference that might be worth going to. This one, CloudBeat, is put on by the folks at VentureBeat and promises to be different from all the rest.  Their focus is on customer case studies. They’ve got seven lined up: Nexflix, Zynga, Huddle,  RehabCare, MarketScout, BestBuy and Eloqua. There is a start-up competition as well.

The Netflix and Zynga case studies have already gotten a lot of attention from users interested in how they can leverage solutions from Amazon and other IaaS providers. The others seem to be much more about SaaS and embracing cloud-friendly policies and procedures to reduce costs and be more efficient. For BestBuy:

Like a lot of enterprises, Best Buy found that its developers were routing around corporate IT in order to use storage and applications in the cloud. Rather than ban this, or look the other way, Best Buy worked to find effective ways to exploit the benefits of both cloud and on-premise infrastructure. Developers retained the flexibility that they’d gone outside the firewall to look for, and Best Buy was able to ensure that IT policies and procedures were adhered to, delivering clear benefits to all concerned.

The idea that policies and procedures (v. technology) are the main inhibitors to cloud adoption is one that resonates with a lot of people so this BestBuy case study should be very interesting.

As a player in the cloud space with vCider, to me, this represents the next phase of cloud adoption. The foundation services from large service providers like Salesforce, Amazon, Rackspace, etc are now complimented by a number of cloud services for management, integration, connectivity and security. Everything you need is there, with the remaining challenges primarily based in an organization’s ability and willingness to embrace them.