Cloud Slam '12, May 31 2012. A personal view

One of the first nice impressions is to park your car in South San Francisco Convention Center at about 20 yards from the main entrance. Once inside no crowded registration booth, in less than a minute, one has the badge. This is small, but most quality cloud personalities and cloud  people are there.

Cloud Slam is already four years old, but it now started with an actual exhibition booth. There is nothing like  face to face meetings, as our Gigaom gurus observe.

Khazret Sapenov
Khazret Sapenov is soul of Cloud Slam. He comes from what I call the  Bohemian cloud movement from Toronto, Canada. This is an analogy to the Paris'  Montparnasse - which became famous at the beginning of the 20th century, referred to as les Années Folles (the Crazy Years), when it was the heart of intellectual and artistic life in Paris.

One of the other group members is  Reuven Cohen who founded Enomaly, now part of Virtustream and  has widely read cloud column in Forbes magazine

Reuven Cohen
 I sat next to Khazret in the presentation of Michael McCarthy, VP of Cloud Services at IBM. You can see his presentation on streaming live, day 2, 1:00 pm video. The first thing noticeable he said he was a 26 years IBM veteran. IBM still builds people's careers, in a classic way. When Michael joined IBM, Sun Micro was 3 years old, Google, Yahoo, Facebook and Salesforce.com did not exist yet. Now he was talking to an audience of self employed and startups. He admitted IBM is the not the only cloud technology available to IT world wide. They are open to 3rd parties. He subtly addressed CIO fears. Did you think about security? Do you know which applications to migrate to cloud first? He said IBM RC2 (Research Compatibility Cloud) tests all the applications recommended as cloud compatible
Michael McCarthy
IBM

 His slides gave a feeling of a solid offering, the sort of you-can't-go-wrong-with-IBM. He was talking about reducing costs. This is a classic IT TCO-reducing paradigm is not applicable, IMO,  in the cloud. In a cloud, one must increase the profits. Can IBM tell a customer how much money they loose each day they do not acquire a an IBM cloud solution? So if a service provider - corporate or public, spends double to make 4x profits, it makes sense, doesn't it? I notice the slides have an IBM copyright 2009. Perhaps a newer version (2012) of this presentation can add these important details

The most impressive presentation was from Michael Lock , VP Google Americas. It is memorable and decided to embed it here


Watch live streaming video from cloudslam at livestream.com
Michael Lock
Google wants to transfer the incomparable cloud consumer behavior to the corporate world. Why Apple is a great company? Because of Steve Jobs? To some extent, but they are great because they cater to the consumer IT. There are now more than 6 billion (billions!) mobile subscriptions and 1.2 billions are 3G subscriptions.There a total of 2.2 billions subscribers at higher speeds, so the mobile 3G plus are more than a half .The cloud is not about moving old applications to the cloud (which IBM considered as a centric issue), but about creating new applications taking the advantage of the social and other services available out  there. He gave an example of the Android translator. It enables us to make conversations  in languages we don't know, like say Spanish and Japanese. The app is only accurate 65% of the time now, but the human translation is accurate only 73% of the time Mr. Lock talks a language of the cloud that 90% in the audience identify  with. Corporate IT can not ignore all this massive ownerships of PDAs and Androids and iPad and iPhones. They will have to accommodate them.They have to assimilate in their businesses the productivity potential.

 To illustrate what Michael Lock says, I visited Cirrus Insight booth. You can manage SalesForce.com apps right from the familiar Gmail user interface on Google . Watch the video

Mike Hoskins
Michael Hoskins  is the GM of Pervasive Software Big Data , a new spin-off with only 15 people. He showed a demo of RushAnalyzer

Their product is an essence a  humanized tool for "normal" people  to use Hadoop (known for its' complexity)  for data extraction


Cloud Slam originated from Cloud Computing Group , founded and moderated by Khazret  and many of the concepts now widely adopted were first debated there. The group has over 161,000 members. So compared to other big cloud shows, It is the true blue-blood cloud "serial provocateurs" event.. It's the real thing, not the blah-blah-thing. 


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