From Grid to Cloud ...

Taking it to the Cloud!

So a large amount of vapour has passed under the bridge since my last post. As is always the case, good intentions are always overtaken by necessity, especially on Friday night! However, this week I am faced with a lengthy wait here at Heathrow's T5, not all the fault of the incumbent airline, but nevertheless, I am sitting here with some time to spare and so here goes!

In recent weeks I have attended several conferences, including ICT 2008, the European Commission's big research and development event in Lyon, City#Grid in London's Canary Wharf, one of the premier computing conferences for Financial Services, and other conferences more closely related to my day job in Knowledge Transfer, Innovate '08; IDC's Green IT, etc.. A couple of things which have been dominating recent discussions in the industry at all these venues. The Cloud! It seems that the developments in IT as a Service are beginning to really capture people's attention, there are challenges, but the recent economic downturn is again turning people's heads towards cost cutting activities and what sounds better than replacing agening equipment with shiny new objects in ths cloud? Well it's not as simple as that, but wait there is help at hand!

On January 14th and 15th, one of the projects with which I am associated, OGF-Europe, is holding an event called Cloudscape, A Workshop Exploring Cloud Computing and its Impact on Enterprise IT , in Brussels. This is a programme which has been put together by our Industry Expert Group, to bring focus on the developments in the atmosphere and allow for some genuine engagement between practitioners from both sides of the cloud. Chaired by Microsoft's Fabrizio Gagliardi, the conference will feature speakers such as Paul Strong from e-Bay and Kyriakos Baxevanidis, Acting Head of Unit Géant & eInfrastructures unit European Commission. Among several prestigious contributors. My colleagues from the Open Grid Forum (OGF), a distributed computing standards community, another organisation with which I now have strong links, will also be in town and we hope for an healthy exchange of ideas and experience with which to start the new year. If you are interested please register for the event here.

And for those wishing to bundle their trips together, the SSOKOU '09 conference is also being held in Brussels immediately preceding the Cloudscape event. This event is all about the future of services and knowledge utilities. Its being run by the European Community for Software and Services. Register here. Perhaps I'll see you there?

Ian

Labels: Cloudscape, OGF, OGF-Europe, SSOKOU '09

posted by Ian Osborne, Grid Man Now! @ 10:21 AM