SIIA All About the Cloud Event – brief report

I spent the last two days at the SIIA All About The Cloud Event in San Francisco – and as always it was a great event.  Some interesting insights this year that are worth sharing –

• Several panelists discussed how IDC’s estimates for cloud investments show that majority of revenue/opportunity is in private clouds.
• Bill McNee of Saugatuck Technology estimates that 40% of ISVs now are incorporating cloud delivery as part of their solution – those who don’t in next few years will be marginalized.
• Lots of discussion on how consumer trends are shaping enterprise needs and will demand cloud like ease of use similar to itunes or facebook or netflix.  Then today our IBM Chairman also remarked on this point – but didn’t exactly give it a ringing endorsement.   You can see some of his comments here. I tend to agree with him – and in many ways this “consumerization” theme rings hollow to me the same way the dot.com hype did back in the late 1990s.
• Despite all the buzz about cloud business models, most of the press panelists couldn’t name a consumer cloud provider making $ other than Google, Facebook, and Netflix.

It was also great to see that Feyzi Fatehi of Corent Technolgy – one of our best IBM cloud partners – was on one of the key panels at the event.

While I was at the event, I had the change to spend some time with Navisite – one of our newest cloud partners.  They have a great new cloud offering they announced a bit ago – the Navicloud – which is a great new offering for enterprise class cloud capabilities.

Let me know what you think – especially on the consumerization theme that’s been emerging…..