Be There for ‘Cloud Computing & Beyond’ Event Oct. 1

The Station will make a personal appearance tomorrow, Oct. 1, at a special daylong SDForum conference on “Cloud Computing and Beyond: The Web Grows Up (Finally),” to be held from 9 a.m. to 5:15 p.m. at the Network Meeting Center, Tasman and Great America Parkway, in Santa Clara, Calif. If you happen to be in the neighborhood, want to learn a lot of cool new ideas and perspectives, and want some free food and drinks, be there.

You don’t need to register in advance. Just drive up to the free parking in the structure out behind the Santa Clara Convention Center and show up. You will be glad you did.

The exploding availability of computing resources “in the cloud” is transforming software development as much as any of the revolutions since computing’s infancy. This daylong event will address the issues and controversies surrounding cloud computing, discuss the technologies and risks involved with cloud computing, and enable attendees to explore what their company should do to take advantage of the ongoing Web revolution.

The Station was able to snag the excellent Forrester Research cloud computing/storage principal analyst, James Staten, to be the keynote speaker at 9 a.m.

Staten, an expert on x86 servers and server infrastructure, data center and server futures, cloud computing, and application-specific infrastructure trends and technologies, will discuss “What Cloud Computing Can and Cannot Do.” Staten is the author of the March 2008 Forrester report, “Is Cloud Computing Ready for the Enterprise?”

My panel at 12:15 p.m. will examine where cloud computing is now and where it appears to be going in the next few years. We’ll have a colorfully named group of gentlemen: Rajen Sheth of Google, Trae Chancellor of Salesforce.com, Sanjog Gad of SAP, Daniel Druker of Intacct and Praful Shah of RingCentral.

These are all experienced IT professionals who work in the real world of grid/utility/cloud computing each day alongside customers and partners. We’ve talked beforehand; some really valuable trend information can be expected.

SDForum is a Silicon Valley professional educational group dedicated to being a source of information and education for the technology community. The Station is honored to be among the organizers of this event.

For more information and detail, go here. See you there!