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SANTA CLARA, Calif.—The Station just returned from spending the middle part of a sunny Silicon Valley Friday at an SD Forum conference on “Shaping the New Age of Application Development” here at TechMart, right across the street from Marriott’s Great America. Not surprisingly, much of the discussion revolved around development for cloud computing—and storage for cloud computing, because all that data being collected has to have a home somewhere.
Some excellent speakers either gave keynotes (Forrest Principal Analyst James Staten and Salesforce.com Director of Social Networking Alliances & Product Strategy Clara Shih) or participated in panel discussions (see the list here).
The panel The Station moderated, titled “Roles of the Infrastructure in the Cloud,” featured three very knowledgeable guys: Hamid Pirahesh, IBM fellow and director of IBM’s Database Technology Institute; Randy Bias, GoGrid VP of Technology Strategy; and Ken Oestreich, Egenera VP of Product Marketing. (No, Ken’s name isn’t pronounced like the big bird; it’s “Oh-stryche.”)
A near-full-capacity room heard some valuable inside information from people who work daily on the front lines in this burgeoning new sector. A video of the discussion was made; check out the SD Forum site to find it.
Hamid offered a clear definition of the different layers of infrastructure in a typical cloud computing model. Randy said that despite all the talk about so-called “unlimited storage capacities” in the cloud, storage management is still extremely important for it all to work the way it’s supposed to work. Ken ventured the notion that in many ways, cloud computing is simply a fancy evolution of the outsourcing model.
That’s not the tenth of it, but it’s all we have for now here in this blog. The conference continues for half the day tomorrow (April 18 at TechMart), should you decide at the last minute you want go. I would, if I didn’t have previous plans. Have a great weekend!