Cloud computing is growing up fast, so we’ve decided to bring together some of the smartest people we can for our next TechCrunch Roundtable: Whose Cloud Is It Anyway? The event and networking reception will take place on Friday, February 27, between 3:00 and 6:30 PM at Microsoft’s Mountain View Conference Center, which holds 275 people. Tickets are $75 and are on sale now.
The cloud is many things to many people. It is a a data center in the sky, a platform for a new breed of enterprise apps, a way to bring Web-scale computing to businesses small and large.
But are we on the verge of a new set of platform wars that will make the Windows Vs. Mac war look like Tiddlywinks? Or will all the different cloud platforms which are emerging create an interwoven fabric of Web applications that draw from each cloud as is convenient? Mission critical apps are moving to the cloud. In fact, entire industries are being built on cloud computing infrastructure.
Yet as both consumer and enterprise apps move to the cloud, they start to look more and more alike. They also begin to take on social features. What does a social enterprise app look like?
To help us explore these questions we’ll have on hand:
Roundtable Discussion
Marc Benioff, CEO, Salesforce.com
Vic Gundotra, VP Engineering, Google
Amitabh Srivastava, Corporate VP, Windows Azure
Lew Tucker, CTO, Cloud Computing, Sun Microsystems
Scott Dietzen, SVP Communications Products, Yahoo
Paul Buchheit, Co-founder, FriendFeed; creator of Gmail
Additional speakers to be announced next week, stay tuned
Roundtable Moderators:
Erick Schonfeld, co-editor TechCrunch
Steve Gillmor, editor TechCrunchIT
The format of the event will be similar to the Android Vs. iPhone Roundtable we did last August, but with fewer speakers. The Roundtable will be preceded by product pitches from three to five companies (products or startups that actually launch at the event will receive extra consideration, but it is not a requirement).
If you have a cloud computing startup or enterprise Web app ready to launch on February 27th and would like to give a demo, send a brief pitch to steve [at] techcrunch [dot] com.
After the product pitches and the roundtable, there will be a reception where we will have additional demo tables and sponsor packages for a select number of enterprising sponsors. Those interested in sponsoring the event should contact our CEO Heather Harde by emailing heather [at] techcrunch [dot] com.
What – no one from Amazon?
Ah – missed this line (or was is just added?) : “Additional speakers to be announced next week, stay tuned”
yeah…that’s what I thought too…. funny…
may its too far for Amazon.com to fly all the way from Seattle to Mountain view… or may be its rivalry…I guess we will never no.
http://www.livbit.com
will you guys be casting this over the web?
will you be doing a webcast for those who cannot attend?
No Amazon!!!
Wow…what an omission!
yah, i have to agree – amazon is the future of the cloud 100% — not sure how you can talk about the future without them…
the whole ecosystem is changing based on the ability to create and scale web-apps on their platform. it totally changes development and growth patterns.
All I can say right now is that this is not a complete list. In fact, I just updated it with Amitabh Srivastava, Corporate VP, Windows Azure. As we get more confirmations, we’ll add them.
How much of your time will be for this enormous panel of yours. You’re looking at 8 people + 2 moderators? Even with limited introductory time for each speaker, you’re looking at very little substantive time, unless you use the whole 3+ hours…
mmmm…. new bread….
Can’t believe you have Sun, who has nothing and leave out Amazon. Silly.
that’s good idea.
thanks
Well a discussion around cloud Computing without including Cisco at the table hmm.
Awesome… can’t wait!
cool! very relevant to what we are doing and plan on attending!
Any live broadcast of the event for long distance bloggers?
It would be good to have some people who build the network that the cloud works on:
AT&T, Verizon, Sprint, Comcast, Cox
What about the companies that provide the equipment?
Cisco, Juniper, HP, Dell? You’ve got Sun, which is a good start here.
Thos guys you invited are a JOKE
Right now the only viable cloud computing offer is AMAZON.
Microsoft can’t even keep their own SHlT running..so what they are doing here is a puzzle to me.
Google’s cloud offerings are mediocre at best and sales force is too limited.
Do you homework Erick… and you’ll find that you need
AMAZON
IBM
and a few others.
If you were smart I’d also invite the GoGRID guys and throw a bone to your advertisers..they seem to have their shit together too…
For example having a guy on that claims fame to Vista… is just not a very compelling reason to tune into this.
SO PLEASE START MATTERING and invite the real players too
here in England, we have an expression: “What a knob”, which sounds remarkably similar to Name.
I’m trying to recall when the last time Hotmail went down was. And I quite clearly recall a number of Amazon outages last year.
I don’t see anyone who’s claim to fame there is Vista. Perhaps you confused that with Azure, which seems to be regarded as a terrific cloud computing infrastructure.
Go back under your little bridge you Troll and leave the comments to people who know what their talking about not people who’ve had 6 cups of coffee in their mom’s basement.
Mike-
If you’d understand something about this, and if you’d actually do your research, you wouldn’t leave comments like that. It is obvious that you are a bit slow to grasp more complicated things, so allow me to help you understand things – so you can comprehend the stupidity of your post in it’s full extent.
1-First Microsoft runs a few more things then just HOTMAIL. Here are some facts.
Microsoft main site was down Jan 26th, 2009, 11:33 GMT. Then MS download was down January 8th 2009. Also MSN was down Oct. 4th 2008, MS connect was down a few times last year. Also a variety of attacks brought down selected services. And most of the times they were down for a full day or more.
I SUGGEST YOU START LEARNING HOW TO USE A SEARCH ENGINE.
2 Amazon Outages – We are talking about the cloud computing offerings (AWS) not the book ordering. And yes they had a few outages.. but they were fixed within an hour or two. If you look at the complexities and services they offer, they are the only game in town regarding cloud computing at the moment.
3 Vista’s claim to fame. Well same thing if you’d take your head out of your back end you’d be able to see the light and smell the fresh air, before leaving comments that just show how ignorant you are.
If you click on Vic’s profile (the Gmail guy) in the article you’d learn that “In Microsoft, he was responsible for variety of products…., including ….Vista”.
I SUGGEST YOU START LEARNING ABOUT HYPERLINKS, WHEN SOMETHING GETS UNDERLINED WHEN YOU MOVE YOUR MOUSE OVER YOU CAN CLICK ON IT. YOU SHOULD TRY IT MAKES FOR A MUCH BETTER INTERNET EXPERIENCE.
Oh and while you’re at it, why don’t you show us on the teddy bear where they touched you when you were young…
I’m not for or against AWS, but an outage of an hour or two is a huge problem when you’re building a professional offering. Try turning to your customers and saying “sorry, it’s not us, it’s Amazon”. They aren’t customers for long.
Let me know if you want to get Cisco involved. There are some very qualified people available to talk about the network’s role in cloud computing and the “Interloud”.
at least tell us you tried to invite Amazon, Microsoft, heck even maybe some DoD folks
Have you guys extended an offer to anyone at Mosso? RackSpace’s cloud offering is pretty nice. We are using it in combination with Amazon AWS.
Mosso is interesting because they have sort of combined cloud service with web hosting. So it’s not as bare-metal as EC2, but you get the benefits of an inexpensive, scaling website across a huge cluster.
They’re also competing with Amazon S3 with an offering, Amazon’s CDN with an offering, and have something in beta to compete more directly with EC2. I think they’re worth talking to.
MGZ
Surprising to me that their is no Amazon rep. Aren’t they the obvious player here?
What about VMware/Trango? They are giving freedom to applications on mobile phones. Then, what about the VDC-OS (Virtual Datacenter OS) and the Cloud Computing initiatives? If anyone was going to succeed, it should be the company with the software that is already publicly available.
Next, I would think Cisco and Intel would be on the list.
Lastly, a company like EMC who can ensure teh data exists in two places.
You absolutely need to include Charles Jennings on your panel. He was one of the founders of TRUSTe, founded Geotrust and is currently heading up Swan Island Networks (www.swanisland,net). I know, never heard of him or this company but trust me – look him up and call him. You will thank me.
Let me describe cloud
” a term used by bloggers like Mike A to earn $75 off market pitches from various vendors… wake up… this should be free and if you pay 75 for this crap… you’ve just been ripped off….”
Webcast???
for those yearning for Amazon, here’s a presentation by Werner Vogels on cloud computing:
http://www.scri...zon-asw-s3-ec2/
funny, and EMC too:
http://www.scri...-opportunities/
and IBM:
http://www.scri...-of-the-future/
I couldn’t find Microsoft, Intel or Cisco, but a few good videos on what Amazon, EMC & IBM are doing.
Rackspace’s Mosso looks interesting.
Also anyone looked into http://www.slicehost.com ?
What about Appirio? You guys did a story on them last week about their Facebook viral recruiting/marketing app that connects SFDC and Facebook. They are connecting a bunch of these PaaS’s together (Amazon, Salesforce.com, Google). I think they would definitely have an interesting perspective to add to the roundtable.
Cisco has nothing to do with the cloud. In fact, the Cloud is the single most threatening technology to stare down Cisco in 15 years. I’m struggling to understand how you can claim any of these players are cloud players. You guys really wiffed on this one.
re: “the Cloud is the single most threatening technology to stare down Cisco in 15 years.”
Really? Behind everything we label “virtual” there is something physical powering it. For the cloud it’s called infrastructure. Last I looked Cisco was playing a pretty big role and making quite a bit of money in infrastructure. And my guess is Cisco gets paid for their gear whether or not Amazon, et al convinces you and me to rent it as a service.