Our roundtable on cloud computing is coming up next week. (Get tickets here via Eventbrite: $75 each based on availability). In addition to the previously announced speakers, I am happy to announce a few more very special participants: Amazon’s chief technology officer Werner Vogels, Ning CEO Gina Bianchini, Facebook VP of Engineering Mike Schroepfer, and Jon Engates, CTO of Rackspace.
An event on cloud computing wouldn’t be the same without Amazon, which is becoming the computing infrastructure of more and more startups through its various Amazon Web Services (winner of this year’s Crunchies Award in the enterprise category). And Rackspace, through its Mosso subsidiary, is diving headfirst into the business as well. But we also wanted to hear from consumer-facing companies such as Facebook and Ning that are creating their own cloud platforms. What happens when all of these various cloud platforms meet in sky? And how does the similarity in their back-ends result in similar applications for users, whether they be consumers or enterprise users? Do enterprise apps need to become more social, or is that simply a frivolous pursuit?
These questions and more will be put to everyone on the roundtable, which will be preceded by five cloud computing enterprise product demos which will be evaluated by a panel of judges TechCrunch50-style. We got so many good candidates we decided to expand the demo session and move the event up a half hour earlier.
There will also be a networking party afterward where more companies will be giving product demos. We couldn’t do this without our sponsors Microsoft and Ribbit. To find out about how to become a sponsor or get a demo table please email Jeanne Logozzo or Heather Harde.
Below is the complete list of Roundtable Participants
Roundtable Discussion
Werner Vogels, CTO, Amazon
Mike Schroepfer, VP of Engineering, Facebook
Gina Bianchini, CEO, Ning
John Engates, CTO, Rackspace
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
Roundtable Moderators:
Erick Schonfeld, co-editor TechCrunch
Steve Gillmor, editor TechCrunchIT
Date: Friday, February 27, 2:30 – 6:30 pm
Location: Microsoft Mountain View Conference Center
1065 La Avenida St
Building 1
Galileo Auditorium
Mountain View, CA 94043
(more info here).
*Psst – Werner Vogels is at Amazon, not Facebook
*
fixed. I’m blaming that one on no sleep due my new one-week old baby.
congrats!
Congratulations on the new baby, It must’ve been tough writing and the baby crying. Goodluck
TechFilipino
What Bill said
How about getting some of the smaller players like http://www.gogrid.com/ to participate?
Seems like that would be more interesting than hearing from Ning or Facebook which at this point, as far as I know, don’t have much to do with cloud computing.
Facebook and Ning are there equally for what they can teach the other players about social apps. One topic of discussion will be how cloud computing makes new apps possible, and how these apps are starting to look very similar whether they are enterprise or consumer.
I agree, is this cloud computing or social networking? Another great small cloud computing company is http://www.newservers.com.
I don’t know about Facebook, but Ning before last October(when they shut down source code access and external APIs) used to offer a programmable cloud platform to run hosted web applications too. Every Ning account used to come with sftp and webdav access to a remote sandboxed PHP environment with access to their APIs, which included a scalable non-relational datastore, much like what Google AppEngine and Amazon SimpleDB offers today.
So I believe they do have the experience of offering distributed and programmable cloud computing web platforms even though that offer is currently closed for the general public AFAIK their main product (the customizable social network) is built to run on top of this platform (formerly referenced as the Ning Platform) and all their 850k+ networks still runs on top of this same architecture that used to be open for everyone interested in programming for more than 2 years (the social network application source code was even released as open source Apache 2 licensed, and I am sure there are copies of it still online).
I have built some apps on the Ning cloud myself, the most popular being http://cchits.org, a digg-like website for creative commons music tracks
So, yes, all this companies one way or another are working on very similar problems and I think this Roundtable can be very good to bring attention for the issues they have faced or are still facing and what solutions are being developed.
I only wish Ning’s CTO or some other more technical person was invited too for the table, since Gina might not be the best person to discuss all the developer topics that are of interest in their cloud
With the level of scale required to run sites like ning and facebook, they’re more then likely running highly tuned virtualized environments. Just because they are a SaaS provider and not a PaaS / Cloud Hosting provider, doesn’t mean they’re not on top of the virtualization game..
Why is Ning here? Oh and did you realize that Ning is FUNDED with more money than most traditional public media companies are now worth
To find the reason behind Nings extra funding, start snooping around adult related forums in the SouthWest lol
Just a bunch of horny geeks looking for a better way to make a self moderated community.
We’ll be there!
I still don’t see a showing from real cloud players like VMware. The industry already recognizes the platform…
VMware infrastructure has been named the “Best Overall Cloud Product” and “Best Cloud Platform” at the inaugural Cloud Computing Conference & Expo Show Awards
Is TechCrunch talking about a “Cloud” or are you thinking about a distributed or “Grid” computing solution?
This is a great event! Congratulations are early as now!
Very exciting that TechCrunch is hosting this.
We’ll have a bunch of Intuit Partner Platform team members there and look forward to participating.
Oh, and I think it’s our cloud btw
Is there any webex?
Wish I could fly over to join the fun
“Friday, February 27, 2009 from 3:00 PM – 6:30 PM (PT)”
Most people that have a job find themselves at work at that exact time.
I would love to see what cloud computing can do in the internet and mobile banking domains. I do not see the time consuming and expensive customisation required in both cases being very tenable for much longer- in fact that may be one reason for mobile banking not taking off as much as it should. There should be banks banding together and procuring services off the cloud- easier said than done, but doable, esp for local banks in Asia that are still up and running.
I would also like to see any potential interfacing between social networks and mobile banking software. For example, can a person open his or her bank account through his or her facebook account? Can Facebook become an additional touchpoint to access your bank? If you are a overseas worker, can you use your friendster account to remit money home? Again, lots of issues will arise on API interfacing, security, and so on- but if you believe it can be done, it can be done. It would be incredible if the explosions in social media networks and mobile commerce run on 2 parallel tracks and never meet.
what’s gina doing on the panel? a marketing ceo that knows nothing about technology whose company has almost nothing to do with real cloud services…
gina is there for the glamor quotient.
From a consumer/SOHO perspective, is there any chance you can ask about Rackspace’s plans for their acquisition of Jungle Disk? It’s a given that Jungle Disk will add support for Mosso Cloud Files, but will support for Amazon S3 also be phased out?
Any info on future Jungle Disk developments would also be welcome — ie. having public access/sharing, syncing (instead of just backing up), etc.
P.S. I wish I can combine the best features of online sharing/sync services such as Dropbox, Syncplicity, SugarSync, etc, with Jungle Disk (and having my own S3 account)!
http://forum.ju...p?p=42271#42271
great moment…
guys, CloudBerry lab is going to release an online backup product powered by S3 soon and we are going to focus to S3 exclusively as we believe only being very focus on a single platform can we provide an outstanding solution. If you want to sign-up for beta go to http://cloudberrydrive.com/ and check out our other free products
guys, CloudBerry lab is going to release an online backup product powered by S3 soon and we are going to focus to S3 exclusively as we believe only being very focus on a single platform can we provide an outstanding solution. If you want to sign-up for beta go to our website and check out our other free products
Before there was techcrunch, there was Akamai.
Akamai was the first real business that provided cloud to businesses. Call it CDN, but in reality, they were (maybe still are) the largest cloud provider out there.
iT’s the Lord Jesus Christ’s Cloud
Book of Acts Chapter 1
King James 1611 Only!
Sweet line up there. Congrats on pulling them in, and good luck with the show.
Before there was techcrunch, there was Akamai