Cloud Slam'12

Below is an outline of Cloud Slam'12 Tracks and Topics.

Next Generation Cloud Platform (The Road to PaaS)

Last year we observed a growing number of cloud platforms popping up on a surface, while existing platforms are maturing and undergoing dramatic change in recent months, including a focus on multi-language support, multi-cloud deployment capabilities and common developer services. This track will examine the transformation of platform services from one of the greatest sources of cloud lock-in to one of the most open and flexible approaches to leveraging infrastructure services.

Telcos, Data Centers and The Cloud

As businesses outgrowing their enterprise data center capacity, while having time and budget constraints, that limit business agility, many executives decide to switch to the cloud for extreme scale, flexibility, availability and global deployment to name a few. How do you adapt to this job-slashing trend? Pushing the ball to the cloud provider doesn’t remove the responsibility to understand how cloud infrastructure is built, grown and operated at scale. Meet data center engineering companies who bring their expertise to help you build or grow your cloud infrastructure up to Tier 1/Tier 2 levels.

Key areas that will be discussed in this track include:
• Datacenter Economics
• Efficiency and Greener Cloud Computing
• New Architecture for Networking
• Service Efficiency Metric Proposal (Useful Work Metric)

Business In The Cloud

This track covers applications for use across business and industry areas to help increase knowledge of what is possible from sales and marketing, customer and contact centers, supply chain of product and services, financials, human resources to specific areas across business including analytics, business intelligence, business process management, location intelligence, operational intelligence, information and data to business focused collaboration.

Big Data and Cloud (Information Growth)

Sighted as one of the anchor topics to watch out for in 2012, this track will look at the pace of digital information created and transmitted over the Internet, phone networks, and airwaves which has been rapidly increasing year over year. The Digital Universe is expected to double in size every 18 months. While the pace of digital information increased, IT budgets declined, thus creating an even larger divide between the amount of information generated and the amount of IT resources purchased and deployed to manage it. This dynamic further validates the demand for tools and techniques (e.g. virtualization, deduplication and other data reduction technologies, etc) geared specifically to managing more with less.

VARs and the Cloud

As more companies adopt cloud-based systems, opportunities to resell software and hardware are diminishing. Cloud changes the way software is being procured, implemented and methods of training. Join your peers to learn and share knowledge of adapting current strategies to compete in coming time.

Sales and Marketing for Cloud Products and Services

This track focuses on the challenges and concerns of B2B sales and marketing executives selling cloud products and services. You'll learn how to create a sales process ruled by metrics and measurement, how internal teams can collaborate to promote productivity and enhance the customer experience, ways to leverage technology to empower your team and and much more!

Managing Cloud Products Portfolio

A vital question in the product innovation battleground is, "How should corporations most effectively invest their R&D and new product development resources?" That is what portfolio management is all about: resource allocation to achieve corporate product innovation objectives.

Today's new product projects decide tomorrow's product/market profile of the firm. An estimated 50% of a firm's current sales come from new products introduced in the market within the previous five years. Much like stock market portfolio managers, senior executives who optimize their R&D investments have a much better opportunity of winning in the long run. But how do winning companies manage their R&D and product innovation portfolios to achieve higher returns from their investments?

In this track, we will look at how Portfolio management for new products, can aid in the dynamic decision process wherein the list of active new products and R&D projects is constantly revised.

Enterprise content management

This track will explore integration of enterprise content management with the cloud in the need of production efficiencies, findable content, reduced time-to-market, risk mitigation and compliance. as well as developing enterprise content strategies. Learn how to capture, search, and collaborate on documents with full library services and life-cycle management, on a unified, robust repository.

Cloud Use Cases

Learn about experiences transitioning traditional IT resources into the cloud, efforts to use the cloud to support business processes that are presently supported by traditional IT. Usage/ industry focus such as application to and lessons learned from use in Public & Government sectors, institutional and / or retail financial businesses, life sciences, manufacturing, retail, medicine, pharmaceutical, etc. Features real world use-cases showcasing where and how the cloud has been used to improve operational efficiencies, whilst maintaining lower total cost of ownership.

Cloud Best Practices

This track discusses real world experiences, applied thought leadership propositions realizing best practices from business owner perspective. Learn from tried and tested cloud methodologies, avoid common pitfalls, and optimize your move to embrace the cloud.

Unified Communication & Collaboration

Consumerization of the enterprise and new cloud solutions are the driving the evolution of corporate communications. We will address the state of business communications today and how innovation is being driven by corporate and consumer needs. Rapid change in mobile communications and the evolution of rich UC functionality make for a logical, and economically compelling bridge for transitioning core enterprise communication to the cloud, sooner, rather than later. In this track we will explore the current UCC marketplace, discuss how UCC fits in the cloud world and define the cloud’s role in delivering next generation UCC cloud solutions.

Software Defined Networking for Cloud

Software defined networking separates out the router control plane responsible for what is in the routing table from the data plane that makes network packet routing decisions on the basis of what is actually in the routing table. Historically, both operations have been implemented monolithically in each router. SDN, separates these functions allowing networking equipment to compete in how efficiently they route packets on the basis of instructions from a separate SDN control plane. In this track we will look at emerging cababilites that introduce Networking as a Service, and how this effects leading conventional networking / communications providers, and what they can do to stay competative.

Social & Mobile

This track covers the latest technological advances in Social collaboration - integrating social collaboration tools into the workplace. We will look at how to enhance the user experience in the cloud - the same user-friendly experience in the cloud as is found in on premise tools. We will also explore the notion of seamless mobility – how the cloud provides the ability to communicate with anyone, at any time, through mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets

Cloud Solutions

This would be a technodrome of various solutions and technologies like highly scalable databases for cloud computing.

Government / Public Sector

This track will cover public sector cloud initiatives, ranging from U.S, UK, European Union and other government initiatives to move to the cloud. Specific topics will include: government and public sector organizations use of cloud computing (private cloud, public cloud, hybrids); policy implications in moving to the cloud; security and privacy requirements for government use of external cloud resources; and success stories. In addition, there will be presentations on Open Government, Crowd Sourcing, and Government Transparency Initiatives tied to cloud computing.

Compliance And Governance

If you face the problem of governance, risk management and policy, now you have to think about one more thing: cloud computing. Privacy, jurisdictions, legislation, data breaches and remedies, data exposure and liabilities in the cloud are all covered in this track.

Flexibility And Deliver Models

This track will delve into the benefits and pitfalls associated with private and public, hybrid and community cloud options.

Research, Findings and Outlook for 2012

This track will look at new ways in which Cloud is streamlining Research and driving next generational IT evolution. You will also hear from leading industry analysts who share findings, visions and strategies on future direction of Cloud.