Sessions at CloudBeat 2011 on Thursday 1st December

An important area to cover in the move to the cloud is that of the underlying systems that ensure cloud solutions are available to end users – one of the most important of those services is that of monitoring. In this session NewRelic will talk of the new, application-centric delivery model for IT and the challenges it brings for monitoring. They will discuss the different areas that organizations need visibility into to ensure performance.

Rick Schultz from Oracle will argue that despite what might sound good at a conceptual level, organizations need to maximize the investments they already have in IT assets and cannot be lumped into a “one size fits all” point of view. He will details the different IT staffing levels and skills; different financial models and budgets; different data center capacity, etc. and set out how organizations can find a path to get from their existing setup to one that drives better business benefits for the organization. He will do so while describing what Oracle sees as the cloud adoption trend for existing large enterprises.

Like a lot of companies, helpdesk system provider Zendesk needed a way to integrate telephony with their product offering. Unlike many companies, Zendesk probably could have gone out and built the capability for themselves. But they didn’t. Instead, they worked with cloud communications company Twilio to build the necessary functionality. Twilio recognises that telephony is a feature of a broader customer system, rather than a compelling product in its own right. As such, their API-based model is specifically designed to make it as easy as possible to incorporate voice communications into something else, whether that’s a customer helpdesk, an event booking system, or the telephone system of a large enterprise. Join Zendesk and Twilio to learn more about this use case, and to understand the growing importance of the API in the IT systems of tomorrow.

Eloqua has achieved a 54% CAGR the last 5 years by using the cloud to manage the rapid growth of their business. Eloqua uses Netsuite for its global accounting and time management; salesforce.com for CRM, Service Cloud, and SFA; Successfactors for performance reviews; Taleo for recruiting; Cornerstone Ondemand for training/education; Echosign for contract processing; ADP for payroll; github for software version control; Adobe Connect and Citrix Online for web conferencing; On24 for live web events; box.net for document collaboration; cvent for event planning; and Eloqua for marketing automation and revenue performance management. These SaaS products enable Eloqua to have access to great software, with fast time to value, at affordable prices. These SaaS offerings are all department enabled — thus allowing Eloqua to maintain a small IT staff. The next generation of SaaS products will allow collaboration between applications with no IT or expensive integration projects required. The next generation will also allow for Mobile access and Social Media integration. This next generation is called SaaS 2.0. Payne can talk knowledgeably about this incredible transformation taking place in software.

When faced with the challenge of collaborating on scientific documents with colleagues around the world and working more effectively with team members, other UK government departments, partners and stakeholders, the Met Office turned to Huddle. It wasn’t long before Huddle had replaced SharePoint for project management, task management and file sharing. Huddle is now used by 70% of central government departments. Being cloud-based, Huddle enables the Met Office to support mobile working so that staff can securely edit and comment on documents on the move. Files can also be accessed securely on and off site to facilitate training. The Met Office is the UK’s National Weather Service. Employing more than 1,800 people around the world, it has a long history of weather forecasting and has been working in the area of climate change for the more than two decades. Michaela Drummond will discuss how the cloud has played a vital role in the organization’s internal and external communications with teams working with the Rwanda Meteorological Service. Michaela will cover the main drivers for moving to the cloud, how the change was implemented, and the major benefits experienced since the Met Office made the leap.

2011 has seen the convergence of several technological advances with an acceptance of new ways of work, all culminating in a new trend dubbed “cloud commuting”. Phones and tablets have increased their functionality significantly, while maintaining ease of use, all at low prices and with solid vendor eco-systems. This includes applications for just about anything (including productivity apps, print from anywhere services , or tablet BI tools). Add to that the advancements made in cloud services from file sharing to mobile enterprise (location based) solutions and just about every software vendor. Combine this with mass acceptance and adoption of a mobile workforce, whether it’s simply working from the road, or fully telecommuting, and you have the ingredients for a huge new trend, cloud commuting. We’ll discuss this convergence, the larger vendor ecosystem, and strategies for implementing this in environments from small to enterprise sized companies. 2012 is the year of Cloud Commuting, as people work from their homes in virtually any city or even any country.

The cloud has transformed the way that Enterprises develop software solutions for themselves. By investigating some enterprise case studies we show how this new approach is driving efficiencies.

The customer has more power today than ever before – with a lone voice able to build a groundswell of sentiment about a brand. World monitoring tools that allow businesses to see what people are saying about them are increasingly important. This sesssion will discuss how a new generation of companies are giving enterprises insight into what their customers, and the world at large, thinks.

From cloud-based file storage to enterprise storage arrays and the latest solid state innovations, we are presented with a dizzying number of options when selecting the right place to keep our data. Some are characterized as “cheap,” others “easy” and still others “fast,” but it is proving increasingly difficult to seriously examine the available options to arrive at the rather more elusive “best.” There is, of course, no single answer to “best,” but there are a common set of criteria that can be evaluated in order to reach the most sensible decision for your particular circumstances. How much data are you storing, how often does it change, what does your current infrastructure look like, etc. In this panel, sponsored by Scality, startup companies representing very different aspects of the storage market will come together to shed light upon the issues… and the opportunities. Aided by real numbers on the cost of storage, the panel will get past the hype and the traditionally simple polarisation of different storage technologies to answer the difficult questions and to admit that, sometimes, their particular product may not be “best” for you.

RehabCare is a health services company that was recently acquired by $5 billion company public Kindred Healthcare. While IT spending was inline with industry averages, CIO Dick Escue knew he could get more bang for his buck. Learn how RehabCare ripped out it’s legacy system to enable mobile applications for its 10,000 mobile workers. Escue will also discuss why he believes that the Socialization of IT is even more inevitable than the Consumerization of IT.

MarketScout is a product that allows decision makers to achieve competitive advantage by aggregating, integrating and visualising economic and business information about their competitors, suppliers, customers and peers. This case study highlights the means by which an innovative startup can leverage cloud technology, specifically the Heroku platform, to focus on form and function, while allowing the platform to implicitly cater for non-functional aspects of delivery. We’ll explore the way in which the platform was used initially, the hurdles that have surfaced and been overcome, the real world experience of leveraging multi-tenancy and the extensible modularity offered by Heroku’s rich “addon” ecosystem. A year in the evolution of MarketScout is positioned beside that of Heroku, showing the correlation between supply and demand, and the way in which the newer polyglot offering of Heroku will affect the future of this audacious little venture.

10 companies chosen from a pool over over 70, will battle it out onstage to see who’s product/service is leveraging the cloud in the most disruptive way. They’ll each have four minutes to showcase their technologies, and our team of judges — made up of industry experts, venture capitalists and actual enterprise customers — will provide thorough feedback and ultimately determine one winner. The 5 companies in round 1 are Gigaspaces, myERP, OfficeDrop, Oxygen Cloud, and Talkdesk.

The 5 companies in round 2 are VeaMea, VirtualSharp Software, Visier, Xiimo, and Zadara Storage.

Faced with aging infrastructure and expecting significant budget pressures, pharmaceutical company Amylin embraced cloud computing to ensure that IT kept up with the needs of the business. Many other companies have done the same, but the foundations for this shift were laid at Amylin as far back as 2008. CIO Steve Phillpott discusses the work of the change management needed across the business to support the shift. Then he delves deeply into the analysis his team continues to conduct to help them understand where different applications should most effectively run.

While there has been a massive emergence of both open source and proprietary cloud platforms launched in the last year, this session will focus on the creation, adoption and exit of one of the most broadly distributed platforms in the space. Some of the most successful clouds in production today run on CloudStack, including Zynga, GoDaddy, KT and Edmunds.com. Hear from Peder Ulander about Cloud.com’s transition from startup to cloud powerhouse with their recent acquisition by Citrix and how Emil Ndreu transformed Edmunds.com with CloudStack, the leading open source platform for building large scale clouds.