Next week sees my friend Krishnan Subramanian and I put on the Cloud 2020 Summit in Vegas. The summit is an exclusive look at the future of cloud infrastructure – it’s going to bring together pundits, vendors and enterprise buyers to postulate on where the industry is going. We’ve spent the past week or two working out the agenda and have just finalized it (in as much as anything for an event is “final”).

I’m really looking forward to the event and, due to some requests from the community, we’ve been able to free up a few more places – if you’re in Vegas next week for either Interop or EMCWorld, and you’d like to come along – fill out the application form here.

I’m looking forward to meeting up and discussing this stuff with fiends old and new – the agenda (as it stands today) is copied below to whet your appetite.

0935-0945 Housekeeping: MC James Urquhart

Track 1: The Data Center

0945-1015 Keynote: Data center design, efficiency and sustainability – Mark Thiele

The data center as an extension of the ability to deliver IT services is also part of the greater “system” that is your IT. All your measures for operating model performance, for delivering manageable capacity and sustainable cost effective operations will be determined to a large extent by the quality and capability of your data center strategy. The pressure of rapidly changing business models combined with increased demand for IT solutions will have a much more dramatic effect on your data center decisions in 2020, than they do even today.

1015-1045 Keynote: Infrastructure for data-centric world  – Val Bercovici

In this talk, Val will review the four data-centric dimensions of disruption to the infrastructure industry.  New trends covered will include software-defined data management, virtual storage controllers, storage capacity futures, parallel workloads, storage-class memories and next-gen interconnects.  Val will introduce the relevance of these important trends as well as their inter-relationships.  Some of these notions will challenge the conventional wisdom of infrastructure possibilities, making Val’s talk often provocative and highly engaging.

Track 2: The Core Components – Compute, Storage and Network

1045-1115 Panel: Operating Systems of the Future – Cloud Stacks

Moderator – Josh Sanderson
Panelists – Jared Wray – Tier3, Andy Knosp – Eucalyptus, Rodrigo Flores – Cisco

Beyond the obvious war of words between the various open and proprietary cloud operating systems, few people are looking far enough into the future to predict how the landscape will look down the line.

1115-1315 Lunch and Switch SuperNAP Tour

1315-1400 Panel: Programmable Infrastructure

Moderator – Larry Carvalho
Panelists – Jonathan Murray – WMG, Pete Johnson – ProfitBricks, George Reese – enStratius, Randy Bias – CloudScaling

Recent years have seen a massive amount of innovation that drives higher densities from chips. Alongside this we’ve seen a move to low-power designs that deliver on the commodity hardware promise.

1400-1430 Keynote: The Future of HyperScale Datacenters – Agility Thru Disaggregation – Jay Kyathsandra, Intel

Today’s hyper scale customers need for increased capacity, flexible  architecture and lower total cost of ownership  is driving the need  to “re-architect” the traditional platforms and move towards aggregation at the “Rack as a system”.  In this session you will hear about the industry trends extending beyond the traditional server by  innovating across  compute, network and storage platforms, optimized for rack scale architecture to meet a broad range of end user needs and OEM implementations.

1430-1445 Open Discussion on Session Topic

1445-1515 Afternoon Tea

Track 3: Controlling our Heterogeneous Future

1515-1545 Panel: Automation and Cloud – DevOps as a Unifier

Moderator – Sam Charrington
Panelists – Duncan Johnston-Watt – Cloudsoft, Jeff Sussna – Ingineering.IT, Tim Prendergast – Adobe IT

As we increasingly move to a services world with large scale automation, organizational needs demand varying levels of control and abstraction. DevOps is slowly gaining traction trying to meet the diverse needs of a large enterprise. In this session, we will discuss how DevOps is helping organizations and the various use cases.

1545-1600 Open Discussion on Session Topic

Track 4: The Economics – Economics of Infrastructure Services

1600-1630 Panel: The Economics and Use Case of Federated Clouds

Moderator – Michael Ducy
Panelists – John Cowan – 6Fusion, James Mitchell – Strategic Blue, Kosten Metreweli – OnApp

With various open source and proprietary infrastructure platforms in the market, we are seeing more and more cloud providers offering infrastructure services. But it goes against conventional wisdom that there will be handful of providers offering services. In this panel, we will try to make some sense in terms of economics of how it is going to play out and also discuss some use cases around the idea.

1630-1700 Keynote: Beyond Cloudonomics – Mega Trends – Joe Weinman

Joe will address the debate on the business value of IT, as well as whether IT—including the cloud—is just “plumbing” or can be strategic.  How can cloud computing—and related technologies such as big data and mobility—contribute to business strategy?  Joe argues that there are four major ways: operational excellence, product and service leadership, customer intimacy, and accelerated innovation.  Joe will also overview his latest research on the economics of network intelligence, including software-defined networks.

1700-1715 Open Discussion on Session Topic

Ben Kepes

Ben Kepes is a technology evangelist, an investor, a commentator and a business adviser. Ben covers the convergence of technology, mobile, ubiquity and agility, all enabled by the Cloud. His areas of interest extend to enterprise software, software integration, financial/accounting software, platforms and infrastructure as well as articulating technology simply for everyday users.

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