This week sees me on a whirlwind visit to the Bay Area where I’ll be speaking at a few different events as follows:

Tuesday – DeployCon

I’m really looking forward to the second edition of DeployCon – in the morning I’ll be moderating a panel with two of my favorite PaaS executives, Sinclair Schuller (the super smart and often outspoken CEO of Apprenda) and Bart Copeland (no less smart himself) CEO of ActiveState. The topic of our chat will be the Business Value of Private PaaS. It’s an area I’m particularly interested in – and am keen to dive in to the use cases and success stories that these two are seeing in the private PaaS space. If you’d like to come and attend the event, use discount code DCCOMP6.

Tuesday – Cloud Connect Executive Summit

Tuesday afternoon sees me jump ships (but stay in the same venue) over to the Cloud Connect executive summit where I’ll be running another session that is of real interest to me. My work as an angel investor, as well as startup adviser, alongside the advisory work I do with some VC firms, has me particularly interested in this session. The title of the panel is Finding the Next Cloud Opportunity and I’ll be joined by a who’s who of VCs and cloud executives including Ryan Floyd, the Founding General Partner of Storm Ventures, John O’Farrell a General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz, Salil Deshpande the Managing Director of Bain Capital Ventures and Rueven Cohen, SVP at Virtustream.

Wednesday – Cloud Connect

Wednesday afternoon sees me joining a panel looking specifically at SaaS applications for enterprises. While we’ll surely be doing a bit of name checking of applications that we’ve all had success with, much of the focus of the panel will be on advising customers around methodologies to ensure a robust process for adoption of SaaS applications. On the panel I’ll be joined by Kevin Dobbs, the CEO of Montclare, and the Clouderati’s own gentleman, Mark Thiele from Switch networks.

Wednesday – Cloud Connect

My final formal job on this trip is to take part in another panel – this one also close to my heart. True Stories from the Cloud will be moderated by Randy Bias from Cloudscaling, himself a veteran of many cloud stoushes and we’ll also be joined by Thomas Barton and Neal Sample. In the panel we’ll try and separate the wood from the trees and tell some home truths about cloudwashing, failed deployments and the unintended consequences of cloud gone wrong.

All in all it’s going to be a pretty busy few days. If you’re attending DeployCon, the executive summit or CloudConnect itself – be sure to stop by at one of my sessions, or say howdy when you see me passing in the hallways. Oh and if you’re a runner, be sure to join us on Wednesday and Thursday mornings for a short easy jog. 6:30am in the lobby of the Hyatt Regency

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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