Cloud Connect is in full scale today. Yesterday, there was the Cloud Business Summit where top industry executives spoke about the impact of Cloud Computing on today’s business. I had a chance to talk to many leaders in the industry and I could feel the cloud in the air. People are pretty excited about how cloud computing is going to change the entire business landscape in the coming decade. The sessions ranged from discussions about which business models are winning to exploring different challenges and opportunities in the enterprise market to the investment scene and go to market strategies.I had a chance to speak to Mr. Jason Green of Emergence Capital Partners yesterday. Emergence Capital were an early investor in Salesforce.com and their portfolio includes such big names like Successfactors, Echosign, Yammer, etc.. He sounded very positive about the state of the clouds. He told me that they exclusively support cloud vendors, especially on the applications side. He was telling me that he sees a big increase in enterprise adoption and expects it to stay that way in the coming years.
Another interesting topic in our discussions was about SaaS players using other cloud based services (platform and infrastructure) for their needs. I had a twitter discussion long back on the same topic. We see SaaS and Web 2.0 startups using IaaS and PaaS for their infrastructure needs early on and move to their own datacenters as they grow big. I am really keen to hear from SaaS companies on why we see such a trend while IaaS and PaaS players are trying to get enterprises move into the cloud. It is also interesting because on one hand, they want customers to trust them and put their data on their services but, on the other hand, they don’t think they can rely on IaaS or PaaS players to deliver their apps. Ideally, I would like to see SaaS providers use the -aaS’ all the way down to the infrastructure part of the stack.
In short, I get a feeling that Cloud Computing has finally taken off. In spite of some hyping on the vendor side and scare tactics on the side of the traditional software vendors, it has finally reached mainstream. I spoke with a couple of ISVs and both of them told me that they were at the conference because they want to move their apps to clouds. Nope, they didn’t talk about cloud washing, they want to re-architect their applications so that they can offer them “as a service”. If anything this conference has highlighted, it is the fact that the cloud has arrived.
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