Now in its second year, CloudBeat is again assembling the biggest names in the cloud’s evolving story and asking them the questions that you need answered.

Unlike nearly all other cloud events, the customers themselves are front and center. Their discussions with vendors and other experts unearth rare lessons on cloud adoption, providing insights and actionable data on what really works, who’s buying what, and where the industry is going.

“The quality and level of discussion at CloudBeat is way beyond what I’ve seen at other conferences. The fireside chat style with industry leaders gives the audience a behind-the-scenes look at what is going on in cloud today.”
– Lew Tucker, VP/CTO, Cloud Computing, Cisco Systems

“In 2011, CloudBeat established a winning format in a crowded market for cloud conferences. We’re looking forward to seeing their success grow in 2012.”
– Randy Bias, Co-Founder/CTO, CloudScaling

Core to the two-day event will be a series of customer-centric case studies, big-name fireside chats, and deep-dive breakout sessions, providing big-picture perspective as well as concrete, actionable data.

We’re expecting over 500 executives — from the hottest cloud startups and leading cloud providers to the Fortune 500 — with a mix of CEO’s, CIO’s, CTO’s, VP’s of product development, analysts, investors, high-level press, and more.

Themes:

Open versus Closed
On opposing sides of potentially the biggest divide in cloud computing, we have two very different perspectives: Those who argue a single-vendor solution (such as Amazon or Eucalyptus) can deliver all of a user’s needs, and those who believe the cloud must be built upon foundations that support and encourage freedom of choice and integration (such as CloudStack or OpenStack). This divide goes beyond any particular vendors or solutions and extends to big questions of IT philosophy and business strategy. We look at the two sides of this argument in depth.

Integration and the Cloud
As more and more applications move to the cloud, there’s a real need for consistent workflows, integration tools, common data formats and other solutions to help tie a multitude of disparate systems together. What are the different solutions, and why is this area poised for massive innovation in the months to come?

Visibility: Cloud Management and Control in a Complex World
As more CIOs accept cloud computing, they are moving from reactivity to proactively searching for tools that give them real-time insight into their organizations use of Cloud. We’ll take an in-depth look into the myriad of providers who are trying to answer CIO concerns about IT resource usage, performance, governance and cost.

Platform as a Service: The Future of the Cloud?
Many industry pundits contend that PaaS will be the biggest growth area in the cloud over the coming years. It’s at the platform level that enterprises are focusing most of their cloud-based efforts, and it’s here that cloud vendors see the biggest opportunities for profit. We’ll tackle the big questions around PaaS: Polyglot versus best of breed, the rise of cloud marketplaces, declarative versus framework based, and how real customers are using PaaS to speed up their dev time and reduce management input.

Real World Uses for Big Data
Big data is perhaps the hottest buzzword in the industry today. But the industry has been slow to articulate real use cases and success stories for big data. We’ll explore this area from a problem-centric viewpoint (looking at organizations’ current issues with too much data) and a solution-centric viewpoint (looking at different approaches that vendors have to providing solutions)

Security
“The cloud is not secure,” the media cries whenever a data breach is reported. The truth is, of course, somewhat more nuanced. On the whole, cloud providers tend to have better, tighter, deeper security than the local IT infrastructure they’re replacing. But large cloud services are attractive targets, and even the most rigorous procedures can be circumvented through hardware failure or human error. What can cloud providers do to reassure their customers, and what can those customers do to ensure that they don’t become the weak link?