Cloud impact: A state of the art discussion (podcast)
To listen to the podcast recording click the player above. Although, the audience audio quality isn't great, for which I apologize, this discussion is well worth hearing.
The Defrag conference, held this week outside Denver, offered a fantastic opportunity to mingle with bright folks working on various technology-related problems. As part of the Enterprise Irregulars conference track, I moderated a panel discussion, titled Impact of the Cloud, that explored fascinating and important issues related to cloud computing.
The panel consisted of four cloud experts, but real magic happened as the audience engaged. In the end, the discussion was truly an equal collaboration between panel and audience. The audience included folks with serious expertise, so both panelists and audience learned from each other.
Aside from me as moderator, the panel included the following participants:
- Steve Mann, a strategy consultant and formerly an executive with SAP
- John Taschek, an executive with Salesforce.com who reports directly to CEO Marc Benioff
- Sadagopan Singam, an executive with Mahindra Satyam, one of the largest Indian IT outsource firms
- Mitch Lieberman, an analyst / consultant and previously Vice President of Marketing at open source cloud vendor SugarCRM
Here's a photo of the panelists:
The discussion covered why the cloud is important, implications for groups such as IT, the business, end-users, professional services, and so on. We also spoke about differences between established, on-premise software vendors and the new breed of cloud-based suppliers.
At various points in the discussion, the conversation mentioned Microsoft, Oracle, Salesforce.com, SAP, and Workday.
[Photo by Graeme Thickins]