Cloud in Context - The 451 Group's ICE Summit

As we've seen from IDG World Expo's recent OpenSource World/NGDC/CloudWorld conference, putting on events is often a great deal of work. Outside events can make event the best planned event surprisingly interesting or totally irrelevant. In this context, I've been speaking with Rachel Chalmers, Director of The 451 Group's Infrastructure Computing for the Enterprise (ICE) program, about her upcoming event, the ICE Summit.

We agree that it is a difficult time to present a conference.  Budgets are tight and getting approval to invest in conference attendance can be problematic for many IT professionals.  After all, it is very difficult to tie conference attendance directly to improved effectiveness, increased revenues, cost reduction or anything else IT decision makers currently are seeking. Air travel is frustrating. Information about various suppliers offerings is readily available on the internet. One strategy that has worked is helping these decision makers that getting the story behind the story, learning about best and worst practices deployed by others and meeting senior representatives of suppliers can be very helpful  in the race to being more efficient, making better use of IT resources and seeing the future.

She tells me that this event is designed to be an independent forum for executives in the virtualization, systems management and cloud computing market segments. That means she's trying to put something together that cuts through all of the noise and directly provides useful, actionable information.

She's also told me that I'm leading a couple of panel discussions.  One is on technology innovation - where select suppliers speak about what we are likely to see next in the world of information technology. The other is an analyst panel in which 451 Group analysts address the same issue.

Rachel is going to do her best to put cloud computing into context in her own session.

If you're coming to San Francisco to attend VMware's VMworld, you just might find the ICE Summit a useful extension to your trip.

Have you ever had to help your organization present a seminar, a conference, a symposium, etc.? How did you go about making sure it was relevant, concise and actionable?