Nov 18th, 2009 |
OK, so here’s a “high class” problem. I’ve been jumping around the conference a bit and decided I really wanted to look in on this session. I got there, and it was too crowded for me to stay. I mean, every seat was filled and people were standing two-deep around half the room. People were still coming in when I left, too.
I’d love to tell you what the panel was discussing, but I can absolutely tell you that people are serious about cloud computing at Interop. We can debate questions like the one asked in the session title, and we can even ask whether cloud computing is “real”, but regardless of our answer the attendees are certain: cloud computing is real, and they want to know more about it.
In a very real way, this ties back to the first couple of speeches in the keynote this morning. Cloud computing is an extension of virtualization, and a serious continuation of the software-as-a-service model. It’s new enough that many of its applications have hit consumers first, but the enterprise customers are coming because the model just makes too much sense.
That doesn’t mean there aren’t significant questions to be answered, especially around security and regulatory compliance issues. The key, though, is that there is enough entry to force the questions to be answered, and answered sooner rather than later. This won’t be the last time we see standing-room only crowds for cloud sessions at Interop, and I see things only getting stronger from here.
