I was corresponding a bit with an acquaintance of mine from India about Cloud Computing. A division of his company produces small cloud events in India. But nothing huge so far. Meanwhile, an Indian colleague of mine who's currently in Singapore has told me how aggressively vendors are pursuing cloud business in India, particularly to the SMB sector, which comprises companies that don't have the resources to have big capital expenditure budgets. Cloud could be a savior to them, as they get onto the pay-as-you-go bus.

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But, as much as I like developing nations and the potential of cloud for them, the Big Kahuna is still found in the Big Apple, with Cloud Expo, opening April 19 at the Javits Center in New York. This is not an event with a single track, or a few tracks. There are, in fact, eight of them, as follows: Enterprise Cloud; Moving to the Cloud; two tracks on Security, Management, and Compliance; The Cloud from All Angles; Performance, Standards, Storage, and Hosting; Virtualization; and of course, Hot Topics.

The last track includes sessions on dynamic data centers (and why static virtualization tools won't work within them), hardware vs. Amazon EC2, and customer-side encryption within SaaS. There will also be power panels, one of them devoted to business value. Because these days, the business is supposed to be driving the IT. Doesn't always happen; I've certainly been in organizations where it seemed impossible. The business side does really need to learn a thing or two about geeknology, but the IT side also needs to learn there are valid human beings who just can't get their jollies from reading badly written code.

Cloud Expo is scheduled to return to Prague this summer and to Silicon Valley in the fall. But this New York event, which is reaching for 5,000 attendees, should be the biggest, most diverse yet in this globe-shifting world of Cloud Computing.

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