Spouting Shite

CloudStorm London

On Monday and Tuesday last week I travelled to London to attend the Cloud Computing Congress Europe event at London’s Olympia conference venue. The event was packed full of speeches, demos and panel discussions for the Cloud Computing area. I especially liked the opportunity to spend some 1-2-1 time with the owners, developers and sales teams of the various participants.

I especially liked the CloudStorm event on Tuesday afternoon. CloudStorm is a event that is run by Arvid Fossen from A-Server. The event is run around 10 times a year in various cities around the world. It gives around 8 companies in the ‘cloud’ area the opportunity to give a five minute pitch to the audience. Once the pitches are completed the audience have the opportunity to ask questions to the panel. This can be very helpful for attendees as you can ask general questions and ask various panel members to answer….for example questions on security, interoperability and data consistency are excellent for this type of forum.

CloudStorm was opened up Hamish Macarthur from Macarthur Stroud International. Hamish gave an excellent keynote speech on the topic of cloud services and how they are now moving from the niche arena to the mainstream.

Arvid Fossen, Product Management Director A-Server spoke about how the A-Server platform can be used by a xSP to roll out cloud based services to your clients. I last spoke to Arvin at the CloudCamp Newcastle event in early 2009 so it was an excellent opportunity to catch up. A-Server technology is being used by many xSP’s around the world including SymetriQ.

Raph Cohn, Managing Director of StormMQ was next. SrormMQ is a new entrant to the messaging market. StormMQ’s Messaging Cloud is a new AMQP-based cloud messaging service.  It has four variations of service packaging including a fully managed, pay-per-byte cloud service; a shared, multitenant contended-cluster cloud service; a dedicated-cluster cloud service; and a colocated service where some components are installed in the customer’s data center. It is aimed at B2B applications. All messages are persisted so they will not be lost.

Raph and I go back a long way. He attended CloudCamp Newcastle and Dublin in the past. After meeting up with him a few weeks ago I decided to take a Non-Exec position at his company in February. We are on target to launch the BETA in a few weeks!

Johnny Patterson, Account Director SymetriQ was next up. SymetriQ is an enterprise ready cloud computing infrastructure provider…with a special slant for users with elevated needs for security and resilience. Jonny has taken over at SymetriQ from Phil Huber. Phil was the host of the most recent CloudCamp Newcastle event.

I really liked finding out how each of the companies got to market, their successes and shortcomings. I find CloudStorm to be an excellent way to keep an eye on the market!