Conference Press Release

Structure 09, organized by leading technology journalist and GigaOm founder Om Malik, has become the must-attend cloud computing conference of the year.

“Cloud Computing is growing at any incredible pace, and we at GigaOM believe it is a long-term opportunity on a vast scale,” says GigaOM Network Founder Om Malik. “The industry needs to embrace the technology shift that is happening and make plans to take advantage of its potential. We have designed the Structure 09 conference as the forum to get those plans in place and for customers to act fast as the future unfolds.”

Cloud Computing Market is growing at any incredible pace, and the industry needs to embrace the technology shift that is happening and make plans to take advantage of its potential. U.S. Federal Cloud Computing Market Forecast 2010 - 2015 provides an agency-by-agency forecast of the U.S. Federal Cloud Computing Market. The report predicts 40% growth in federal cloud computing for the next six years.

The conference will take place at the Mission Bay Conference Center in San Francisco on June 25, 2009.

The conference will be keynoted by pioneers in the world of “infrastructure on demand”:

• Leaders from IBM and HP will give “Mini-Notes” that look at how their corporate might will influence the cloud computing industry’s evolution.
• Paul Sagan, CEO of Akamai, will reveal how Akamai continues to innovate in an industry it helped birth a decade ago.
• Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce.com, will share his insights on what drove Salesforce.com to become the first SaaS (Software as a Service) company to pass the billion-dollar revenue mark.
• Michael Stonebraker, a pioneer of database (RDBMS) systems.
• Werner Vogels, CTO of Amazon.com.
• Greg Papadopoulos, CTO of Sun Microsystems.
• Jonathan Heiliger, VP of Technical Operations at Facebook.

The speakers and audience will comprise experts from the critical topics in cloud computing: SaaS/PaaS, virtualization, next-generation data storage, cloud computing, broadband and operational issues rising from the adoption of cloud computing. The conference will cover the following topics:

• The Myth of the One-Size-Fits-All Cloud - As enterprises begin to evaluate cloud computing, some are asking if the current model of commodity servers and virtualization meets their needs. Is there money to be made creating specialized clouds for industries that require highly specific computing tasks, from video trans-coding to fiscal transactions and medical records?
• From Databases to Dataspaces - Web-scale computing is creating a physically distributed infrastructure, which has led to the emergence of distributed data storage and processing layers like Hadoop, HyperTable and Couchdb.
• Better Broadband: Enabling the Cloud Era - We’re building huge Cloud Computing cities, but are we neglecting the already clogged broadband highways between them? As internal data center networking speeds start to exceed 40 Gbps, the pipes that connect those clouds to the outside world and each other will hit their limits. This panel examines what stress fractures we may see initially, what technology can do about it, and who will ultimately pay for it.
• Private Enterprise Clouds: As A First Step Towards Cloud Computing - Enterprises aren’t yet able or ready to migrate their applications to public clouds. Public cloud infrastructure can’t run existing enterprise applications without requiring a rewrite. Yet the lure of usage-based resourcing is strong. The solution? Build your own cloud with your existing infrastructure investment as a first step. This panel will contrast vendor visions about how internal systems can work in unison with external cloud platforms.
• On The Shoulders of Giants - Innovation occurs when you push at the edge of reasonable practice. When your job is to manage some of the worlds largest infrastructures, with demands that test the limit of technology and budgets, innovation is your only option. Keepers of six of the largest collections of boxes, bits and bandwidth on the planet will share their successes with current technology and their desires for and opinions on the future.
• Building The Perfect Host for Web Applications - When a hosting platform is built from boxes and bandwidth, it is built with a vision of usage in mind. When a startup codes the next big hit application, it has preconceived notions about what load challenges it’s platform will cope with. With cloud computing, do things change drastically? This panel brings together three of the most innovative infrastructure hosting companies and three rising web application startups to outline what each wants from the other and what new opportunities can be generated from the missing elements.