Santa Clara Convention Center
Santa Clara, CA
November 5-8, 2012
Attendance: 6,500
Exhibitors: 120
Media and Analysts: 46
Calysto Overview
Two unstoppable enterprise IT trends, Cloud Computing and Big Data, converged at the 11th Cloud Expo event in Santa Clara.
Organized by SYS-CON Media, the 11th Cloud Expo was held in Santa Clara’s Convention Center; it is held each year in California, New York, Prague, Tokyo, and Hong Kong. SYS-CON’s Cloud Expo is the world’s leading Cloud event in its 5th year, larger than all other Cloud events put together.
Interest in conferences such as the Cloud Expo increased but sessions were only moderately covered in U.S. trade media. Jonathan Bryce, the Executive Director of the newly-formed OpenStack Foundation, and who has spent his entire career building the cloud, gave the opening November 5 keynote. The cloud will be driven by open source technologies, but businesses are still trying to understand which technologies are the best fit for their needs, Bryce discussed. How do you separate hype from reality and openness from open-washing in the cloud computing market? What unique factors should you consider when evaluating open source technologies versus proprietary software? In his keynote, Bryce made sense of the open cloud landscape so IT pros can make the best decision for long-term success.
This year’s attendance was up 15 percent, with 6,500 attendees compared to 5,700 in 2011. As for the exhibition hall, those numbers increased this year as well, with approximately 30 percent more exhibiting companies than last year. Exhibitors were not just from the USA but truly international including ten companies exhibiting from Holland, several from France, the UK, and Canada, an entire trade delegation of exhibitors from Japan, and booths too from companies based in Australia, Belarus, India, Israel and Belgium. The majority of exhibitors were from the major IaaS players, along with SaaS and Paas providers.
Jim Miller, MBA, CTO at Sigma Consulting Group, attended and commented: “I attended your recent Cloud Expo and I also attend about 20 other events each year from Interop and NAB to HIMSS, Ethernet Expo and The Security Standard, and yours was the best in all of 2012 for the programs, the energy and excitement!”
Organizers tallied approximately 46 media at this year’s event and have seen articles posted around the event from Cloud Computing Journal, Virtualization Journal and more.
The presentations themselves drew decent coverage.
Overall, Cloud Expo is an excellent event for the top layers of IT professional management, from CEOs, CTOs, and CIOs down to VPs of Engineering and Infrastructure, Cloud Directors, Enterprise Architects, and IT Managers. All the main layers of the Cloud ecosystem were represented–the infrastructure players, the platform providers, and those offering applications. The international exhibitor roster is quite impressive as well.
Next: 12th Cloud Expo | Cloud Expo New York is June 10-13, 2013 and 13th Cloud Expo will be back in Silicon Valley November 4-7, 2013.
Articles of Interest
Cloud Computing Bootcamp Continues Today at Cloud Expo Silicon Valley
SOAWorld
By Elizabeth White
November 6, 2012
Day 1 Keynote at Cloud Expo Silicon Valley | Open Cloud – Place Your Bets!
Virtualization Journal
By Liz McMillan
November 5, 2012
Cloud Expo Silicon Valley: Lunchtime Focus Keynote – Day 2
.NET Developer’s Journal
By Elizabeth White
November 4, 2012
Speakers at the 11th Cloud Expo: A curated list you can follow at TwitChimp
CTOVision.com
By Bob Gourley
November 3, 2012
Cloud Expo Silicon Valley: Making Money in the OpenStack Ecosystem
Cloud Computing Journal
By Liz McMillan
November 2, 2012