This week Steve Smith and I presented at the IDC Virtualisation and Cloud Seminar 2011 where we were also given the opportunity to sit on an expert panel to answer questions around what cloud computing means for real businesses today. I attended and presented at the show last year and was very interested to see that the audience this year was less interested in trying to define ‘the cloud’, and much more focused around how their own businesses could benefit from cloud – for example by migrating data onto cloud platforms.
The customers that we met with today are not part of the wave of ‘early adopters’, but are instead mainstream businesses that are carefully assessing what the cloud could do for them, and what key challenges it will help to solve. It was particularly interesting to see that so many public sector organisations attended the show and took part in the Q&A panel. Until now, the prevailing view has been that cloud presents more barriers than enablers for public sector companies due to legislation and complex processes. However, feedback from users in the public space today clearly showed that cloud adoption is now seen to be more about people than processes themselves, signifying a real evolution in attitude towards cloud computing. For a great example of this check out what Roger Bearpark from Hillingdon Council shared with the conference in his presentation which is now up on IDC’s website.
The day provided real evidence that customers are now willing to work with this technology in order to change and educate people and processes, learning from the experiences of early adopters in order to reap benefits in their own organisations.
Many thanks to all those who supported Dell’s participation at this event, and especially those that were onsite at the event including:
Phil Newman, EMEA Storage Specialist; Eddie Wright, MDS Project Program Management Consultant; Richard Stevens, UK LE – Next Generation Datacentre Specialist; Nick Hyner, EMEA Services Legal Council and Linda Minto, EMEA Events Team.