Your Cloud Computing Questions Answered

In the book Outliers, author Malcolm Gladwell says that it takes roughly 10,000 hours of practice to achieve mastery in a field. For the average person, working 2000 hours in a year, this means that expertise would require 5 years of dedicated focus at any given craft. Unfortunately, most people don't have the ability to carve off 2000 hours from their daily schedule, so we've pulled together an incredible agenda at Interop's Cloud Connect program to help you get closer to your goals.

Let's start with the basics -- cloud computing can feel like a chaotic mess of new technologies, competing options, and changes from your current way of running IT. With so many choices that move so quickly, it can seem almost impossible to answer these basic questions:

Within the Cloud Connect program at Interop Las Vegas this spring, we tried to answer these questions for you, by bringing together speakers that are solving these challenges every day. Let me draw you a mental map of how we thought about the lineup of topics and speakers.

We began with the basic business question: Are we utilizing resources in the best way possible for our business? For some companies, this means better utilization of private resources, and for others it means a hybrid mix of private and public resources. We'll walk you through that framework in the following sessions:

Once you have an understanding of resource allocation, it's time to think about how to strategically acquire those resources in a way that doesn't ruin your budget:

Now that you have a blueprint for resources and costs, it's time to start thinking about some of the complexities of modern technologies.

If you're trying to decide between some of the leading cloud computing standards, these sessions will help you compare and contrast what fits for your organization:

Of course, the applications are the end game. So if you're trying to build the next-generation of applications that align to social, mobile, analytics and cloud, the presentations below will give you deep insight into ways to make that application development go faster:

But with speed comes risk, and it's important to find the right balance of control, security and agility. We've got you covered there, too:

While we feel that the team has pulled together an excellent set of topics to help you shorten that 10,000 hour learning curve to cloud computing excellence, we're most proud of the people who will be giving all of these talks. Interop has always been about learning, not just vendor hype. And we'll continue that this year in the Cloud Connect program as we bring together entrepreneurs, practitioners, operators and doers.

Don't just take my word for it; go check out their bios. These folks aren't just industry thought leaders; they are industry doing-leaders. People just like yourselves that are invested in making this technology understandable and practical for your business.

We tried very hard to bring you a set of discussions that are worthy of your time. We can't wait until you get to experience it all in May. Look forward to seeing you all in Las Vegas!