Here at Xconomy, the stories we cover give us great ideas for networking events, and at our events we meet great people who give us ideas for more articles. Our Cloud3 Forum on Thursday was a perfect example. Every company on yesterday’s agenda is working on technologies we’ve chronicled—and will keep chronicling—in these pages, including Akamai, Allurent, Cloudswitch, EMC, Iron Mountain, Litl, Microsoft, Pixily, and Sonian.
We’d like to extend a heartfelt thanks to all of the leaders from those companies who took the time to attend and speak: Tom Leighton from Akamai, Joe Chung from Allurent, John Considine from Cloudswitch, Michael Feinberg from EMC, Jim Cuff from Iron Mountain, John Chuang from Litl, Hasan Alkhatib from Microsoft, Anand Rajaram from Pixily, and Greg Arnette from Sonian. We were also very glad that Eric Nakajima could join us from Commonwealth of Massachusetts Executive Office of Housing and Economic Development to talk about the Holyoke High Performance Computing Center project.
We also want to thank our event sponsors, who are all actively helping to spur innovation in cloud computing, or supporting the efforts of emerging cloud companies here in New England. That distinguished list includes Akamai, EMC, Iron Mountain, Microsoft, and Moody Famigletti & Andronico.
We’re especially grateful to our event host, Microsoft’s New England Research & Development Center, for providing such a perfect venue (and great food too). Microsoft’s Gus Weber, in particular, has been a great friend to Xconomy and to the whole innovation community around Boston. We also had valuable help promoting Cloud3 from three great event partners: CloudCamp, the Mass Technology Leadership Council, and MITX.
And as always, we are indebted to our underwriters—the companies whose logos you see on the right side of the website (or at the bottom of our RSS feed), whose annual commitments make Xconomy and its events possible.
One special shout-out must go to Sim Simeonov of FastIgnite, who did a fantastic job as the host of our first-ever “unpanel,” an audience-directed session where we mulled over many of the most vexing issues surrounding cloud computing, such as costs and security. Sim managed a multitude of questions and contributions with humor and grace. I want to personally thank all of the local innovators and technology leaders who agreed to play “cloud seeder” roles during the unpanel session, including David Cancel of Performable, Phil Jacob of Stylefeeder, Nitin Kapoor of OpenMile, John Landry of Lead Dog Ventures, Matt Stevens of Apparent Networks, and Devdutt Yellurkar of Charles River Ventures.
Unfortunately, time limitations meant that a few of the cloud seeders didn’t get a chance to speak, and that quite a few of the audience members’ questions went unanswered—but we hope that the unpanel was a worthwhile experience for everyone. By the way, we’re always eager for participants’ feedback about our events, and we’d be particularly interested to hear how you thought the unpanel worked out, since it was the first time we’d tried this less-structured approach. Please send your comments to [email protected].
We took a boatload of pictures at the event and we plan to bring you a slide show early next week. As a final note: We heard from several attendees that they’d like to have copies of the slides used by the speakers at Cloud3. We think that’s a great idea, and we’re in the process of getting permission to distribute the presentations online. We hope to get those published next week as well.
