With all this talk of disruption in the enterprise, young founders should not underestimate legacy vendors. Business software behemoths like SAP and Oracle have their eye on the big trends, whether it’s cloud, “big data” or mobile computing, and are finding ways to filter out the most innovative technologies from the noise.

At CloudBeat, VentureBeat’s recent customer-focused cloud conference, I caught up with Sanjay Poonen, president and corporate officer at SAP, who specializes in technology and product innovation. That afternoon, Poonen was joined on stage by one of the company’s biggest healthcare customers McKesson to discuss ongoing concerns about the cloud and their reasons for selecting SAP.

In this ensuing discussion, Poonen revealed that SAP has hedged its bets on its own big data solution, known as HANA. He told me that IT will be “transformed” by big data. In 2013, he said, “a lot of the hype goes out [the door] and the substance starts to show up.”

Watch the video for more of SAP’s predictions on the big tech trends for the coming year.

SAP (Source) from VentureBeat on Vimeo.

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013 San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

AgilOne does cloud-based predictive analytics, and at VentureBeat’s recent CloudBeat conference, AgilOne CEO Omer Artun took a few minutes to chat with us about big data topics as well as the startup’s recent funding round.

AgilOne tries to use the cloud to predict parts of the future with some degree of accuracy. The company used CloudBeat to announce its $10 million round of funding and the launch of its product, which provides cloud-based predictive marketing intelligence to help marketers figure out what their customers are going to do before they do it.

Big data itself was a huge topic at the conference. One of the more interesting revelations as one speaker’s assertion that companies were collecting vast amounts of unstructured data on consumers — data that they then were ill-equipped to actually use. Many of the startups at CloudBeat were attempting to meet that need, to make data from social media and other inputs actually useful.

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013 San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

For most cloud providers, the biggest PR problem is security. Egnyte CEO Vineet Jain has invested years into understanding — and alleviating — common concerns about the cloud.

If the enterprise-focused cloud storage startup is to continue luring customers away from heavyweights like Box and Zetta, it will be due to its commitment to security.

I caught up with Jain at VentureBeat’s CloudBeat 2012 conference to discuss the questions that companies should ask their cloud providers before entering into a contractual agreement.

Considering migrating sensitive information to the cloud? Jain suggests you ask about a vendor’s ability to deal with encrypted data, and their understanding of industry-specific compliance laws.

If the vendor passes these tests, Jain recommends delving into where the data is stored. Recently, an Egnyte customer flew in an IT director from Pittsburgh, PA. to check how physically secure the data centers are and where the servers are located.

These questions will help companies protect themselves from the “vagaries of the Internet,” Jain explained. ”These three things are becoming table stakes now,” he said.

For more, check out the video.

Video via livex.tv

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013 San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Big business is embracing the cloud more than ever. Cloud tech has reached a level of acceptance in the past year, with many companies moving out of pilot projects and into full-on deployments of critical parts of their business onto cloud-based systems.

This week, VentureBeat hosted CloudBeat 2012 in Redwood Shores, Calif., where executives from VMWare, Dropbox, Box, SAP, PepsiCo, Nebula, and more gave us tons of details on how they are using the cloud to disrupt business as usual.

Sure, we faced a challenge when Amazon decided to schedule its Re:Invent conference in Las Vegas at the exact same time. There’s no question Re:Invent, with its sold-out crowd, peeled some of our attendees away, but we had remarkable attendance (over 400 people) and content regardless.

And through the sessions, we saw several big themes emerge.

1. Security needs to step up in the cloud

One of the biggest concerns people had at CloudBeat was security. At a surprisingly lively panel with experts from HP, Qualys, and CloudPassage, these folks all agreed that cloud security was getting more scrutiny than ever.

Some of that scrutiny is unfair because security is problematic no matter if we rely on cloud services or not. Still, in the increasingly interconnected world of cloud services, a security weakness in one service can lead to breaches in many others, raising the stakes.

Thankfully, the speakers agreed on one easy step to move businesses and consumers in the right direction: Everyone needs to turn on multi-factor authentication if they can. Multi-factor authentication basically means you need to verify an account (part one) on a specific device (part two). Some of them even thought that every site and service on the web needs to turn it on too.

One reason so many people haven’t turned it on is because it’s sometimes a pain in the ass. During our Innovation Showdown, for example, the startup MuleSoft had trouble with its live demo because of multi-factor authentication on a Salesforce account.

2. PaaS is starting to catch on, but the enterprise will decide its fate

Platform-as-a-service (PaaS), once the ugly duckling of the cloud, is starting to get way more attention. In an exciting standing-room-only session, four PaaS CEOs discussed how their businesses were changing rapidly by offering more languages and options that even slow-moving enterprises could get behind.

PaaS providers offer tools that make application development easier and faster than ever, so there are lots of reasons for companies and devs to get on board. And PaaS is getting big enough that there’s even a new startup called Appsecute that offers a dashboard for managing multiple PaaS services. But the big question is, which PaaS companies will survive when major corporations start biting?

3. Healthcare in the cloud is gonna be huge

One thing we heard from several speakers at CloudBeat was about the intersection of health care and the cloud. With electronic medical records taking off and companies investing in numerous health-care solutions, things are changing quickly. It’s a bit of a “perfect storm.”

“There is market pressure, pressure from physicians and audience groups,” Scott Whyte, VP of IT Connectivity at Dignity Health, the fifth largest hospital provider in the nation, said on stage.

While there are many hurdles to electronic medical records — including security, breaches, compliance and regulatory issues, and legacy systems — the Affordable Care Act mandates the transition to them by 2014. This will mean a bit of forced innovation is coming and lots of players who will benefit.

4. Big bets on ‘big data’

Yet another topic we heard a lot about the conference was “big data.” Companies are looking for more ways to take advantage of vast amounts of unstructured data that they’re collecting from social networks and other sources and put it to better use.

Ken Stineman, the senior director of enterprise architecture and security at Genomic Health, told us on stage that companies can do better. “We are generating terabytes of data about the human genome,” he said. With that data in hand, Genomic Health hopes to do things like improve the effectiveness of chemotherapy on cancer patients.

A big data startup called AgilOne — which tries to foretell the future using the cloud — used CloudBeat to announce its $10 million funding round and the launch of its product. It provides cloud-based predictive marketing intelligence to help marketers figure out what their customers are going to do next.

5. Cloud compute is getting super cheap

Amazon lowered its S3 prices yet again during Re:Invent, prompting Google to lower its prices as well. We had Google exec Amit Singh tell us Google was “happy to compete.” Clearly cloud computing power is racing to the bottom when it comes to price. This is a great thing for startups and businesses that want to take advantage of the cloud. You could almost say it has a “Robin Hood” effect: It’s bridging the gap between rich and poor businesses.

Singh later told us he believes pricing for the public cloud, especially from major companies like Google should continue to go down. When asked whether it will eventually be free, Singh said he didn’t know if that would actually happen. He did say, however, that it was “possible.”

Photo credit: Michael O’Donnell

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013 San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Seven companies presented on stage today, but only one won CloudBeat 2012′s Innovation Showdown. That was Kabbage, a small-business funding platform that uses cloud power to connect companies with cash.

“The average business has grown by 266 percent since they’ve started using us,” Rob Frohwein, CEO and co-founder of Kabbage, said on stage during his presentation.

The CloudBeat Innovation Showdown, sponsored by Silicon Valley Bank, featured seven finalists from more than 200 applicants that hope to disrupt business using cloud-based technologies.

Upon winning, we asked Frohwein (pictured, far left) why his company potentially beat out the other promising finalists. He suggested it might be relatability and appreciation to small businesses and startups, which often don’t get off the ground because loans or funding don’t come through.

“People want to connect to problems they relate to,” Frohwein told VentureBeat. “Everybody in this room has interacted with a small business at some point. We leverage the cloud, big data, and real-tine analytics to power a large segment of the U.S. economy that otherwise wouldn’t be served. It’s the life-blood of our economy.”

Check out the other six finalists from the Innovation Showdown below:

Adaptive Planning

Adaptive Planning offers a SaaS-based solution for budgeting, planning, and forecasting for companies big and small. It works with companies and nonprofits to fundamentally transform their management processes — the way they plan, monitor, measure, and analyze their business performance, throughout the entire company to improve productivity, costs, and decisions. It claims to be a step better than traditional Excel-based planning and budgeting and legacy enterprise performance solutions.

“We save our customers time, we increase productivity and we help them make better decisions,” Adaptive Planning CEO John Herr said.

Appsecute

Appsecute is a relatively young cloud application management provider. Appsecute bills itself as “RightScale for PaaS.” It claims to bridge the divide between developers and IT operations, delivering collaborative management tools. The company provides app management for the cloud, with an emphasis on transitioning applications into production.

“Enterprises need to be able to use a variety of platforms,” Appsecute CEO Mark Cox said. “We understand the enterprise space and we’re taking PaaS to the enterprise.”

At CloudBeat, the company announced that it would support major PaaS provider Heroku.

CircleCi

CircleCi offers software to make companies’ and developers’ lives easier with “continuous integration.” It claims that its software can make developers 90 percent more productive and save them an average of 36 hours per week. In a nutshell, the company provides hosted continuous integration for web applications. Once developers push their code to GitHub, CircleCi immediately begins testing it and deploying the application to Heroku if tests are successful.

Cloudessa

Cloudessa bills itself as a “Dropbox for network security.” It is a cloud service that control access of every user or device on a particular network. The company claims to use complex network security protocols, simplify them dramatically, and provide them as a cloud utility to any user on any device.

Fiverun

Fiverun offers a service for showcasing your products in a very easy fashion on a tablet. It helps retailers provide advice and recommendations and checkout customers. The company believes consumers should first be helped by a sales associate that is armed with a device that has every product the retailer carries. Fiverun leverage its cloud-based platform to power this functionality as a SaaS-based solution for any retailer that wants it.

MuleSoft

MuleSoft lets organizations harness the power of their applications through integration, which is vital to success these days. The company provides one of the most widely used integration platforms for connecting SaaS and enterprise applications in the cloud and on-premise. Customers include Zynga, Boeing and Bank of America.

“Typical implementation takes 18 hours,” the company’s CEO said. “That’s everything from design through implementation.”

You can watch the full competition between the seven finalists below:

Photos via Michael O’Donnell

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013 San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

At CloudBeat, the healthcare panel kicked off with a harrowing statistic. The vast majority of breast cancer sufferers will not benefit from chemotherapy. And yet, most patients today receive this highly invasive treatment.

According to genetics expert Ken Stineman, over 80 percent of patients are treated with chemo so we can “catch that four percent.” Stineman, the senior director of enterprise architecture and security at Genomic Health, believes that we can do better.

Genomic Health offers diagnostic services to cancer patients. The company pulls in health information so patients can be treated based on their genetic make-up and we can take the guesswork out of medicine. Companies in this space, often referred to as “personalized medicine,” have spawned in recent years to take advantage of the plummeting cost of sequencing human DNA.

“We are generating terabytes of data about the human genome,” said Stineman. Read more here about how genomics entrepreneurs are building technologies to help you live longer. 

At CloudBeat, the Silicon Valley cloud conference that emphasizes real customer case-studies, Stineman revealed his concerns about whether cloud technology companies could be trusted with our sensitive genetic information. Chaos would ensue if this data gets into the wrong hands. Stineman’s ongoing concern: “How can we protect your genes and mitigate those risks?”

He revealed to Cloud of Data’s Paul Miller, a CloudBeat moderator, that there has been rapid progress in recent years. One year ago, most cloud companies had negligible experience dealing with sensitive health information. Stineman and his team chose to work with SAP (they were the first healthcare customer to use the SAP Business ByDesign product). SAP’s team was willing to get educated about compliance and regulatory issues, and engage in a dialogue about how to keep patient information safe.

Stineman would take this relationship between healthcare companies and the cloud one step further — he said that vendors should be liable for security breaches that occur, perhaps in the form of a data loss prevention fee.”If we’re going to trust you, you”ll have to be on the hook for some of that liability and cost,” he said.

Read more about one of the hottest topics at CloudBeat: healthcare and the cloud. 

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013 San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Platform-as-a-service (PaaS) is by far the smallest sector of cloud among the main areas of IaaS, PaaS, SaaS, and BPaaS. But the CEOs of four young platform-as-a-service startups think their prospects for growth and survival are good — as long as the enterprise bites.

Today at CloudBeat 2012, the four CEOs — AppFog‘s Lucas Carlson, Apprenda‘s Sinclair Schuller, dotCloud‘s Solomon Hykes, Engine Yard‘s John Dillon — all believe that 10 years from now the PaaS and cloud markets will be substantially changed, with PaaS kicking serious ass. What that takes is big-dollar companies to invest in PaaS companies on the promise that it will help them deploy and develop apps faster and better than they’ve ever done.

“When you go into an enterprise and talk to them, you say ‘we’re here to build the foundation for the next 10 years of app development for you,’ Schuller said.

Apprenda stands out among the rest of the crowd because it offers its product to enterprises as a service that can be run behind a firewall instead of using the public cloud. AppFog works behind the firewall and as a public cloud options, while dotCloud and Engine Yard are public PaaS options.

Even though these are all competitors with different visions on how they survive, the CEOs were remarkably friendly with each other. They had slight disagreements but believe in the overall picture of PaaS growing due to mainstream adoption. The adoption of PaaS correlates strongly with overall cloud services adoption, Engine Yard’s Dillon noted.

“I predict very few companies in the future will build their own data centers,” Dillon said. “If you’re an army base or an oil rig, you might need your own fire department, but most of us will use the San Francisco fire department. We’re not going to dig our own wells to get water. Generating your own compute cycle is one of the dumbest things you can do.”

The biggest cloud services company in the world, Amazon, does not offer a legit platform for app development and is even an investor in Engine Yard. Dillon said even with Amazon as an investor, “they scare the hell out of me” based on their size and power in the market.

dotcloud’s Hykes had a different take on Amazon. He says that Amazon has been “surfing” on the success of its widely used S3 and EC2 products for a long time and that’s why they are the largest. But since cloud is growing, there’s room for other giant cloud players. “Cloud is such a tremendously huge market,” Hykes said. “There’s room for 20 companies that size.”

Some of the companies Hykes mentions could be of the PaaS variety. But yet again, that all depends on buying into the promise of PaaS. “It’s not about running apps — it’s about changing the way they are built,” Schuller said.

AppFog’s Carlson agreed with that point and later said he thinks business IT spending will shift more to PaaS in the near term.

“PaaS brings relevance to where application development is going,” Carlson said. “When it clicks, we’ll see a generational change in enterprise spending.”

Photo credit: Michael O’Donnell

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013 San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

VMWare chief technology officer Stephen Herrod believes in a future filled with choices. And he thinks networking companies better start embracing choice, especially open-source software, or face steep consequences.

“There’s not a networking company in the world that doesn’t realize things need to change dramatically,” Herrod said on-stage today at CloudBeat 2012.

VMWare currently has its hands tied to many different projects, trying to find a way forward in software-defined networking, trying to virtualize every piece of the data center, and embracing platform-as-a-service with Cloud Foundry. Herrod cited VMWare’s acquisitions of Nicira and DynamicOps as big wins that will help them continue to innovate in the virtualization space.

Herrod is so dedicated to choice that half of VMWare’s engineers are working on open-source software and the other half are on closed-source software.

“The approach we’re taking is the one that will win in the long term,” Herrod said.

Check out the great full interview with Herrod in the video below.

Photo credit: Michael O’Donnell

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013 San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Who would have thought that a full-on debate would erupt with such a simple question, “What is open cloud?”

At CloudBeat, a panel of experts were in consensus about one thing and one thing only. Open cloud is a marketing-driven concept, and it’s not easy to distill into a simple sentence or two. “I don’t think there is a clear distinction about what it is,” said Chris Pinkham, cofounder and CEO of Nimbula, a company that delivers cloud computing software for building private, public or hybrid clouds.

“Open cloud means with relative ease you can replace any given components [whether it's] hardware or software,” explained Randy Bias, co-Founder and CTO of Cloudscaling.

In minutes, the panelists got riled up about the purpose of vendor lock-in, the benefits of open source tools, and the ways that companies can move their workloads between different infrastructure providers.

Tension arose around the subject of “locking-in customers” year-on-year — while Bias argued that vendors should build solutions that their customers love and aren’t stuck with year-on-year, Pinkham made the case that a certain degree of lock-in is needed to maintain a steady rate of innovation.

“You can’t do anything new and interesting without locking yourself in [to a vendor] in some way,” Pinkham explained.

“My customers don’t want to be milked like a cow,” hit back Bias, who claimed that customers are too often paying $100 million in licensing fees to a behemoth like Oracle. “You could buy a company for that…or a 50 person noSQL team,” he said. Bias said it’s important that companies own their own code so they can kick their cloud providers “to the curb” if expectations aren’t met.

Fellow panelist Boris Renski, Co-Founder & EVP of Mirantis made the case that most customers will have a degree of lock-in, and will typically need to pay hefty fees to switch vendors.

What are your thoughts? Should customers be able to walk away at anytime? Is there a balance between vendor lock-in and control? And finally, how would you define the term open cloud?

photo credit: Akbar Sim via photopin cc

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013 San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

How do you do the cloud right? Salesforce showed off a case study of enterprise integration today at VentureBeat’s CloudBeat 2012 conference in Redwood City, Calif.

Elias Dayeh (pictured right), director of business operation at Axcient,  a hybrid-cloud-based data protection service, said that one of the myths is that a company can bring in Salesforce and implement its cloud-based sales solution in a “magical way.”"

“The myth is it will magically fix everything,” he said in a talk at CloudBeat with Matt Marshall (pictured left), founder and editor in chief of VentureBeat. “Orders will start rolling in.”

But the first Salesforce integration wasn’t done right, starting in 2008. Dayeh came in during 2011 to help redo the integration. The cloud-based app wasn’t talking with the core systems. Integration had to happen, and Dayeh learned that “you still have to create a process” to do the integration right.

The problem at Axcient was that sales would receive an order through Salesforce and forward it to the manufacturing operations team. The problem was that  the forwarding happened by printing out the order and passing it on the manufacturing team, which had to re-enter the data.

In this system, if one party upgraded its system, that could break the smooth flow of information from one place to another.

That’s not the way the revamped system works. Now, Axcient has automatically integrated Marketo with Salesforce. That was easy because apps on Salesforce’s AppExchange platform are designed to work together. They may look like web apps, but the data systems have been integrated. The apps talk to each other, said Peter Coffee (pictured center), vice president and head of platform research at Salesforce. That’s important because Axcient is adding customers who want storage at a rate of a petabyte a quarter.

Coffee said that Salesforce has architected its software so that such problems don’t occur. The behind-the-scenes software keeps the communication flow in spite of such differences. Salesforce has learned, he said, that it can’t require its customers to engage in months-long testing processes related to upgrades. Axcient is now using just about every feature that Salesforce offers.

Customers would not regard that as value if we imposed that testing on them,” Coffee said. “You are abstracted from what happens behind the scenes.” Salesforce has kept working on easy integration, so that its service can be implemented in a safe way. That way, a full installation can happen as easily as a prototype test can be done.

The mix of data across platforms doesn’t have to be scary for customers.

“The public cloud is not like a public toilet,” he said. “You put your money in a public bank, but your account is your own.”

Here’s a video of the discussion:

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013 San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Box VP of engineering Sam Schillace recently moved to his current job after several years at Google. He doesn’t tolerate bad user experiences in the products he develops, and he doesn’t think users will either.

“Users in general are getting more and more savvy and tolerance for bad experiences is getting lower,” Schillace said on-stage at CloudBeat 2012 conference. “The bar keeps getting higher in terms of design and user experience. We see it in Google Docs, we see it in Box quite a bit. You get carried into enterprises because there’s a blurring of lines between your work and your personal life.”

This philosophy relates intensely to his work at Box, the enterprise cloud storage startup that’s attracted $287 million in funding from top-tier investors and now has more than 140,000 customers.

The biggest area Box is focused on when it comes to designing a better experience? Mobile, no question.

“When you’re in a mobile device, that’s essentially a consumer experience,” Schillace said. “It’s very fast — you don’t have a lot of time or space. You’re running next to other consumer-grade applications. You have to be at that level of quality. And we see knowledge workers demanding that more and more.”

Check out out full interview with Schillace in the video below.

Top photo: Michael O’Donnell

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013 San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

If you’re not using multi-factor authentication as a company or as a consumer, you really need to start. No, seriously, go turn it on now if you can.

During today’s cloud security panel at CloudBeat 2012, three security experts that didn’t always agree about the best approaches to security did agree that everyone needs to start using multi-factor authentication.

Mentioning the now-famous incident of Wired writer Mat Honan being hacked, the panelists — HP senior security strategist Rafal Los, Qualys CTO Wolfgang Kandek, and CloudPassage chief security evangelist Andrew Hay — basically said every connected device you own and every electronic account you have has the potential of being hacked.

One of the easiest ways to start protecting yourself is multi-factor authentication. For example, if you have a Google account, you can install Google Authenticator on your devices.

“Standard passwords are not secure,” CloudPassage’s Hay said. “Multi-factor authentication is the only solution that will be accepted by the mainstream.”

Qualys’ Kandek went a step further, saying every service and site needs it: “Every site should use multi-factor authentication,” he said.

The panel also hit several other big topics:

– Should we be emphasizing security first for the enterprise or for consumers? HP’s Los and Qualys’ Kandek agreed that it needs to start with the enterprise, mostly because you can actually force security policies on employees whether they want it or not. Consumers won’t necessarily embrace security no matter how much you prod.

CloudPassage’s Hay disagreed. He believed security isn’t starting explicitly with either the consumer or enterprise. He said:

“It doesn’t have to start with enterprises or consumers. Personal users should be educated to use these tools. With enterprises, you’re assuming that the organization is going to know better than you when that may not be the case.”

– Is a standardized password policy across all big enterprises a good idea? Yes, but it’s not going to happen.

“I would love to have one standardized password policy to use across all companies, but my grandkids will be driving hover cars on Mars before that happens.”

– How can we make security policies better at companies? Get feedback from real employees, not just IT guys.

“Have your employees vet what you’re saying,” Hay said. “If you involve two or three people on the process, they’ll have a connection to the policy and add input that you might not have thought of.”

Check out more of our coverage and livestream from CloudBeat.

Photo credit: Sean Ludwig/VentureBeat

“Big data” is all the rage, but it’s rare you’ll hear real case studies from companies that are storing, processing, and analyzing vast stores of unstructured data (texts, emails, reports, and so on).

At CloudBeat, a conference that focuses on innovative cloud-based technologies, companies revealed on stage how they are using NoSQL databases to drive their business strategy. The session was moderated by Bill Coughran, Partner at Sequoia Capital and former senior vice president of engineering at Google.

On stage, Coughran said he had spoken with dozens of companies that had collected unstructured data but had no idea about what to do once it was stored.

For companies, data-mining is a highly complex and regulated process. “Consumer data is a very sensitive topic,” said Hope Arenas, group manager of e-business development at Bosch Tool Corporation, a company that provides power tools. “To try to do something that is revolutionizing our marketing [strategy]…there was no other way we could have got anything approved unless it was cloud-based.”

Arenas described how the company selected AgilOne‘s analytics tools to help standardize and collect data. “What wasn’t easy was getting everyone on the same page and getting it clean and processed,” Arenas explained. “We are just starting to analyze the data.”

For Arenas, big data means being able to connect with potential customers, start conversations with retailers, and target existing customers with marketing messages.

The company discovered that people who own its power tools typically have at least two to four of them. The marketing team began incorporating localization into their emails. By understanding where their customers are based, Bosch could share offers from its nearest service center.

Daniel Rapp, Vice President of Research, UX, and Web Development of Family Search joined Arenas on stage to discuss how the company uses big data technologies to determine whether strangers are related.

The company can process data about family history — if two people are related, the data will pinpoint where their family trees intersect.

The key takeaway from the big data panel: The space is flooded with options, but we’re still in the nascent stages of understanding how companies can use their data to drive business and strategy.

In case you missed it, check out the full video here:

Photo credit: Michael O’Donnell

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013 San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

For cloud technology companies that are brave enough to tackle the healthcare industry, it’s a perfect storm — there are major challenges and opportunities.

At CloudBeat, the conference focused on how real customers are transitioning to the cloud, healthcare technology experts gathered to discuss moving from paper-based to electronic systems.

For IT leads at hospitals and health providers, now is the time for action. “There is market pressure, pressure from physicians and audience groups,” said Scott Whyte, Vice President of IT Connectivity at Dignity Health, the fifth largest hospital provider in the nation.

By 2014, Obamacare mandates that hospitals and practitioners who have been maintaining paper records to switch to electronic medical records.

It will not be a simple transition. “The healthcare industry is fragmented, complex and paper-based,” said Darin Brannan, president and CEO of ClearDATA, a secure provider of e-mail and cloud computing technologies that take the risk out of mail and app hosting.

The key hurdles for companies like ClearDATA include security and breaches, compliance and regulatory issues, and the existing legacy infrastructure systems.

Brannan was joined on stage by Whyte, who selected ClearDATA five years ago. He recalled choosing ClearData from myriad providers because they “got healthcare.” ”They understood the compliance issues that are unique to the industry,” explained Whyte. “They delivered value and executed quickly and we started learning the value of the cloud.”

According to these experts, the leading cloud providers are not adequately serving the healthcare vertical. “AWS [Amazon Web Services] will give you the tools to make yourself HIPPA compliant but that isn’t really an option,” said Brannan. “We are HIPPA compliant to the same level as a hospital.” To ensure that the security is adequate, Dignity Health performed deep privacy checks and legal reviews.

Security is an enduring problem in healthcare – The Office for Civil Rights reported that (the “OCR”), from 2009, 477 breaches affecting 500 people or more were reported. In total, the health records of 20,970,222 people were breached, according to the OCR’s website.Read more about how healthcare is moving to the cloud here. 

Healthcare IT is hot: As the market matures, we can expect that more mainstream cloud providers will introduce solutions specifically designed for this vertical.

If you missed it, catch the live stream of the talk!

Image credit: Michael O’Donnell

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013 San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Chris Kemp has a pretty impressive resume: a co-founder of OpenStack, former NASA CTO, and CEO of next-gen private cloud startup Nebula. So when he speaks, people listen up.

On stage at CloudBeat 2012 today, Kemp predicted that “next year is the year of OpenStack.” OpenStack, the open source cloud platform that was established in 2010 by NASA and Rackspace, has attracted a lot of fans since its inception and has more than 150 participating companies using it including Intel, Dell, HP, IBM, and Yahoo.

So it makes sense that OpenStack adoption will continue to increase, especially over the next few years as more companies increase their reliance on cloud solutions. This ties perfectly to what Kemp is selling with his company Nebula. Nebula has raised more than $30 million from Comcast Ventures, Highland Capital Partners, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, and others on the promise of equipping businesses with more flexible and secure private clouds.

Kemp argues that private clouds need to deliver all the benefits of the public cloud (Amazon, Rackspace, SoftLayer, Joyent, etc.) but behind a firewall. Ideally, you get fast and reliable computing power but with more security. He also makes a fair point that companies need better hardware, especially if they are running a cloud.

“If you’re a developer using the cloud, the hardware doesn’t matter,” Kemp said. “If you’re running a cloud, it very much matters.”

Check out the full talk with Kemp below for more interesting tidbits from this impressive fellow:

Photo credit: Michael O’Donnell

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013 San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

This is a guest post written by cloud analyst Paul Miller, who is content advisor for VentureBeat’s upcoming CloudBeat 2012 conference, November 28-29 in Redwood Shores, Calif.

Established by US space agency NASA and hosting company Rackspace in 2010, the OpenStack open-source cloud project has done a remarkable job of attracting attention to itself over two short years. The project now lists over 150 participating companies including major players like Intel, Dell, HP, IBM, and Yahoo, and consistently eclipses earlier open source projects such as Eucalyptus in media coverage of the cloud.

For a quick check of its growth in mind-share, check out the graph above, taken from Google Trends. It shows OpenStack’s dominance (the blue line) of search terms for open source cloud infrastructure projects.

OpenStack’s proposition is simple, with the same freely downloadable code powering big commercial cloud data centers run by Rackspace, Hewlett Packard, and others. Customers, the argument goes, are therefore able to easily move their applications from one provider to another without having to alter their own programs. They can even download a copy of OpenStack to run inside their own data center as well, which (in principle) makes it feasible to move computing jobs from a private data center to commercial clouds and back again, at will.

For some customers, this portability might be critical to the way they run their IT. For many (most?), it’s simply an insurance policy; a comforting demonstration that they can move, should they ever need to.

The proposition is simple, and it is compelling. The roster of participating names is a veritable who’s who of IT infrastructure. But the OpenStack story has not been without its hiccups:

• Throughout much of 2011, grumbling about the degree of control exerted by Rackspace persisted. In October, 2011, Rackspace announced plans to pass control to an independent Foundation; a process that only completed this summer;
• In April of this year, long-time OpenStack supporter Citrix took the CloudStack software it gained through acquisition of cloud.com in 2011, and submitted it to the Apache Software Foundation as a new (competing?) open source project. The first fruits of that project were released earlier this month. Citrix remains a ‘supporter’ of the OpenStack project;
• In June, a blog post by NASA CIO Linda Cureton sparked a flurry of speculation, as pundits claimed NASA was ‘ditching’ OpenStack in favor of Amazon and Microsoft’s Windows Azure. The reality, in which a large and complex organization sensibly continued using a range of different tools for a plethora of different purposes was clearly too mundane to report;
• And, despite already powering services for which customers are willing to pay, other pundits continue to complain that the code is developing too slowly, and neither robust nor complete enough for mainstream adoption.

Not the only game in town

OpenStack, however, is far from alone in providing cloud infrastructure. E-commerce behemoth Amazon remains the dominant provider of a public cloud solution, letting customers rent computing capacity in Amazon’s global network of data centers by the hour with a credit card.

Telecom giants such as AT&T and France’s SFR are also entering the market, as are established technology players from Dell and HP to Google and Microsoft.

Virtualization specialist VMware is increasingly keen to help its existing customers transform their corporate data centers into mini clouds, powered (of course) by VMware’s software.

Finally, smaller local entrants are increasingly offering services of their own, typically differentiated by geography, support, or nuances of configuration. These solutions are often proprietary or depend upon extensive modifications to open source foundations, and there are certainly plenty of open source pieces to choose from.

Those in need of some open source cloud infrastructure aren’t limited to OpenStack; they could also turn to Eucalyptus, OpenNebula, CloudStack, and others.

Each of these has its merits, and each is worth exploring further for its own particular story. OpenNebula, for example, emerged from a European research project and is now doing rather well in deployments both inside Europe and overseas.

Eucalyptus also emerged from academic research, this time at UC Santa Barbara. Designed to emulate Amazon capabilities using computers inside any data center, Eucalyptus has for years presented itself as a logical adjunct to Amazon usage. With OpenStack now promising the whole package (public and private clouds, running exactly the same code) there were many who presumed that Eucalyptus’ partial solution would struggle. I was amongst them but, despite continuing to attract less media attention, Eucalyptus continues to quietly attract paying customers. An agreement with Amazon earlier this year also made it easier for Eucalyptus to bill their product as the natural partner to Amazon’s offerings.

And if OpenStack ever gains sufficient marketshare to become a credible threat? The current market leader, Amazon, surely has a very simple response. The company will simply buy (or replicate) Eucalyptus, not in order to support innumerable private clouds for ever, but to smooth the path and drag reluctant corporate server-huggers ever closer to Amazon’s all-consuming data centers.

OpenStack certainly continues to attract the bulk of the media coverage for open-source cloud computing, and the project is also now beginning to deliver tangible deployments. But there is still plenty of room for other open source offerings to grow and differentiate.

Want to learn more? Open versus closed cloud computing is one of the six major themes of CloudBeat 2012, VentureBeat’s upcoming enterprise conference, November 28-29. With a stellar roster of speakers like Chris Kemp (co-founder of OpenStack whilst CTO at NASA), Chris Pinkham (responsible for the initial development of Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud whilst working at Amazon), Lew Tucker (responsible for the development of Sun’s cloud computing offering, and now vice-chair of the OpenStack Foundation), we’ll have plenty of expertise and insight available to attendees. What, we shall ask them, are the merits of the various ‘open’ clouds, and how do they stack up against today’s 800-pound gorilla (Amazon, of course), or the bold ambitions and deep pockets of relative newcomers such as Google? Is there enough room for everyone? Come to CloudBeat and find out.

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013 San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Our second annual CloudBeat 2012 conference is just around the corner! Today we are extremely excited to announce our finalists for the event’s Innovation Showdown, a lively competition where seven new companies (chosen from over 200 nominees) will battle it out onstage to see whose product or service is leveraging the cloud in the most revolutionary way.

The finalists will have five minutes to pitch, and our team of sages — made up of industry experts, venture capitalists and actual enterprise customers — will provide detailed feedback and ultimately determine a winner.

We’ll announce the Showdown winner onstage at CloudBeat (Nov. 28-29, Redwood City, Calif.). In addition to the onstage accolades, the winner will receive a VentureBeat editorial profile, introductions to investors and relevant potential customers in our network, and a handful of other prizes to be announced.

Last year’s winner, Zadara Storage, went on to raise $7 million in first-round funding.

Without further ado, here are our 2012 Innovation Showdown finalists:

Kabbage

Kabbage has developed a technological platform to analyze seller data and advance cash on the spot. The internet-based funding platform enables small businesses to receive approval and funds within 7 minutes of completing a simple online application — a process that would normally require months of hassle and paperwork when applying for traditional funding through a bank. This data is pulled from sources such as PayPal, UPS, Intuit, Amazon, eBay, Facebook, Twitter, and many others. All of this is stored and processed in the cloud, making the product fast, efficient, secure, and capable of scaling.

Appsecute

Appsecute bridges the divide between developers and IT operations, delivering collaborative management tools for PaaS. The company provides application management for the cloud, with an emphasis on transitioning applications into production. It’s like RightScale for PaaS.

Fiverun

Fiverun provides a tablet solution that helps retailers provide advice/recommendations and checkout customers, anywhere in a store with any sales associate. The company believes consumers should first be helped by a sales associate that is armed with a device that has every product the retailer carries. Fiverun leverages the power of its cloud based platform to power this functionality as a SaaS based solution for any retailer on the globe.

MuleSoft

Founded on the idea that connecting applications should not be hard, MuleSoft lets organizations harness the power of their applications through integration. The company provides one of the most widely used integration platforms for connecting SaaS and enterprise applications in the cloud and on-premise. Customers include Zynga, Boeing and Bank of America.

Cloudessa

Adaptive Planning

Adaptive Planning is a cloud-based solution for budgeting, forecasting, reporting and analysis, sales planning, data visualization, and business intelligence. It works with companies and nonprofits of all sizes to fundamentally transform their management processes – the way they plan, monitor, measure, and analyze their business performance, throughout the entire company to improve productivity, costs, and decisions. It is a step ahead of traditional Excel-based planning and budgeting and legacy enterprise performance solutions.

Circle

Circle provides hosted continuous integration for web applications. Once developers push their code to GitHub, Circle immediately begins testing it, and deploying the application to Heroku if tests are successful.

The CloudBeat 2012 Innovation Showdown is sponsored by Norwest Venture Partners.

It’s one track in a program packed full of never-before-seen customer case studies, fireside chats with top-level speakers, and focused breakout sessions.

Tickets are very limited, so make sure to grab yours today!

Special thanks to the industry leaders who are supporting CloudBeat 2012: Ping Identity as Gold Sponsor; New Relic, dotCloud, Huddle, and Oxygen Cloud as Silver Sponsors; and CollabNet, Aria, Apprenda, Nasdaq OMX, Scality, Egnyte, Norwest Venture Partners, Silicon Valley Bank, RingCentral, and Scale Venture Partners as Event Sponsors.

Image via Shutterstock

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013 San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Once upon a time, you knew who to fire when a hack took down your servers: The “little weenies” running around in the basement of your company, as AlienVault’s Russell Spitler put it.

But that’s all changing.

Cloud technology is ubiquitous. How many of you just checked Google Docs or put a photo in Dropbox? How many of you looked up a customer on Salesforce or answered a service ticket on Zendesk? I’m writing this article in WordPress, a veritable platform as a service. If your business depends on these kinds of cloud services, you’re in a scary world, my friend — a world where your company depends on servers you don’t control, with security policies you may not know, run by “weenies” you have no authority over.

After talking to several security execs about the issue, my sense is that one of the biggest fears about the cloud is simply not being able to see inside of it. It’s like an actual cloud, thick and opaque. You’re standing on one side, and the cloud service providers are standing on the other. As a chief technology officer, you can only hope that the provider is building good defenses on their end, because you aren’t in control of anything and you’ll only see your attacker when it’s too late: after they’ve come through the cloud.

We’ll be discussing how to be proactive in these situations — along with many other cloud security issues — at VentureBeat’s upcoming CloudBeat conference, November 28-29, in Redwood Shores, Calif. In the meantime, check out what keeps these security experts up at night:

Andrew Wild, chief security officer, Qualys

My biggest concern for companies using cloud service providers (CSPs) is that the CSP may not provide the customer with the proper level of detail needed to ensure the ongoing effectiveness of the CSP’s security controls.

In an enterprise environment, event logs should be available from the devices that enforce the security controls, such as switches, routers, firewalls, systems, and applications. In the cloud, the CSP is responsible for implementing and managing some or all of these devices, depending on the cloud service model (infrastructure as a service, platform as a service, software as a service). Enterprises may or may not have access to events from these systems.

Without event log information, it is very difficult to implement “continuous monitoring,” which is a key component of an organization’s ability to proactively detect security events and intrusions, leaving the cloud service user vulnerable to an undetected attack.

Rafal Los, senior security strategist, HP Software

What keeps me up at night, and [what concerns me] in my daily conversations with customers, isn’t the next big hack or threat. It’s that organizations out there are adopting cloud technologies without fully understanding the various cloud models.

Rather than wading into the pool feet-first, they’re going head-first, and [they're] finding out the hard way what security, scalability, and legal or compliance challenges they’ll face often in the heat of an issue. Technology certainly helps but doesn’t solve the entire problem. Education is critical.

Russell Spitler, vice president of product management, AlienVault

The top security issue in the cloud is accountability.

When an incident occurs in your own data center, there are plenty of people to blame and subsequently fire. What’s causing such concern about the migration to cloud-based services is that the person who makes the decision to move to the cloud is now the one who gets fired after an incident occurs. Many people have taken the plunge and accepted this risk, assuming that if the could service provider is ‘that big’, they must be secure.

What we are faced with is not new technology: Virtualization and geographically disparate networks have long been a concern. What is new is that the economic stakeholder can no longer place the responsibility for security on the technical weenie scurrying around the bowels of the data center. That stakeholder must now confront the question, ‘What is it that I need to know in order to feel secure?’

The data needed to answer the question is the same as it has always been: You need visibility. You need to know what assets you have, what data is being stored, what are the latest threats, who is attacking you, and, ultimately, if you need to worry.

Placing your trust in a cloud service provider now means that you are putting these concerns in their hands. Some might transfer that concern and walk away. Others, the ones worried about the eventuality of a breach, require visibility into the infrastructure running their cloud services. Even with the largest providers, we have yet to see responsible disclosure of this information.

Gur Shatz, chief executive officer, Incapsula

Today, my greatest concern is that while critical infrastructure gets pushed to the cloud, there is no sure way of protecting the desktops and mobile devices accessing it.

This should be a great concern to chief information officers and chief technology officers. With the inherent risk that employees’ computers and devices introduce, a strong barrier is needed to protect the production environment. After all, this is where customer information is stored and critical business processes take place.

At the very minimum we need to make sure that access to the environment should be limited to specific sources and behind at least two factors of authentication; that access should always be personal; that we have no more generic users such as “administrator” or “root”; and that access is monitored, with a full audit trail of who went where.

Ashar Aziz, chief executive officer and chief technology officer, FireEye

One of the most disconcerting aspects of moving into the cloud is the limited security visibility and (un-)timely incident response offered by cloud vendors.

Whereas before, CIOs and CISOs could put measures in place to detect and stop advanced cyber attacks against their own network, now they may not hear about a data breach until the cloud vendor is mandated to disclose the incident. Organizations cannot just assume and trust that their cloud vendors have adequate security. They really have to demand and verify that advanced threat protections are deployed before moving their valuable data into the cloud vendor’s network.

The most common security pitfall is not addressing the IT security risks in your own network first. In fact, our research shows that over 95 percent of enterprises have advanced malware in their network, which means that cyber criminals and nation-state advanced persistent threat attackers will just utilize this avenue to penetrate the cloud infrastructure of that organization.

The easiest way to break into the cloud is by compromising an end-user system with a zero-day attack or a spear phishing email exploiting an OS, application, or browser plug-in vulnerability.

Jim Fenton, chief security officer, OneID

Losing complete control over your domain by moving services to the cloud is what keeps you up at night.

Critical services need to be protected anyway, and the guiding principle of defense-in-depth that we live by means having multiple ways to protect these services. And one of the most reliable ways has typically been in the ways we rule our topology.

When that goes away as a result of migration to the cloud, it just creates a really uncomfortable feeling.

David Mortman, chief security architect, enStratus

What keeps me up at night with regard to cloud security? Mostly it’s the fear that people aren’t going to apply the lessons we’ve learned over the last 20 to 30 years about how to have disciplined operations and security.

While it’s true to a large extent that cloud isn’t that different than working with bare metal, there are some key fundamental differences that can be used to make things more efficient and more secure. But if we don’t apply those lessons, then all we’re doing is exacerbating the problems we already have to the nth degree. The very benefits of the cloud — speed and elasticity — will cause already fragile systems to become even more brittle and completely obviate any additional value.

On the other hand, if we can properly apply all of that knowledge we’ve gained, the cloud’s speed, elasticity, and ability to automate will make systems more stable, more secure, and easier to manage.

Cloud image via Shutterstock

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013 San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

CloudBeat 2012 is right around the corner, and we’re confident it’s going to be the cloud event of the year. Here’s why:

It’s unlikely that any single player will dominate the cloud computing market in the foreseeable future. So more and more enterprise IT leaders are taking a pragmatic, creative approach and adopting a wide range of solutions.

CloudBeat is unlike other cloud events because it puts those customers (the companies that are adopting cloud solutions) front and center to share their experiences and insights on what’s working and what’s not. Those customers are in the lineup right alongside the companies competing for their business. We’re talking two days packed with customer case studies, big-name fireside chats, and deep-dive breakouts, all aimed at helping a broader audience navigate through the rich, complex, and rapidly evolving cloud ecosystem.

Still not convinced? Check out the speaker list:

• Stephen Herrod, CTO, VMWare
• Sanjay Poonen, President & Corporate Officer, SAP
• Amit Singh, Vice President, Google Enterprise
• James Cuff, Chief Tech Architect, Harvard University
• Lew Tucker, VP & CTO, Cloud Computing, Cisco
• Frank Edwards, Director of IT Strategy, PepsiCo
• Sam Schillace, VP of Engineering, Box
• Peter Coffee, VP of Platform Research, Salesforce
• Rafal Los, Senior Security Strategist, HP
• Chris Kemp, Co-Founder & CEO, Nebula
• Dr. Amr Awadallah, CTO, Cloudera
• Oren Teich, COO, Heroku
• Aleksandr Yampolskiy, CTO, Cinchcast
• Dan Scholnick, General Partner, Trinity Ventures
• Gavin Blair, Director of Technology Ops, Patch.com
• Edward L. Hanapole, CIO, Kaplan
• Jay Simons, President, Atlassian
• Chris Pinkham, Co-Founder & CEO, Nimbula
• Darin Brannan, President & CEO, ClearDATA
• John Cowan, CEO & Co-Founder, 6fusion
• David Mortman, Chief Security Architect, enStratus
• Andy Vitus, Partner, Scale Ventures
• Randy Bias, Co-Founder & CTO, CloudScaling
• Benjamin Revcolevschi, SVP Cloud & Services, SFR
• John Dillon, CEO, Engine Yard
• Dan Rapp, VP Research, UX & Web Development, Family Search
• Elias Dayeh, Director of Business Operations, Axcient
• Glenn Solomon, Partner, GGV Capital
• Greg McAdoo, Partner, Sequoia Capital
• J. Christopher Wagner, CTO, SnapLogic
• Ruben Daniels, Co-Founder & CEO, Cloud9
• Joe Weinman, Senior Vice President, Telx
• Mat Ellis, Founder & CEO, Cloudability
• John Lee, Dir Entrepreneur Services Group, Silicon Valley Bank
• Juan Carlos Soto, SVP, Data Integration, Informatica
• Solomon Hykes, Founder & CEO, dotCloud
• Ken Stineman, Sr. Dir. Enterprise Architecture, Genomic Health
• Sinclair Schuller, CEO, Apprenda
• Lucas Carlson, Founder & CEO, AppFog
• Mark Cox, Founder & CEO, Appsecute
• Paul Miller, Consultant, Cloud of Data
• Michael Driscoll, Co-Founder & CEO, Metamarkets
• Tom Lounibos, Co-Founder & CEO, SOASTA
• Robert Abbott, General Partner, Norwest Venture Partners
• Ben Kepes, Cloud Computing Analyst, Diversity Limited
• Philip Kromer, Co-Founder & CTO, Infochimps
• Scott Whyte, VP of IT Connectivity, Dignity Health
• Ashish Thusoo, Co-Founder & CEO, Qubole
• Adrian McDermott, SVP Product Development, Zendesk

Join us at CloudBeat 2012 and forge relationships with over 500 industry executives, with a mix of business and IT decision makers, analysts, investors, marketers, big brands/retailers, press, and more.

Tickets are very limited, so make sure to grab yours today!

Special thanks to the industry leaders who are supporting CloudBeat 2012: Ping Identity as Gold Sponsor; New Relic, dotCloud, Huddle, and Oxygen Cloud as Silver Sponsors; and CollabNet, Aria, Apprenda, Nasdaq OMX, Scality, Egnyte, Norwest Venture Partners, Silicon Valley Bank, RingCentral, and Scale Venture Partners as Event Sponsors.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

With all the reports of a dearth of women in business, it’s easy to forget that there are female chief executives running behemoths like Pepsi and HP.

A New York-based analytics startup, PeekYou, has compiled a list of the most influential female chief executives.

The executives on the list span a variety of industries, from enterprise technology to retail. Given the amount of media attention paid to technology companies of late, it’s no surprise that Silicon Valley-based CEOs dominate the list.

At the top of the list is HP CEO Meg Whitman. Tasked with retooling HP, Whitman has garnered a great deal of media interest, fending off competition from Marissa Mayer, who recently assumes the top job at Yahoo.

The list reminds me of a conversation that unfolded at Box‘s recent conference, Boxworks. A panel of female executives, including Epiphany’s former CEO Karen Richardson and Drugstore.com’s former CEO Dawn G. Lepore, made the salient point that women are often brought on in times of transition.

That’s certainly true in HP’s and Yahoo’s case: All eyes are on Mayer and Whitman. Can they re-energize flat-lining companies with a visionary corporate strategy?

No pressure.

Every executive on the list was given a PeekScore ranking between one and ten. As the company explains, the higher the score, the “more important” they are on the web. To calculate the ranking, the company takes into account known presence and activity on the Internet, including: blogging, participation in social networks, friends, followers, readers, the amount of content created, and prominence in the news. It’s not disimilar from a service like Klout, which analyze web streams to calculate a person’s social media influence.

“The sequence of the list seems pretty consistent with the notoriety and public awareness of each of these esteemed women,” Michael Hussey, PeekYou’s CEO, told me. “The list beyond those two (Whitman and Mayer) was rather a tight race but the scores certainly appear accurate.”

Note: with the servers hit during Hurricane Sandy, the site has not yet been restored to full functionality.

Attendees of VentureBeat’s upcoming CloudBeat conference, November 28-29, will meet senior execs from both HP and Pepsi, both companies mentioned in PeekYou’s list. Rafal Los, Senior Security Strategist at HP, and Frank Edwards, Director of IT Strategy, PepsiCo are among the list of speakers. Learn more about CloudBeat here.

Check out the list of top female tech CEOs below — let us know what you think!

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013 San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

It’s just six weeks away, and we already have many stellar speakers lined up for CloudBeat, our annual conference that spotlights innovative companies across all sectors of the cloud.

Unlike many other cloud conferences, this one is focused on customers: The executives and IT managers who are actually using cloud technologies. You’ll hear real-world case studies that will show you, in concrete terms, how cloud technologies are transforming the enterprise.

It’s VentureBeat’s second annual CloudBeat conference, and last year’s attendees had this to say:

“The quality and level of discussion at CloudBeat is way beyond what I’ve seen at other conferences.”

“CloudBeat established a winning format in a crowded market for cloud conferences.”

Join us for panel discussions, fireside chats and keynote talks from chief technology officers and founders of disruptive companies like Zendesk, Google Enterprise, Cloudera, Cisco, Genomic Health and more — as well as their customers.

It’s not too late to get involved! If you work at an innovative cloud company that deserves to be recognized for its out-of-the-box adoption strategy, read up and apply for the CloudBeat Innovation Showdown, hosted by Norwest Venture Partners.

This year, our speakers will address security, collaboration, analytics, mobile usage, increased productivity, and integration. Have a fantastic speaker or customer case study in mind that addresses one of these themes? Submit your speaker form here. Deadline is Friday, October 19th.

Check out our speaker lineup below, and grab your tickets today. Space is limited!

 Adrian McDermott leads and manages Zendesk’s Engineering and Operations teams. Prior to Zendesk, he was CTO at Attributor where he applied “lean startup” techniques to build multiple product lines, and as general manager, ran video compliance business from first customer sales until business acquisition.

Amit Singh leads Google’s Enterprise business. He joined Google in 2010 after nearly 20 years at Oracle in different areas of the business. In his most recent role, as group vice president, he led the Application Strategy Group, responsible for applications acquisitions, shared services and product strategy for North American Sales.

Ben Kepes is an analyst, an entrepreneur and a business adviser. His business interests include a diverse range of industries from manufacturing to property to technology. As a commentator he has a broad presence both in the traditional media and extensively online. Ben covers the convergance of technology, mobile, ubiquity and agility, enabled by the cloud.

Chris C. Kemp is the co-founder and CEO of Nebula, developers of a turnkey enterprise private cloud computing system. Prior to Nebula, Kemp was the Chief Technology Officer for IT at NASA, where he co-founded OpenStack, and was responsible for pioneering work in cloud computing, open source and open government.

Chris Pinkham is a senior technology executive and entrepreneur with over 20 years of experience building Internet and large infrastructure environments. Chris started his career co-founding South Africa’s first ISP, TICSA/Internet Africa, which was sold to UUNET in 1996. Most recently Chris initiated and managed the development of Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), which has emerged as the undisputed leading public Cloud Infrastructure.

Dan Scholnick is a General Partner at Trinity Ventures, a venture firm dedicated to investing in early stage entrepreneurs. Dan began his career as employee number two at Wily Technology (acquired by CA) where he built the first version of the company’s application performance management product and then helped sell it to many of Wily’s Fortune 500 clients. Dan founded Flurry, the leading user analytics platform for mobile applications.

Dr. Amr Awadallah is Co-Founder and CTO of Cloudera since it was formed in Oct 2008. Before that he was an Entrepreneur-in-Residence at Accel Partners for about 3-months. Prior to joining Accel he served as Vice President of Product Intelligence Engineering at Yahoo!, and ran one of the very first organizations to use Hadoop for data analysis and business intelligence.

Edward L. Hanapole is Chief Information Officer for Kaplan, Inc., a subsidiary of The Washington Post Company (NYSE: WPO) and a leading global provider of educational services offering post-secondary education, test preparation, professional training and K12 programs.

Frank Edwards specializes in data center capabilities, cloud hosting, and virtualization for a large, global IT organization. As Director, IT Strategy he developed complex modeling tools to determine the optimal IT strategies and staffing plans in uncertain, risky environments. Prior to his current role Edwards led PepsiCo’s network and server operations groups.

Glenn Soloman has led GGV’s investments in Pandora (NYSE: P), Successfactors (NYSE: SFSF/Acq by SAP), Isilon (NASDAQ: ISLN/Acq by EMC), Quinstreet (NASDAQ: QNST), Square, Conviva, Nimble Storage and Zendesk, helping the first four successfully navigate the initial public offering process.

James Cuff is the Director of Research Computing & Chief Technology Architect for the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard University. Before assuming this role in 2007, James directed Research Computing for the Life Sciences Division at Harvard. In 2003 he moved from the UK to the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT.

Jay Simons is president of Atlassian, an award-winning enterprise software company that helps innovators everywhere plan, build, and launch great software. He is responsible for all revenue-generating activities of the company, including customer success and retention, operations and marketing. Atlassian has more than 22,000 customers— including Microsoft, Facebook, Cisco, Oracle, Proctor & Gamble, Exxon, BMW and NASA..

Special thanks to the industry leaders who are supporting CloudBeat 2012: Ping Identity as Gold Sponsor; New Relic, dotCloud, Huddle, and Oxygen Cloud as Silver Sponsors; and CollabNet, Aria, Apprenda, Nasdaq OMX, Scality, Egnyte, Norwest Venture Partners, Silicon Valley Bank, RingCentral, and Scale Venture Partners as Event Sponsors.

Agawi, a cloud-gaming platform formerly known as iSwifter, has adopted Microsoft’s Windows Azure cloud hosting to stream games to Windows 8 devices.

The deal means that it will be possible to enjoy games created for other platforms on Microsoft’s Windows 8 PCs and tablets, said Peter Relan, the executive chairman of Agawi in Menlo Park, Calif., in an interview with GamesBeat. Agawi will use Azure to stream Facebook social games and other titles to Windows 8 PCs and tablets, so that players can play “any game, anywhere, instantly.” (The initials for that phrase are the letters in the Agawi name.)

Windows Azure is a cloud-computing platform that Microsoft has set up to provide web-connected data center infrastructure to startups that need to accommodate lots of Internet users connecting to websites. Like Amazon Web Services, it is a “public cloud” service that enables startups and other companies to grow quickly without spending a lot on Internet infrastructure.

Agawi will use Azure to offer cloud streaming for all types of games — Facebook social games, midcore titles, and hardcore games — to all devices. Relan said that popular AAA titles will be made available in the coming months for instant play on Windows 8 devices with no rework for developers. As such, Agawi plans to offer the same kind of cloud-gaming service as OnLive, Gaikai (now owned by Sony), Playcast, and others. Relan is making the announcement at the Cloud Gaming U.S.A. conference in Burlingame, Calif.

“We have been having discussions with Microsoft for a while,” said Relan. “The two prongs are our adoption of Azure, so we can use the largest cloud provider to bring our solution to the market. The second thing is to add new clients with Windows 8.”

The advantage for users is that they will be able to instantly log in to their games and resume playing on any device even if developers have not taken the trouble to port a game to that device. The web-connected data center executes the game in its servers and then sends a stream of video down to the user’s tablet or computer. Agawi has previously streamed Facebook and web games to iPad tablets. Now it is expanding to include new platforms such as Windows 8 and beefier hardcore games with high-end 3D graphics on devices that would not otherwise be able to run them, said Relan.

Agawi’s aim is to stream games to tablets, TVs, and PCs. With new tablets coming out based on Windows 8, Microsoft will enable Agawi to hit even more platforms.

“We are looking forward to bringing not just social games, but PC games and console-quality content to new devices,” said Relan. “To do that, we have to run Windows in the cloud. What better way to do this than have the games run in the cloud and stream them?”

“Game developers want to focus on building great games, not worrying about back-end issues like scalability and platform management,” said Walid Abu-Hadba, the vice president at Microsoft. “With Windows Azure, Agawi 2.0 enables developers to make high-performance games easily accessible across devices with high-quality graphics and virtually instant game downloads. For gamers, Windows 8 delivers a fast, fluid, and no-compromise experience that opens the door to exciting new form factors.”

Agawi was started as part of Relan’s YouWeb incubator in Menlo Park, Calif.

CloudBeat 2012 is assembling the biggest names in the cloud’s evolving story to learn about real cases of revolutionary cloud adoption. Unlike other cloud events, customers — the users of cloud technologies — will be front and center. Their discussions with vendors and other experts will give you rare insights into what really works, who’s buying what, and where the industry is going. Register now and save 25 percent! The early-bird discount ends September 14.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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Sept. 9 - 10, 2013 San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Calling all cloud fanatics! Nominations are open for our Innovation Showdown, one of the highlights of the CloudBeat 2012 conference (Nov. 28-29) at the Sofitel Hotel in Redwood City.

Returning for its second year, we’re looking for examples of innovation in, and around, the cloud. Do you have a product or service that will change how businesses serve customers, empower employees and deliver tangible value to investors?

This is your opportunity to showcase that fresh idea, disruptive technology or product, with special consideration for those that haven’t been widely publicized yet. Whether you’re a tiny startup in a garage in Cupertino or an established company, we’re looking for any and all examples of innovation in the cloud. To get an idea of what we’re looking for, check out VentureBeat’s round-up of last year’s competitors here.

Here’s how it will work. Finalists will have four minutes to showcase their innovative cloud technologies live at CloudBeat 2012. Our team of judges— made up of industry experts, venture capitalists, and actual enterprise customers — will provide feedback on the products/services presented. Ultimately, our sages will recap the highlights of the competition and determine the winner.

The Showdown winner will be announced onstage at CloudBeat 2012 and will receive a VentureBeat editorial profile, introductions to investors and/or relevant potential customers in our network, and other prizes yet to be announced. Additionally, the audience will get to choose its favorite new product or service. The winner of the “People’s Choice” award will also be announced live onstage.

We’ll be announcing the ten finalists on October 31 to present to a packed house. Tickets for CloudBeat are selling fast, so don’t forget to register!

What are the guidelines and other rules?

• A short video telling us more about your company or product must be included with your application. This should not be an elaborate production. We are just looking for a no frills video of the entrepreneur or executive talking about the idea, so that we know it is concise and clear enough.
• All applications must be received no later than October 31, 2012, at 5pm PST.
• A person from your company (ideally the person in the video) must be available to pitch live on stage CloudBeat 2012.
• We do not allow powerpoints; instead you can do a demo, video, screenshots or other creative ways of presenting your technology.
• If you are a startup and/or have received less than 10 million in funding, we will provide you with a mandatory “bootcamp” where experts will help you to hone your pitch (don’t worry, this will be amazingly useful).
• We’ll accept products that haven’t even been launched yet, and in fact we’d encourage this, and prioritize this.

Apply for the Innovation Showdown here. We’re looking forward to seeing you at CloudBeat 2012!

CloudBeat 2012 is assembling the biggest names in the cloud’s evolving story to learn about real cases of revolutionary cloud adoption. Unlike other cloud events, customers — the users of cloud technologies — will be front and center. Their discussions with vendors and other experts will give you rare insights into what really works, who’s buying what, and where the industry is going. Register now and save 25 percent! The early-bird discount ends September 14.

Special thanks to the industry leaders who are supporting CloudBeat 2012: Ping Identity as Gold Sponsor; New Relic, dotCloud, Huddle, and Oxygen Cloud as Silver Sponsors; and CollabNet, Aria, Apprenda, Nasdaq OMX, Scality, Egnyte, Norwest Venture Partners, Silicon Valley Bank, RingCentral, and Scale Venture Partners as Event Sponsors.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

iPads have taken over the boardroom, and corporate CEOs and their egos are to thank for the somewhat surprising trend. At least, that’s the consensus among a panel of cloud computing and enterprise experts who gathered to discuss the reality and implications of mobile devices infiltrating the office.

“Apple is killing it in the enterprise, and they’re not even trying,” Alan Masarek, CEO of Quickoffice said in a season entitled “The year of Cloud Commuting” at the CloudBeat conference in Redwood Shores, Calif.

“Tablets started as lean-back devices, and usage would peak in the mornings and evenings, Masarek said. “But even that’s beginning to change … there’s been huge pickup during the day … and a ton of note-taking.”

“The iPad is a bonafide genuine business device,” Andy McLoughlin, EVP of strategy and co-founder of Huddle, added. McLoughlin said when he first started seeing iPads in office meetings he thought it would be a passing fad. But the trend is actually here to stay, he said, because executives are taking their iPads to meetings to capture information that they can then have access to later via the cloud. This reality means that app makers need to make their iPad applications first rate, he added.

But it was years before the enterprise opened its arms and accepted Apple’s iPhone into the mobile fold, so why has the iPad been able to leapfrog this long adoption cycle? The panel talked about new business environment factors, the large-screen form factor and access to cloud services as logical explanations, but perhaps it all boils down to CEO ego.

“The tablet is corporate bling for executives,” moderator and Forbes contributor Tom Taulli said. “When you get the ego going, you can sell a lot of software in the organization.”

Nick Mehta, CEO of LiveOffice, concurred. “This is the first situation where the top is driving technology adoption,” he said. “The CEO gets one, he goes to the IT department and he asks, ‘why don’t we support this?’”

Still, iPads, or tablets in general, are not viable desktop or laptop replacements, Vineet Jain, CEO and co-founder of Egnyte, said. Serious work requires other devices, he argued. “When you need to reference four things simultaneously — bullshit, you can’t do that [on an iPad].”

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

BYOM, or bring your own mobile, is the new mantra at virtualization software-maker VMware. The 10,000-person strong organization, founded in 1998, has chucked its company-issued phone policy in favor of something more hip to the modern mobile times.

VMware told all employees to BYOM a few weeks ago, Javier Soltero, CTO of SaaS and application services, said at the CloudBeat conference in Redwood Shores, Calif. (We’re livestreaming the event. You can watch it here.)

The radical change is actually a logical one for VMware, even if it does present new challenges in bill management, Soltero said.

“The rapid adoption of tablets and smartphones clearly means that employees have a different type of computer,” Soltero said. “The point of the post-PC era is that we’re working a little differently; we’re not tethered to a desk … and there’s got to be room for digital devices to lead that transformation.”

But aren’t there inherent security risks in letting employees BYOM? “We’re at a point today that you do have the ability to revoke access to email, exchange and calendaring environments for a device that isn’t in your control,” Soltero said. “Solving this problem has created tremendous opportunity [for VMware].”

He’s right. The company released a new product called Horizon Mobile Manager designed to help corporate IT departments effectively manage employee-owned smartphones. The product, in essence, virtualizes the employee’s mobile device by letting the organization run a separate, corporate-managed environment on the phone, and secure access to centrally managed data, apps and services.

Clearly the BYOM policy is less about winning favor with employees — but that’s a nice bonus, we’re sure — and more about showing potential clients the advantages of VMware’s Horizon Mobile Manager.

At the CloudBeat conference today, we got to talk to Netflix’s cloud architecture guru, Adrian Cockcroft.

Cockcroft took a moment to explain the massive changes Netflix had to go through to transition from a physical DVD rental company to a worldwide streaming video service. Of course, Netflix didn’t simply need the huge amount of bandwidth required for streaming video; it also needed to roll it out at human scale, and fast.

It was a tall order, and the company chose to work with Amazon Web Services to fulfill it.

Cockcroft also tells us a bit about how Netflix will continue to scale as its streaming media services branch out across new regions around the globe.

Stay tuned for more from CloudBeat today and tomorrow.

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013 San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Big companies often get a bad rap for being too slow to adopt emerging technologies, but electronics retailer Best Buy, which employees more than 6,000 employees in technology positions, has managed to avoid this corporate pitfall and build an enterprise infrastructure in the cloud.

Thomas Kelly, enterprise architect for cloud services at Best Buy, described how the company adopted the cloud in a session moderated by Dan Scholnick, general partner at Trinity Ventures, at the CloudBeat conference in Redwood Shores, Calif. (You can watch the livestream here.)

Today, Best Buy runs a hybrid cloud with best-of-breed applications and IT governance in place. It also leverages the entire suite of Amazon data products, and even encourages programmers to experiment with new technologies.

“We are very strong proponents of the cloud and have had great success with it,” Kelly said.

But this wasn’t always the case. “We went to the cloud in small isolated packets for two to two-and-a-half years,” Kelly said, “We had 50 applications running on the cloud with no governance … this is where I came in.”

Kelly said that instead of being afraid of these unsanctioned applications running in the cloud, Best Buy looked at them as a new opportunity. It started to view the cloud as a utopian frontier where it could build the scalable data center of its dreams, and do so in a strategic fashion.

“Anything without governance becomes a failure potential,” Kelly said. Best Buy manages enormous amounts of data, undertakes hundreds of new IT projects each year and is responsible for continuous lifecycle management, which makes governance a must, he said.

Rogue applications were brought inside the cloud infrastructure, appropriate policies were put in place and now, Kelly said, Best Buy is able to more successfully and quickly scale up to manage the avalanche of activity it gets on days like Cyber Monday.

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013 San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

OpenStack, the open source cloud platform backed by Rackspace and NASA, is “battle-tested and ready to go,” Lew Moorman, chief strategy officer and president of cloud for Rackspace, said today at the CloudBeat conference in Redwood Shores, Calif.

(We’re live-streaming the CloudBeat conference, so you don’t have to miss a thing.)

140 companies have joined the project and are working to improve the OpenStack code base, Moorman said in a fireside chat with VentureBeat editor-in-chief Matt Marshall.

Moorman also disclosed that NASA and Latin America e-commerce giant MercadoLibra.com are just two of many large organizations already using the private beta OpenStack infrastructure. Sony and PayPal have committed to substantial deployments as well.

OpenStack, now 18 months-old, is available as open-source code and applications that are free to download from the OpenStack website. But until recently there were few applications available from commercial vendors that used the infrastructure.

“We made the decision to make this platform and help the world have a standard,” Moorman said. “We’re getting it ready to be the replacement of our compute fabric … we’re proud of the state that it’s in, but it still needs adjustments for scale.”

So we’ll have to settle for the generic “coming soon” answer for now, but Moorman did add that we should see an “amazing number” of OpenStack deployments in the next six months.

Correction: An earlier version of this story stated that OpenStack was not available to the public. We regret the error.

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013 San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Enterprise cloud platform provider ServiceMesh has raised $15 million in its first-ever round of funding to help businesses better manage their cloud services, the company announced Wednesday morning.

“Our platform makes it possible for companies to completely govern their cloud ecosystems,” ServiceMesh CEO Eric Pulier told VentureBeat. “We’re going to take this new capital and scale the company globally.”

ServiceMesh’s Agility Platform is subscription-based software that gives companies a set of APIs to improve efficiency and cut costs when it comes to implementing cloud services. The Agility Platform (as seen in the image above) is made up of five distinct products: Planner, Designer, CenterPoint, Manager and Access. The company says it has thus far helped financial, health care and retail customers from the Global 2000 better manage their “mission critical” systems.

The company considers big-name players like BMC, IBM and HP as its competition, but only just. “We welcome companies like IBM and BMC to the space, but they are behind us,” Pulier said.

ServiceMesh has been entirely self-funded up to this point, but it accepted the $15 million round of funding from Ignition Partners because it wants to aggressively grow the company.

Frank Artale, a partner at Ignition will join ServiceMesh’s board of directors. Artale has been guiding investments toward major cloud companies, and just last week Ignition led Cloudera’s new $40 million funding round. Ignition also led AppFog’s $8 million round in August.

“To successfully deploy [cloud] services in the enterprise, organizations must be able to bring their cloud, SaaS, and business services together under a unified SLA [service-level agreement], governance and compliance framework,” Artale said, in a statement. “And because of the do-it-yourself approach that enterprise IT and business users take toward consuming cloud resources, organizations need a transparent mechanism for departmental chargebacks and usage analysis. The ServcieMesh platform is unique in its ability to deliver these capabilities.”

Santa Monica, Calif.-based ServiceMesh was founded in mid-2007 and currently has more than 90 employees — quite a feat for being entirely self-funded.

CloudBeat 2011 takes place Nov 30 – Dec 1 at the Hotel Sofitel in Redwood City, CA. Unlike any other cloud event, we’ll be focusing on 12 case studies where we’ll dissect the most disruptive instances of enterprise adoption of the cloud. Speakers include Aaron Levie, Co-Founder & CEO of Box.net; Amit Singh, VP of Enterprise at Google; Adrian Cockcroft, Director of Cloud Architecture at Netflix; Byron Sebastian, Senior VP of Platforms at Salesforce; Lew Tucker, VP & CTO of Cloud Computing at Cisco, and many more. Join 500 executives for two days packed with actionable lessons and networking opportunities as we define the key processes and architectures that companies must put in place in order to survive and prosper. Register here. Spaces are very limited!

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013 San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Zuora aims to be the leader in subscription billing as it raises $36 million in a fourth round of funding.

Redwood City, Calif.-based Zuora will use the money to fuel its overseas expansion and extend its product lines to address the growth of the “subscription economy” around the world. The company offers subscription billing as an easy-to-set-up cloud service with a wide range of offerings.

Zuora says it is rapidly expanding in Europe, particularly in the Netherlands, Germany, France and Ireland.

“We’re going to hit the gas hard, globally,” said Tien Tzuo (pictured), chief executive and co-founder.

The money came from Index Ventures, Greylock Partners, PeopleSoft founder Dave Duffield and Salesforce.com founder Marc Benioff.  Zuora’s existing investors also participated, including Benchmark Capital, Redpoint Ventures, Shasta Ventures, and Tenaya Capital.

To date, the company has raised $82.5 million. Mike Volpi, partner at Index Ventures, is joining Zuora’s board.

The company said that in the first three quarters of operations, the European and Middle East countries have signed up $2.5 billion in contracted subscription transactions.

Co-founders Tzuo and K.V. Rao and Cheng Zou made a good bet in 2007 that industries would shift from a “buy once” product-based model to a services-based economy with recurring subscriptions. They call this the “subscription economy,” and it is rising to the forefront in communications, media, technology, consumer services and other industries. Zuora built a platform to enable businesses to adopt subscription commerce quickly.

Zuora is now one of the fastest-growing private enterprise software companies, with more than 100 percent annual growth in bookings. It has struck 10 deals in the last 18 months worth more than $1 million. It signed up 100 new enterprise and high-growth customers in the first three quarters of 2011, and it doubled its number of employees to nearly 200.

The customer list includes AAA of Northern California, Nevada, Utah, Dell, Concur, IBM Coremetrics, Informatica, News International, Reed Business Information, Qualcomm, Ricoh, Tata Communications, Touring Club Suisse, TripAdvisor, VNU Media and Vocus. Fast-growing customers include Box, Cloud9, DocuSign, Marketo, MuleSoft, Ning, Ooyala, Rearden Commerce, Symplified, TimeTrade, Ustream, Xactly, Yammer and ZenDesk.

Zuora hopes to liberate companies from the “constraints of old guard enterprise systems” such as enterprise resource planning software from SAP and Oracle. It calls their solutions outdated and obsolete in the age of subscription business models.

“There is a clear global mandate for companies to shift rapidly to the services-based subscription economy,” said Tzuo. “The product-focused, industrial economy and the systems that support it are part of the past. It’s time for a new perspective and a new system of record for the subscription economy.”

Gartner says that by 2015, 35 percent of the Global 2000 companies will generate revenue through subscription-based services and revenue models.

Rivals include Chargify, Recurly, Aria Systems, SAP and Oracle.

CloudBeat 2011 takes place Nov 30 – Dec 1 at the Hotel Sofitel in Redwood City, CA. Unlike any other cloud events, we’ll be focusing on 12 case studies where we’ll dissect the most disruptive instances of enterprise adoption of the cloud. Speakers include: Aaron Levie, Co-Founder & CEO of Box.net; Amit Singh VP of Enterprise at Google; Adrian Cockcroft, Director of Cloud Architecture at Netflix; Byron Sebastian, Senior VP of Platforms at Salesforce; Lew Tucker, VP & CTO of Cloud Computing at Cisco, and many more. Join 500 executives for two days packed with actionable lessons and networking opportunities as we define the key processes and architectures that companies must put in place in order to survive and prosper. Register here. Spaces are very limited!