Cloud computing has become a subject of increasing interest over the last few years but what exactly is ‘Cloud’ and what does it mean for business both now and in the longer term?

This event gives you the opportunity to hear experts describe exactly what is meant by ‘Cloud Computing’, to hear from businesses already using cloud services and gaining benefits, to quiz an expert panel and to workshop with other business people. This will help you to find out what the advantages and drawbacks are of commitment to the use of Cloud Computing.

Agenda:

12:30-12:45 Registration

12:45-13:15 Lunch and Networking

13:15-13:25 Introduction, Opening remarks from Chair

13:25-14:00 Keynote Address ‘Towards the Cloud!’ An overview of a Cloud – delivery and deployment, market dynamics, opportunities and challenges (Ian Osborne, Director of the Digital Systems Knowledge Transfer Network)

14:00-14:30 Who’s Who in ‘Cloud’? A review of existing and near-future Cloud service providers and the products that they offer (Phil Worms, Marketing Director, iomart Group).

14:30-14:55 Getting Ready for the Cloud. A quick look at the technical and non-technical stepping stones for cloud computing (Mahesha Pandit, Programme Manager-Scalable Computing, Digital Systems Knowledge Transfer Network

14:55-15:15 Refreshments

15:15-16:00 What can ‘Cloud’ do for me? Case studies of the use of ‘Cloud’ in real business scenarios

* Speaker – Dr James Huntington

IT Farm provide a fully managed IT system for finance, law, recruitment or life science businesses. Using the latest cloud technology, their system consists of servers, software and support which can be tailored to the needs of your business.

* Speaker – Andrew Smithson

Commercial lawyers with experience in technology transfer and exploitation. They have a number of lawyers working remotely and we use cloud technology to provide a unified service.

16:00-16:35 Q&A panel session with the speakers (Moderator: Ian Osborne)

16:35-16:45 Closing remarks from the Chair.

ABOUT THE SPEAKERS

Philip Hargrave, DC KTN

Philip is the CEO and Network Director of the Digital Comm- unications Knowledge Transfer Network (KTN), established by the Technology Strategy Board to bring a competitive advantage to the UK by helping to drive innovation.

Philip previously worked as Chief Scientist, Europe Middle East and Africa for Nortel, and is a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering.

Ian Osborne, DS KTN

Ian Osborne is Director of the Digital Systems KTN, a Technology Strategy Board funded programme operated by Intellect, QinetiQ and National Physical Laboratory. He also chairs the BCS Distributed and Scalable Computing Specialist Group, and is VP of Enterprise for the Open Grid Forum and a Principal in the European FP7 Project, OGF-Europe.

Ian has worked in ICT since 1972, latterly with HP’s Corporate Research Laboratories in Bristol and Telecom Systems Business in Edinburgh.

Phil Worms, iomart Group

Phil Worms is the director of marketing for iomart Group plc, one of Europe’s largest providers of managed hosting, cloud computing and business continuity services. Having spent 25 years working in the IT industry he is recognised as one of its brightest thinkers. He regularly contributes internet and “new media” related features for trade publications and national newspapers and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. He is an advocate of social media using it for both business and charitable causes.

Phil has sat on several national advisory committees ranging from the provision of broadband access to online safety initiatives. He is now heavily involved in the debate surrounding the greening of IT with energy efficiency and carbon emission reduction a particular topic of interest.

Mahesha Pandit, DSKTN

As a programme manager, Mahesha Pandit is driving the scalable computing programme of Digital Systems KTN. He has around 14 years of IT industry experience in automotive and aerospace domains. His interests include software architectures and software engineering.

Please contact Carolyn Hayes c.hayes2@lancaster.ac.uk or 01524 510465 if you have any problems with registering.

via Cloud Computing – Eventbrite.

Description:

The 2nd annual Cloud Computing World Forum is the perfect event to learn and discuss the development, integration, adoption and future of cloud and SaaS.

Building on the success of the 2009 show, this two day conference and free-to-attend exhibition will provide a focused platform for the global cloud computing and SaaS industry.

Organiser:
Keynote

via 2nd Cloud Computing World Forum | Chinwag – the UK’s leading community media company for the new media industry.

Description

About CloudCamp:

CloudCamp is an unconference where attendees can exchange ideas, knowledge and information in a creative and supporting environment, advancing the current state of cloud computing and related technologies.

As an informal, member-supported gathering, we rely entirely on volunteers to help with meeting content, speakers, meeting locations, equipment and membership recruitment. We also have corporate sponsors that provide financial assistance with venues, food, drink, software, services and other valuable donations

Location:

The event will take place at the Gateshead Heritage @ St Marys building in Gateshead…this is located between the Sage Gateshead and the Tyne Bridge. You can find a map here: http://tinyurl.com/ydcsexj

Interested in more CloudCamps?

- visit http://www.cloudcamp.org/

Organiser:

CloudCamp

Website:
http://www.cloudcamp.org/

via CloudCamp Gateshead | Chinwag – the UK’s leading community media company for the new media industry.

Google's Parisian Love campaign told a virtual love story to the Superbowl audience.

The search engine giant, that previously has relied strongly on word-of-mouth hype in its marketing, has turned to creative agencies for a new advertising campaign, The Marketing Week reports.

Agencies across the UK have been invited to pitch for a campaign that will focus on promoting Google’s search facilities.

It is not yet officially decided where the future campaign will be aired. Google has said it’s not looking into following last month’s campaign at the Superbowl with advertising in the next massive sports event, the World Cup.

The news follow Microsoft’s announcement of a multimillion ad campaign to promote its search engine Bing in the UK. The company is trying to gain market share by portraying Bing as a “decision engine” with Google’s search associated with information overload.

Earlier this week, Google added to the rivalry of the two companies by opening an online shop for business software. Google Apps Marketplace involves more than 50 companies offering a wide-variety of cloud-based business software.

Chris Vander Mey, Google’s product manager, said: “The Google Apps Marketplace eliminates the worry about software updates, keeping track of different passwords and manual syncing and sharing of data, thereby increasing business productivity and lessening frustrations for users and IT administrators alike.”

Sources: Marketing Week, The Guardian, The Independent

Cloud Computing has far-reaching implications for businesses. Don’t get left behind – find out how to take advantage at ‘Cloud Seminar’, an event featuring Microsoft and Sage.

In recent reports both The Economist and Business Week have commented how cloud computing – where software, data and services are hosted on the internet – will transform the business world. Make no mistake ‘the cloud’ is going to be disruptive to IT. It offers significant threats to market incumbents but huge opportunities to new entrants and established companies that respond quickly.

Head to Cloud Seminar on 28th January 2010 to discover how you can benefit. The event, sponsored by Sunderland Software City is just £20 to attend and will take place at Middlesbrough Football Club on 28th January 2010 between 10am and 1pm – Places are limited so book now. To book your place contact Jill Newey on 0191 305 5095 or by email, jill@riseconsultants.co.uk.

What will you learn?

Delegates will leave the seminar with a clear view of the compelling reasons for using cloud computing – and how to do it.

Session one | The Public Cloud

Microsoft one of the world’s leading cloud providers, talk about the benefits of cloud computing. Discover who is using it and for what – and find out how you too can get started. Speakers: Steve Caughey (Arjuna) and Simon Davies (architect at Microsoft).

Session two | The Private Cloud

A number of leading North East businesses, including Sage and Arjuna Technologies, will talk about their practical experiences of using cloud technology.

How to book?

Call Jill Newey on 0191 305 5095 or by email at jill@riseconsultants.co.uk.

via Cloud Seminar | Arjuna Technologies Limited.

Description

2 Day Web 2.0 conference covering web 2.0 interface and innovations.

Interface tackles how users and their clients connect to the web 2.0 phenomenon and “how best to” engage them. Innovation addresses web entrepeneurial challenges and new technologies.

Finally 6 web entrepreneurs will be invited to the event to pitch for venture capital. There will be one lucky start-up receiving this. There will also be a people’s award as voted by the conference attendees.

The conference covers the following: social networking, blogging, cloud computing, security, mobile web, ecommerce, and showing ‘HOW TO’ make your business successful with Web 2.0 innovations!

Web 2.0 enthusiasts will enjoy the following topics:

> WEB 2.0 & Cloud computing
> Monetization of the web,
> Browser wars & web operating systems,
> The mobile web,
> Social networks.

More info: web 2.0 ii Interface & Innovation Conference

Book Tickets for Web 2.0 ii Interface & Innovation

Organiser
Aries Forth
Contact:
Email / +34 93 272 3726
Website:
http://www.web2event.com

Apply now for Digital Mission to SXSWi 2010 – click for info & form

via Web 2.0 ii Interface & Innovation Conference, London, 2009 | Chinwag – the UK’s leading community media company for the new media industry.

With around 50 per cent of TMG’s back office systems now being hosted on the internet, Cheesbrough added: “We would like to get that much closer to 100 per cent so we can free up resources.”

Since arriving at the Telegraph, Cheesbrough has overseen the implementation of several cloud computing projects including deployments with Amazon, Google Apps and Salesforce.com.

In July last year, TMG also moved its 1,400 employees onto Google Apps following a successful trial of the technology to access email, documents and other work-related information.

The business is now using hosted CRM from Salesforce.com to manage its subscription service and advertising sales, as well as its expanding ecommerce business.

TMG has also been using Amazon’s EC2 cloud computing infrastructure to support business intelligence and analytics work carried out via Salesforce.com’s Force.com platform.

The company is currently talking to financial software company Coda about running some of its payment processing on Force.com, while HR and project management applications are also likely to be hosted outside the business.

Cheesbrough said one of the benefits of moving so many applications into the cloud is that the tech team can spend more time innovating within the business.

“My internal team can really focus on doing new stuff rather than looking after the feed and water,” he said.

According to Cheesbrough, the implementation of new technology is also significantly faster using the cloud model, while it can enable access to greater IT capability without increasing headcount.

“As a technology function we’re under huge pressure to control our costs and to deliver more,” he said.
The cloud can also help cut costs, the CIO added: TMG estimates that over the next three years it will spend a fifth of what it would have done for similar on-premises software from Microsoft.

The move into the cloud has been prompted by the way in which the Telegraph’s business is changing. The company has experienced a five per cent annual drop in newspaper circulation which now stands at around 800,000 while there has been a 120 per cent year on year increase in online audience which is around the 28 million mark.As a result the digital side of the business is becoming much more important and has required a significant upgrade to the company’s online technology capabilities.

“Our traditional business model is really under pressure. We’re really in the process of flipping the company upside down. That certainly poses challenges to the technology function internally,” he said.

The company previously used the same service for the BBC’s Visual Radio trial in January, through which listeners could see Chris Moyles at work and interact with him through messaging and polls. Monterosa is also developing the next version of the BBC’s fantasy football-style Celebdaq game in the cloud and expects to use Amazon’s service during peak traffic.

“The cloud is fantastic at handling traffic spikes around events like The Apprentice,” says Simon Brickle, project director at Monterosa. “We could pay £400 a month per server when they’d only be used for an hour a week, or we can pay Amazon by the minute for what we need and make a huge saving.

“Setting up capacity on the cloud can take some getting used to, but now we’ve done it we can switch on extra servers easily and scale up and down really quickly,” he adds.
Monterosa is in the process of training staff at its hosting sites to operate the extra servers it commissions and provide support. “The cloud’s very robust but you don’t get any guarantees, and that’s not good enough for our clients. So we’ve been providing support ourselves, just in case,” says Brickle.

“We can do this during each episode of The Apprentice but for longer projects we’re working on using our host’s 24/7 support team to provide a service-level agreement our clients are happy with.

Thanks to NMA for the case studies

This issue of control appears to a major reason for not all content owners being convinced by the cloud. Property site Rightmove’s head of development Nathan Barron says, “I’m not sure we’d seriously consider the cloud as we’d be concerned we were giving away control over our content. We mostly work through estate agents using our site to sell or rent properties, and they expect details to be updated instantly and the site always to be available. We store our database in three locations to make sure we’re always up — we could lose one set of servers without impacting the site’s performance. I really don’t think we’d be able to confidently offer that level of service if we didn’t control the servers ourselves.”

Provided companies can look beyond these concerns and ensure an agreement is in place that both parties are happy with, publishers say the cloud is proving a vibrant marketplace for enterprise software. It’s particularly suited to hosting and distributing content that can be scaled up or down at minimal cost yet maximum speed to meet the everyday needs of users, as well as coping with spikes caused by popular content and major events.

“We estimate that by moving our web content onto the cloud we’ve saved around 50% compared to the hosting contract we were on,” says Kiss lead developer Gareth Morris. “We wanted to move because the cloud is more cost-effective, but it also has the advantage of being able to scale up easily if we have, say, a week of planned activity from DJs to drive people to the website. The only downside is you need to work with tools supported by your cloud provider, but that hasn’t been a major problem. We’ve been able to work with what’s available to us, and new software and tools are constantly being launched.”