The overall conference theme of Cloud Computing Conference & Expo Europe, which will take place, May 18-19, 2009, in Prague, Czech Republic is "Deploying Cloud Computing in the Enterprise." Here we present a round-up of Themes & Topics that will be covered in the rich array of breakout sessions, General Sessions, and Power Panel dicussions at the 2-day event.

Our organizing principle for the Prague event is that through our intensive schedule of keynotes, general and breakout sessions, attending delegates will be assured of leaving with abundant resources, ideas and examples they can apply immediately to leveraging the Cloud, helping them to maximize performance, minimize cost and improve the scalability of their Enterprise IT endeavors.

The event is co-located with SYS-CON's Virtualization Conference Europe 2009.

Register Today for a Golden Pass and Attend Both Events - Plus Cloud Computing Bootcamp Free !

TOPICS TO BE COVERED INCLUDE:

Amazon EC2/ S3 - see Cloud Science

Amazon Web Services - see Equinox Above the Cloud

Application Portability - Application portability will be a key ingredient of the Multi-Cloud World envisaged by Director of Business Development at RightScale Uri Budnik, who will be giving a session in Prague covering the factors he believes organizations today must consider when choosing among cloud offerings from vendors such as Amazon, Google and Salesforce.com. "Being able to port applications and avoid getting 'locked in' to one cloud platform is critical, and must be a primary concern for anyone planning to move mission critical applications to the cloud," Budnik will argue. He will be discussing what specific steps organizations can take to maximize application portability and minimize cloud lock-in by applying the basic lock-in rule-of-thumb: "the higher the cloud layer you operate in, the greater the lock-in."

Building Great Companies on the Cloud - is the theme of the Opening Keynote in Prague, to be given by Good Data CEO Roman Stanek, a technology visionary who has spent the past fifteen years building world-class technology companies. Specifically Stanek will share with delegates his thoughts on how to use cloud computing as a technical design center; how to take advantage of the economics of cloud computing in building and operating cloud services; how to dramatically change customer adoption; and how to plan for the technical and operational scale that cloud computing makes possible.

Cloudbursting - RightScale Director of Business Development Uri Budnik will be giving a session in Prague covering the factors he believes organizations today must consider when choosing among cloud offerings from vendors such as Amazon, Google and Salesforce.com, will also be discussing how lock-in can affect private enterprise clouds and "cloudbursting."

Cloud Computing Architectures - As IT shops in companies large and small try to do more with less resources, they are looking to cloud computing for its flexible resource usage, low capital and operational costs and ease of management. In a session titled "Gaining Competitive Edge with Cloud Computing Architectures," Pavel Georgiev, an AppLogic Systems Engineer at 3Tera, Inc., will demonstrate some of the strategic benefits and capabilities of a global cloud platform that incorporates both the use of public cloud services and private cloud platforms.

Cloud IA - see Cloud Infrastructure and Application

Cloud Infrastructure and Application - To harness the potentials of Cloud Computing to small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), the Hochschule Furtwangen University (HFU) has established a new Cloud Computing project called Cloud Infrastructure and Application (CloudIA). In a session to be given in Prague, Professor Christoph Reich - Head of IT at HFU - will be explaining how the CloudIA project is a market-oriented infrastructure that leverages different VM technologies and supports Service-Level Agreement (SLA) as PaaS and IaaS models. "Several unique offerings of CloudIA are overbooking of physical hardware to run more VMs, Single-Sign-On using Shibboleth for external applications, such as Google Apps and Online Learning and Training (OLAT), and creating personalized VMs and service containers on-demand," notes Reich, who aims in his session to show delegates that the CloudIA project offers better resource utilization and helps SMEs to increase productivity and reduce IT costs.

Cloud Lock-in - Being able to port applications and avoid getting 'locked in' to one cloud platform is critical, and must be a primary concern for anyone planning to move mission critical applications to the cloud. That is the view of RightScale Director of Business Development Uri Budnik, who will be giving a session in Prague covering the factors he believes organizations today must consider when choosing among cloud offerings from vendors such as Amazon, Google and Salesforce.com. He will be discussing what specific steps organizations can take to maximize application portability and minimize cloud lock-in by applying the basic lock-in rule-of-thumb: "the higher the cloud layer you operate in, the greater the lock-in."

Cloud Science - In his Prague session called "Cloud Science: Astrometric Processing in Amazon EC2/S3," Paul Parsons - Founder & CTO of The Server Labs - will be showing how, with the maturing of cloud computing, it is now feasible to run scientific applications in the cloud. His session will evaluate Amazon's EC2/S3 suitability for this scenario, by running a distributed astrometric process developed for the European Space Agency's Gaia mission in Amazon EC2. "The aim is to demonstrate how cloud computing systems can be a cost-effective solution for HPC applications," says Parsons.

Dynamic Deployment and Scalability - see Scalability for the Cloud

Eclipse & Cloud Computing - see Equinox Above the Cloud

Equinox Above the Cloud - This is the intriguing title of the session to be given in Prague by Harald Kornmayer, Senior Researcher at NEC Laboratories Europe. His session will demonstrate how "goodies" from different Eclipse projects can be combined to build applications on Cloud infrastructures. "The g-Eclipse project is building an integrated workbench framework to access the power of existing Grid and Cloud infrastructures," says Kornmayer. "In addition to accessing scientific Grid infrastructures, the g-Eclipse project implemented support for Amazon Web Services (AWS) proving that there is no substantial difference between Grid and Cloud computing. Together, Equinox and OSGi provide a fundamental infrastructure for defining modules, managing lifecycles and facilitating collaboration between modules. Both are addressing the programming challenges in dynamic, modular and extensible systems on top of cloud infrastructures."

European Space Agency - see Cloud Science

Multi-Cloud World - Application portability will be a key ingredient of the Multi-Cloud World envisaged by RightScale Co-founder & CEO Michael Crandell, who will be giving a session in Prague covering the factors he believes organizations today must consider when choosing among cloud offerings from vendors such as Amazon, Google and Salesforce.com. "Being able to port applications and avoid getting 'locked in' to one cloud platform is critical, and must be a primary concern for anyone planning to move mission critical applications to the cloud," Crandell will argue. He will be discussing what specific steps organizations can take to maximize application portability and minimize cloud lock-in by applying the basic lock-in rule-of-thumb: "the higher the cloud layer you operate in, the greater the lock-in."

Service Component Architecture - see Using Cloud Services with Service Component Architecture

Using Cloud Services with Service Component Architecture - is the focus of a session to be given in Prague by IBM Senior Software Engineer Doug Tidwell. The session will use live demos to illustrate how to create an SCA service from code and data in the cloud. "Once the services are assembled with SCA," says Tidwell, "we'll illustrate how changes to the services don't affect the applications that use them." He says that the session will show delegates how the combination of cloud computing and SCA can give their applications maximum flexibility.

Scalability for the Cloud - Jerome Bernard, Director of EMEA Operations at Elastic Grid, will be giving a session discussing an approach to Cloud Computing that provides dynamic allocation, management and scalability of applications through the cloud. "Cloud Computing providers allow a fantastic way to deploy scalable machine images easily and on demand," notes Bernard. "However, there is a finer grain of scalability that must be provided, allowing individual application assets to easily scale to meet the demands of a running system."

Sun's Public Cloud - Arseniy Kuznetsov, Director of Sun Cloud Computing Core Engineering at Sun Microsystems, will in a General Session in Prague be outlining Sun's vision and strategy for cloud computing, highlighting the Sun Cloud - Sun's Public Cloud Service that leverages a broad range of Sun's innovative hardware and software technology and products. He will give an overview presentation and practical demonstrations / demos will showcase how cloud-based compute and storage resources enable users to deploy applications quickly, easily and inexpensively.