GigaOm Structure convened at the University of California-Mission Bay in San Francisco last week, and it pronounced the new infrastructure paradigm of using cloud for computing workloads - at some level - as "firmly in place."
Various speakers and panelists shared their cloud experiences, whether building mobile apps, developing apps which help IT monitor performance of cloud, networking or other services, or deploying cloud for large enterprises such as Revlon or Twitter.
GigaOm Structure 2013 brought together cloud enthusiats - from those who develop, implement and deploy cloud technology to end-users at Fortune 500 companies. The proceedings were moderated by the ever-entertaining Joe Weinman, who is Senior Vice President, Telx, and author of a book on cloud economics, (Photo: Colleen Miller.)
Former Googler JR Rivers, co-founder and CEO, Cumulus Networks, launched his new company at Structure. Aimed at simplifying physical networks, Cumulus Networks seeks to break down the "single network blob" of hardware, OS, and apps in the network. The networking-focused Linux distribution by Cumulus will run on network switches, and seeks to become the "Linux of Networking." (Photo: Colleen Miller.)
Aneel Bhusri, Chairman, Co-Founder and Co-CEO of Workday, a provider of enterprise cloud applications for human resources and finance, chats with Om Malik. Founded in 2005, Workday went public in October 2012, and continues to raise funding. The key to enterprise cloud applications, Bhusri said, was looking to the consumer application community. "For most any problem in enterprise cloud, someone in consumer cloud has already solved it," he explained. (Photo: Colleen Miller.)
Mohit Lad, of Thousand Eyes, presented about how his performance management software helps end users visualize the entire network. Twitter engineer Rafal Waligora explained how Twitter uses Thousand Eyes to see availability, response time and fetch time metrics on its network. (Photo: Colleen Miller.)
Cynthia Stoddard, SVP ad CIO of NetApp, David Giambruno, SVP and CIO of Revlon, and moderator/GigaOM analyst Dave Ohara discussed cloud infrastructure and innovation on a panel titled, "How Infrastructure Can Transform Business Success." Giambruno deployed internal cloud in 2007 and subsequently reduced data center space by 72 percent and saw $70.4 million in cost savings. With the advent of cloud, Stoddard said her vision of IT is a "broker of services." (Photo: Colleen Miller.)