Mid-Atlantic CIO Forum Meeting Announcement

CIO Roundtable: “Cloud Computing On Demand”

Thursday, March 19, 2009

Location: Towson University

Note: Early formal meeting start time is 8:45AM; Brunch starts at 8AM

Please plan to join CIO members and invited guests at the March 19 meeting of the Mid-Atlantic CIO Forum.  The topic for this meeting is “Cloud Computing on Demand”. Cloud Computing is an emerging, Internet based computing environment where IT capabilities are provided as a service while the complex computing infrastructure needed to provide the capabilities are concealed in a “cloud”. Sometimes called a utility computing model, cloud computing on demand reflects the wealth of scalability, commoditization, and flexibility resulting from the convergence of current technology fronts including virtualization, standardization and service oriented architecture. For this meeting the Forum will examine the strategies and approaches through the vision and experience of three organizations prominent in cloud computing infrastructures, applications and services.

Dr. Robert JT Morris, Vice President, Services Research, IBM will present “Cloud Computing – The Rest of the Story”.

“‘The revolution of cloud computing is broader, deeper and more far-reaching than the visions being articulated.  We will share the Cloud perspective from IBM's Global Technology Outlook.  IBM Research's vision builds on current capabilities in infrastructure clouds, but reaches up into a higher level of services, including application and people clouds (e.g., crowdsourcing) that will shape our future.  The basic idea of clouds is not new, and we will discuss which of the "derailments" of the past have been solved, and which ones will continue to require careful scrutiny if we are now to capitalize on the promise.  We will conclude with some examples of today's most novel and promising clouds, and also some that are under development.”

Paul Maritz, President and CEO of VMware, Inc, will discuss the VMware cloud computing initiative.

“You can divide the cloud today into two categories. One is the enterprise cloud, and there is one, for want of a better phrase, that I call the new-age cloud. The enterprise cloud is really about providing the opportunity for existing IT customers to take their existing workloads and have somebody else supply the underlying infrastructure … The other type of cloud is what I call the new-age cloud. This is about supporting fundamentally new applications. It's not about the current applications that are being used in the IT space. Ultimately the two will come together.” (Maritz, Newsweek, 2009)

Rajen Sheth, Senior Product Manager Cloud will explore the benefits of cloud for IT, some of the common myths, as well as how Google is approaching cloud computing for businesses.

 "For Google, cloud computing offers us the chance to bridge the consumer world with the enterprise world.   From the beginning, we have focused on building a scalable, reliable infrastructure that is enterprise ready, and we have built collaborative tools with origins in the consumer world that make business users more productive.  I will talk about Google's approach in using the concept of cloud computing to bring consumer innovation to the enterprise, and I will talk about the Google Apps cloud computing platform for businesses."

Please join our members at the meeting! The meeting starts at 8:00 AM and ends by 1PM. Note: the formal part of the meeting will be starting earlier than usual, i.e. at 8:45Am.  Brunch and lunch are provided. Brunch still starts the usual time: 8:00 AM. Pre-registration is required. Meeting logistics including directions to the meeting place and parking information will be emailed to you after you register. For registration for this meeting, please contact: Bonnie Lawson at blawson@towson.edu or 410-704-4252.