This week I'm attending the ITEXPO Conference in Austin, Texas, and specifically supporting the Cloud Communications Expo and Startup Camp 6 which are both co-located with ITEXPO. The focus of the Cloud Communications Expo is to draw attention to the specifics of migrating from premise-based systems (you know, those phone boxes you see in your LAN room?) to cloud-based systems where your voice/video data and other communications are stored in the cloud. I'm attending on behalf of our client The Cloud Communications Alliance (CCA), the industry’s largest organization specifically dedicated to the advancement of cloud communications technologies for its members.
I'll be recapping several of the sessions this week, contributing as a guest blogger on TelecomReseller and CCA's new blog, The Cloud Communicator.
Tomorrow I'll be covering the StartupCamp, the only entrepreneur pitch event focused exclusively on the communications sector. StartupCamp is produced by EMBRASE, a leading strategy consulting firm to next-generation communications providers.
We'll hear from Michael Tessler, Co-founder and CEO of BroadSoft, in a rare keynote address. If you're anywhere nearby, come join us ;-)
The first two recaps are up:
Building a Strong Case for Unified Communications in the Cloud
![photo[3]](/Portals/126691/images/photo[3].JPG)
Moderator: Peter Bernstein, Senior Editor, TMC
David Scult, CEO, Fonality, @fonality
Dean Parker, President and CEO, Callis Communications @deanparker
Jeff Wissing, UC Senior Product Manager, ADTRAN @jeffwissing
Adam Cole, CEO, Votela, Inc. @votela
Making the Switch: Using the Cloud for Delivery of Rich, Multimedia Communications
![photo[2] resized 600](/Portals/126691/images/photo[2]-resized-600.JPG)
Moderator: Larry Lisser, Embrase @larrylisser
Todd Carothers: VP of Sales CounterPath @tcarothers
Charles Studt: VP of Product Management and Marketing, IntelePeer @IntelePeer
Sean Burke: VP of Sales and Marketing: Telovations @telovations
Stay tuned for more!
-Elizabeth Shea, @eliz2shea
Take away the cloud, and most of our modern technology gurus are selling artisan burgers out the side of an NYC food truck.
So I appreciate the chutzpah necessary for technology analyst and Forbes contributor Roger Kay's systematic take-down of "Google's ideal" cloud-based universe.
Who are we kidding, you're not going to click that link. So allow me to summarize his points:
1. The cloud still can't handle big files (>1GB) efficiently.
2. Unless you live in Silicon Valley or South Korea, your network will fail you.
3. The more operations you conduct in the cloud, the greater your "attack surface."
(In the service of that last point, Kay includes an anecdote about traveling to Shanghai, shutting off all of the network functionality on his iPhone, and still getting remotely hacked by a China Mobile subscriber.)
I like this article because it dares to confront a fairly pervasive tech industry bias. Inside the bubble, we sometimes forget that not everyone in the world is entirely sold yet on cloud computing (or in the case of West Virginia, computing).
But by identifying the specific pain points, we can help non-techies better understand the pros and cons of cloud adoption.