a view from VMworld two weeks on

Orange was a sponsor at the European VMworld event in Copenhagen 12-14 October. I took part in a press round table (with more than 80 journalists) for service providers along with COLT, Siemens and Elisa (a Nordic service provider) and did a number of face-to-face press interviews. On the last day Stephan Hadinger - Head of the Orange API / Telco 2.0 team, gave a presentation about the promise of Cloud Computing and shared our experiences in this field.

In the various conversations I had, I got the impression that the market conversation is moving this year from being about the technology used to implement Cloud technology to being about the business models for Cloud (Public, Private, Hybrid...) and how best to source and manage Cloud solutions. This is probably best summed up by the phrase "IT as a Service" which was used by many people.

Having said all that, most of the people actually attending the event and going to the sessions seemed to be still deeply interested in the technology; the difference this year is that a lot of that technology is now aimed at helping IT become a service provider to the rest of the business rather than just managing virtual machines into being.