How is the weather today? Is it still "Cloudy"? While on-demand computing is an outgrowth of data centers, timesharing, and virtualization, the essence of IT is u ndoubtedly Cloud Computing. The last year has yielded a more mature cloud marketplace, offering SLAs a wide range of services as well as standardization. Traditional enterprise vendors have launched their cloud strategies, forcing companies of all shapes and sizes to take extra attention to the weather forecast. Long-term strategic thinking and planning seems be the No.1 leadership competency CIOs should embrace.

This high-energy opening keynote will look into where we are today and how CIOs together with cloud computing is quickly closing the adoption gap. Let's check the coordinates of CIOs on this new roadmap.

With the rise of consumer technology in the enterprise and the business's insatiable appetite for IT, the CIO's job is only getting harder and hard. It is merely the beginning of another tough journey after the CIOs sign on the dotted line for any cloud deal. In this session, we will investigate their navigation menu.

Panel highlights:

• CIO in the Cloud - Obstacles or Opportunities?
• Hindrances to Hurdle when Implementing Cloud Technologies Across Businesses
• What to Look before You Leap to IT Transformation
• Maintaining high motivation levels to bring out the best out of in your staff
• Creating Organizational Readiness - Cloud as a Structural Change in Your Business
• Implementation Experiences of the Early Movers: Best Practices and Pitfalls

Among today's most pressing IT challenges is the need to reenergize the data center to readily accommodate changing business requirements and demands for always-accessible information. But with an erratic economic climate and escalating IT costs, the data center has become a ticking time bomb. To solve the dilemma of swiftly meeting both data growth and budgetary ultimatums, IT must be agile. In this session, Hitachi Data Systems will show you how cloud computing can assist your business to achieve agility and introduce you the latest cloud services to optimize return on investment.

At the session, Orange Business Services will cover:

• Why Enterprises are embracing the Cloud?
• Picking the right Cloud Delivery model
• Pragmatic Cloud Implementation Examples
• Why Cloud Computing with Orange?
• How and where to start the Cloud Transformation journey?

Nine out of 10 data center decision makers view private cloud as the next logical step for their organizations. But is your infrastructure fully ready?

To turn your data center from Cloud Risky to Cloud Ready, there are vital steps to preparing your IT infrastructure.

Step 1: you must know what you have and where it is
Step 2: you must have far-reaching remote control
Step 3: you must be able to manage fluctuating power needs
Step 4: you must be able to plan for rapid change

What's the TCO of the cloud? How do we select the best providers? In addition to reviewing a provider's cloud-specific offerings, the CIO must ask questions about the provider's capability to manage the long-term Information as of March 30, 2011 IT transformation to a hybrid cloud environment as it encompasses all aspects of IT, and enterprises will need to take a phased approach. The questions raised need to encompass:

• The provider's ability to integrate and aggregate multiple cloud services, governance, risk, and compliance
• Cloud-burst capabilities in the provider's data centers
• Interoperability skills, tools, and methodologies
• Strategic partnerships with cloud technology hardware, software, and platform partners

In this session, you will learn about the VMware journey to cloud computing, the prescriptive adoption path taken by successful VMware customers in getting to cloud computing through enterprise virtualization. VMware conducted primary research with a number of enterprise and global customer users on how they are successfully deploying virtualization and demonstrating its business values. Learn the key elements of the journey and how to assess your progress toward your virtualization goals.

While there is much talk about how to secure data and systems in cloud computing, there are many gaps remain in implementing such security. One of these keys to security in a multi-tenant infrastructure is to establish trust - trust with providers, trust with users and trust as data is exchanged. Also described will be requirements to exchange information about the platforms they use, assure compliance to agreed policies, and provide measurement of platform state. The role of trust and leveraging existing standards to develop an end-to-end reference implementation framework that aligns with business/mission objectives and validates security compliance across public and Private business sectors will be addressed.

In this session, the speaker will address the end-to-end requirements inherent in securing cloud computing and discuss ideas for tools that can be developed to assist in implementing these requirements. Let's learn how to fill up those gaps.

A visionary Panel comprises of cloud computing industry leaders will discuss the trends we're seeing in cloud computing, what the next year holds, and how the cloud ecosystem is evolving. We'll look at standards, latest regulation, and reveal what cloud issues will be at the top of enterprise IT's list in 2011.

• How the Cloud ecosystem is evolving
• Cloud issues on the top of enterprise IT's list in 2011
• Trends for the next 5 years
• How the industry is addressing users' concerns in Cloud Computing