State of the Cloud 2012 was a full house, with attendance ranging from professionals at Google and Motorola, to SMEs such as First Communications and Hexistor. Our three presenters, Brad DeSent from Apex Consulting Group; Chris Kabat from MPS Partners; and Delivered Innovation’s own Michael Topalovich, spoke on leading cloud capabilities.

In response to the event, Justin Hartung, Enterprise Deployment Manager at Google, stated that the turnout of the event “shows how much the cloud has grown,” and how important it is for businesses today to educate themselves on cloud benefits. Russ Pease, Strategic Accounts at Windstream, shared his thoughts, “the event was great; it’s interesting to see so many industry experts participate in a cloud discussion and give their own definition of cloud computing since everyone’s is slightly different.”

We were very excited about the turnout of the event, and would like to share with you what we learned:

Brad DeSent was the first to take the stage and presented on the old vs. new in cloud computing. Old news- cloud computing discussions were centered around public vs. private clouds, what the difference is between SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS, and what essential characteristics such as on-demand service and resource pooling that the cloud provides. Today, discussions circle around topics of mobility due to releases in tablets, smart phones, and mobile apps, security and backup for cloud services, and “cloud by default” deployments in offices, such as Salesforce, Microsoft Office, and Google Docs.

Chris Kabat helped bring to light our understanding of PaaS, IaaS, and storage as a service. A couple big players in Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) are Google and Amazon EC2; in Platform as a Service (PaaS) there are Amazon, Windows Azure, Force.com, and Google; in Storage as a Service (which is a relatively new term), there are Dropbox, Google, and Rackspace, to name a few. Each of these players have unique offerings to consumers, and when exploring cloud possibilities, it is important to investigate and compare options.

Some interesting statistics:

• 72% of professionals feel more positive about cloud computing than they did 1 year ago

• Cloud computing is predicted to stay in progressive growth mode, with 53% of professionals wanting more clarity around cloud offerings, and 47% wanting more clarity around deployments.

Lastly, our CTO took the stage. Running 100% in the cloud for the past two years, Mike Topalovich gave a run down of the cloud applications that Delivered Innovation uses on a daily basis. Topalovich gave us a quick demo of Evernote for note taking and web clipping, Remember the Milk for task management, Quickbooks for finance management, and Google Docs for document and project collaboration. With these tools, Delivered Innovation has been able to more effectively run our business, making accessibility to information quicker and easier than ever before. Some other applications to consider for your business are Dropbox for storage, Expensify for expense management, DocVerify for document management, Basecamp for project management, and ZenDesk for an online help desk.

With so many cloud applications, there comes an issue with integration- how can you integrate one application with another? Better yet, how can you integrate five applications into one? Topalovich answered this question by stating that applications can be integrated into PaaS services, such as the Force.com platform. That allows for the application to be integrated into a SaaS environment, in this example it would be Salesforce. The added benefit being paying a one time fee for integration and customization, then having it available for full usage. This cuts down on management of different cloud applications, as you could manage them in one place, in one dashboard.

Thank you to everyone who attended our event, we enjoyed your feedback and look forward to seeing you again soon! If you have any further questions or comments about this event, please comment below, or email me at jbuhrman/deliveredinnovation.com.