Events

Judith Hurwitz, President and CEO, Hurwitz and Associates

Cloud computing conference set for October 5

Your company probably uses some form of cloud computing, and if it doesn’t now, it will soon. The more you know about it, the better able you will be to use it effectively in driving your business forward.

To that end, the Greater Philadelphia Alliance for Capital and Technologies (PACT) and LiquidHub, Inc., will offer a full-day summit of hands-on labs, workshops, exhibits, breakout sessions and live demonstration geared to Chief Information Officers, Chief Financial Officers and Chief Security Officers.

The Next Generation Architecture Summit: Cloud Computing on the Rise will be held on Tuesday, October 5, at the Safeguard Building on the Penn State Great Valley campus in Malvern.

There is some confusion about what cloud computing actually is. “When you ask people whether or not their companies are using cloud computing, most of them say they aren’t. But once you start giving examples of ways cloud computing is used, many of them realize that they depend on cloud computing already, without even thinking about it,” says Robert T. Kelley, Ph.D., Partner and COO at LiquidHub and a member of the advisory board organizing the October 5 event.

Very simply, cloud computing is an approach in which shared resources, software and information are available on demand on the Internet, rather than on mainframes or client-servers.

Examples include Web-hosted email accounts (i.e. gmail, hotmail), Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) services (i.e. Salesforce.com, accounting or time tracking), social media (i.e. Facebook, LinkedIn), Google tools (groups, calendars, maps), Web conferencing, and photo and video sharing and storage — any computer-related task in which the infrastructure, software or platform is housed on the Web.

The summit’s keynote speaker is Judith Hurwitz, President and CEO of Hurwitz and Associates, a strategy consulting and research firm focused on distributed computing technologies. Among other accomplishments, she is Co-Author of Cloud Computing for Dummies, Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) For Dummies and Service Management For Dummies.

Serving on the advisory board for the event along with Kelley are his LiquidHub colleague Ray Bordogna, Paul Melchiorre of Ariba, Anthony Gold of Healthy Humans, Don White of SunGard Financial Services and Dianne Strunk of PACT.