Attendees at the Web 2.0 Cloud Summit say one of the most interesting sessions was the Cloud Panel which had major spokes people from Salesforce (CEO Marc Beniof), Adobe(CTO Lynch), VMWare (CEO Paul Maritz), Google (Enterprise President Dave Girouard) among others. Tim OReilly asked a number of relevant questions – and to some observers the responses were rather frank and open(catching a whiff of Obama-speak?).
For example, Tim OReilly asked two provocative questions:
1)Are Cloud Computing margins too thin even for major participants ?
2)What things are wrong with Current Cloud Computing technologies ?
Salesforces Benioff agreed that margins were mixed but also very attractive in some fast growing areas of Cloud Computing while Googles Girouard argued that it was too early to tell and that the high value to customers would eventually drive the market. Also Benioff pointed out the various integrations available at Salesforce including Google features, plus deep Facebook and Amazon links. However, Adobes Lynch argued that Cloud service providers are still very proprietary in their stacks which inevitably locks users to a particular vendors Cloud solutions. And VMwares Maritz took this observation one step further noting that developers will be challenged since they have to make big bets on who to use before the issue is settled.
You can see the latest sample of some remarkably clear Cloud Truthiness at the Summit Proceedings here and a wrap view at eWeek.