"Cloud computing’s not a panacea and it’s not the ideal solution for every business situation," wrote Oracle SVP Bob Evans recently in Forbes, "but at the same time, it’s no longer some nebulous (pardon me) theory whose risk is high and whose potential benefits are impossible to quantify."

Evans was commenting on the state of the infrastructure industry in response to a report by McKinsey consultants James Kaplan, Chris Rezek, and Kara Sprague in which they suggested that the recent IDC saying spending on third-party-managed and public-cloud environments will surpass $70 billion in 2015 might significantly under-estimate the true size of the market.



According to the McKinsey authors, 80% of large North American institutions surveyed "are planning or executing programs to make use of cloud environments to host critical applications - mostly by building private-cloud environments.”

To which Evans responds:

"I couldn’t agree more with the McKinsey report, and while the article was not intended to be a comprehensive review of the merits of the cloud approach, I wish the authors had at least touched on a related point that goes to the very heart of not only IT strategy but business strategy: cloud computing can become the fulcrum point around which companies begin to leverage the majority of their IT budgets away from costly and low-impact infrastructure and toward customer-facing and revenue-generating innovation."

It is Evans's opinion, expressed in an earlier article, that Cloud projects "will not be judged on their technical merits or on hitting their go-live dates, but rather by how deeply they impact essential business-transformation initiatives, and by how much business value and opportunity they unlocked."

The report by Kaplan, Rezek, and Sprague, titled "Protecting Information in the Cloud" was published in the McKinsey Quarterly. In their preamble, the authors note:

"As attractive as cloud environments can be, they also come with new types of risks. Executives are asking whether external providers can protect sensitive data and also ensure compliance with regulations about where certain data can be stored and who can access the data. CIOs and CROs are also asking whether building private clouds creates a single point of vulnerability by aggregating many different types of sensitive data onto a single platform."

The strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats that transitioning to the Cloud entails are going to be dealt with extensively at the upcoming 12th Cloud Expo | Cloud Expo New York, being held at the Javits Convention Center in New York City, June 10-13, 2013.

The event, co-located with, 3rd International Big Data Expo, is the undisputed market-leading event in the Cloud & Big Data industry sector, and has been growing show-on-show for eleven successive and successful events.



With its additional Big Data and (new for 2013) SDN components, the event is especially high-energy, and the overall technical program is rich and diffuse, with lots of great sessions, including:

In short - Four Busy Days, Two Crucial Themes, One Convenient Location

Here just to recap are the tracks:

Track 1:  Enterprise Cloud Computing
Track 2:  Big Data
Track 3:  Software Defined Networking
Track 4:  The Internet of Things
Track 5:  SMAC (Social, Mobile, Analytics, Cloud)
Track 6:  Cloud Security & Performance
Track 7:  Hot Topics
Track 8:  Analytics in the Cloud
Track 9:  Cloud Verticals

Our Call for Papers is currently still open. [Submissions Link]. But you only have until March 15, so please don't tarry, submit your proposal right away and perhaps ensure yourself and/or your company a place in the largest showcase in the world for Cloud Computing, Big Data or SDN-related technical and strategy information.

The Jacob K. Javits Convention Center in New York City - Venue for 12th Cloud Expo