VentureBeat CloudBeat 2011 Preview: Less Talk, More Cloud

By the time you read this, I should be well on my way to Redwood City, Calif. — a 45 minute train ride south of my home base here in San Francisco — for the inaugural VentureBeat CloudBeat 2011 conference, which aims to cut out the cloud hype and focus on actual usage models for enterprises and service providers alike.

CloudBeat is boasting that over 500 cloud executives will be in attendance, from VPs of product development to investors to analysts to, well, bloggers like yours truly. And at least in theory, those attendees will be representing the best and brightest in the cloud marketplace right now across businesses of all sizes.

Here’s a sample of who’s going to be speaking over the course of the two day conference:

• Oracle VP of Technology Product Marketing Rick Shultz
• Google VP of Enterprise Amit Singh
• Salesforce.com Executive VP of Platforms Byron Sebastian
• Rackspace Hosting President Lew Moorman
• Box.net Co-founder and CEO Aaron Levie
• Eucalyptus Systems CEO Marten Mickos

And far too many others to list here. As you can see, though, these guys aren’t small potatoes in the SaaS world. The centerpieces of the conference’s agenda are the Case Studies, where organizations that have actually made the cloud transition will discuss the solutions and strategies that got them there. It’s an inversion of the usual egocentric conferences we attend, where vendors will crow about all the customers they’ve helped, and I’m looking forward to hearing what comes of it.

I’ll be on the floor for most of the day tomorrow, so make sure to say “hi” if you see me wandering the halls. And in the meanwhile, keep an eye on TalkinCloud for updates from CloudBeat 2011.