Your humble correspondent just locked in his attendance at next week’s Cloud Connect Santa Clara conference, which is probably the largest company-agnostic trade show of the season. I mean, Santa Clara, Calif., and the entire stretch south of San Francisco is where Google, Facebook, Yahoo!, Salesforce.com and many, many other cloud mainstays make their home, so it’s no wonder this is shaping up to be a heck of a party.

Somewhat surprisingly, first-day keynotes are coming from Cisco VP and CTO of Cloud Computing Lew Tucker and IBM VP of Global Cloud Services Jen Jackman. I don’t want to undersell their cloud initiatives, but those two companies aren’t known for their cloud thought leadership. Maybe the legacy vendors see Cloud Connect as a chance to turn that perspective around a little bit.

But personally, I’m most excited for Nebula CEO and OpenStack project founder Chris C. Kemp’s keynote on the arrival of enterprise-ready private clouds. Moreover, Google’s Peter S. Magnusson will be presenting on the importance of using platform-as-a-service for modern application deployment. Finally, longtime TalkinCloud readers will know that I love keeping an eye on the legal issues that swirl around the cloud, so I’m very much looking forward to Business Software Alliance President and CEO Robert Holleyman offering his perspectives on the matter.

Otherwise, it’s going to have plenty of exhibitors, plenty of cloud chatter and plenty of professional networking events, and generally looks like a good place to get a feel for how the cloud market is going to develop in 2012. If you’re going to be there, drop me a line; we should meet up.

One final note, though: Scheduling a cloud event in the South Bay on Valentine’s Day? Weak, guys. Weak.