I spent this week in Orlando at the Gartner Symposium/ITxpo talking about clouds from two perspectives – IT and weather – as we endured  a vigorous tropical storm dumping buckets of rain in the area. It certainly brought a whole new meaning to "cloud bursting" this week!  Kudos to the Gartner team for pulling together a very impressive show, a great mix between the emerging technology providers and more established companies.  I ended up splitting my time between the show floor, where Carpathia had a booth, and attending the main sessions at the event.

The show floor was a lot of fun – a big thanks to everyone who came by to say hi or to do a little white boarding with the Carpathia team.  There is nothing more exciting than hearing and helping develop a plan to address real world IT problems.  I'd say the common theme from the white boarding sessions was storage and big-data.  There was lots of interest in the solutions we have deployed for some of the largest content sites on the Internet, as well as how big-data is helping analytics reach their full potential.  I'm sure this is a trend we will continue to see as we crest into 2012.  

At the event itself there were several good presentations with more emphasis shifting up above the hypervisor to the application and information space.  This year we still had many lively debates on the value of cloud being with automation or management (why cant we have both?).  In fact, Paul Maritz went as far to say that customers are not interested in virtualization and only care about the infrastructure going away.  
 

We can make both the infrastructure and virtualization go away - and have been doing so for many years - leaving customers to focus on what is key for them, while making sense of the data they collect/create and delivering business value to their constituents.  
 

The Carpathia team is available through Thursday @ 1:30pm if you would like to sync up in person.  Stop by #1121 in Pacific Hall!