The Amazon Web Services Cloud Summit 2011

On Friday, I was one of the Riverbed folks who got to attend the Amazon Web Services Summit 2011 at the New York Hilton in midtown Manhattan. Originally, this event was scheduled to be held at the much smaller Roosevelt Hotel, but when registration outstripped that venue's capacity Amazon moved it to the larger New York Hilton. 

I didn't get an exact count of attendees, but the main presentation room had nearly 1000 chairs set up, and during the middle of the day, the space was pretty much full. 

And the Riverbed booth, one of only a couple of dozen in the Vendor Expo, was very busy.  (Yes, our candy jar helped, but there were a tremendous number of good intelligent conversations...) We had a lot of questions about our Whitewater Cloud Storage Accelerator, and about Cloud Steelhead.  We also had a number of questions from people who were not familiar with what we do at all, and seemed pretty impressed.

There seemed to be general agreement that the cloud has already become incredibly important and useful (though, to be fair, the crowd was self-selecting for that point of view...), but that it can be very slow, especially when sending large files over long distances. 

It really does seem that as much as enterprises need the cloud, the cloud needs Riverbed.

If this event wasn't geographically convenient for you, there are currently two more AWS Cloud Summits scheduled, one for tomorrow in London, and another the following Tuesday in San Francisco.  You can see the agendas here.  (They may be sold out; there will be additional events later.)