Cloudscape VI

CloudScape held its 6^th annual session in Brussels, at Microsoft center this year, bringing together more than a hundred experts in cloud computing from both public and private sector, with participants from both SMEs and large enterprises.

CloudScape focuses on advancing current knowledge on cloud computing and looks at the issues that are becoming more and more prevalent: privacy, data protection and migration to the cloud. When the conference was launched in 2008, to many the cloud was a completely new concept; today, success stories about cloud implementations and alignment with the EU strategy on cloud computing are commonplace.

"Cloud is still very emergent" said Ken Ducatel, head of Cloud Computing at the European Commission. "There are a lot of business models and they're very complex; there is no one-size fits all solution"

Use of the cloud by enterprise is on the rise, however, the biggest impact on the European economy is expected to be from cloud adoption by SMEs. The MobiCloud project, represented by Vladimir Bataev from EsperantoXL, was invited to demonstrate their applications and to sit on the expert panel on start-ups and small business in the cloud.

The panel included experts from KTH, University of Calabria and several commercial projects, such as Transmetrics, F-Secure and ClouDesire. The panelists discussed the start up techniques used by SMEs to develop applications and meet the demands of users and how to build viable business models. They also shared their concerns over the absence of viable alternatives to Amazon Web Services in Europe. Opportunities in the enterprise market that can be exploited by SMEs were highlighted as well.

The MobiCloud consortium includes 4 technology SMEs, and SMEs are an important customer and user group for the platform and the applications running on it. Moreover, MobiCloud believes that SMEs that develop mobile applications will be the major source of innovation for the more traditionally conservative industries, such as transport and construction, once they get access to the tools to do so. Providing such opportunity for the MobiCloud ecosystem of application developers and system integrators is one of the more important goals of the project.