VentureBeat's Annual CloudBeat Event Kicks Off This Week

VentureBeat's CloudBeat 2012 kicks off tomorrow in San Francisco for two days.   

While some cloud computing events focus on legacy technologies and incremental change, CloudBeat's focus is on real customer issues, highlighting stories about the most disruptive technologies out there. 

They'll be covering ten "never-seen" customer case studies. Enterprise IT leaders from Harvard University, PepsiCo, Dignity Health, Kaplan, and the Church of Latter Day Saints and others will discuss their cloud adoption strategies and the successes, failures, and takeaways surrounding them.  

Through their discussions with vendors and other experts, you'll discover what really works, who's buying what, and where the industry is going. The following themes will guide these talks: integration, big data, open vs. closed, security, and visibility.

Additionally, 65 industry leaders will share their own insights, including executives like Stephen Herrod, CTO of VMware, Amit Singh, Vice President at Google Enterprise, Sujay Jaswa, VP of Business Development at Dropbox, James Cuff, Chief Tech Architect from Harvard University, Peter Coffee, VP of Platform Research at Salesforce, Lew Tucker, VP & CTO, Cloud Computing at Cisco, Sanjay Poonen, President at SAP, Sam Schillace, VP of Engineering at Box, Rafal Los, Senior Security Strategist at HP, Alastair Mitchell, Founder & CEO of Huddle, Dr. Amr Awadallah, CTO of Cloudera, Oren Teich, COO, at Heroku, and others.  

The Innovation Showdown is a lively track at CloudBeat where seven new companies (chosen from over 200 applicants) battle it out in front of the audience and an expert panel of judges to see whose product/service is leveraging the cloud in the revolutionary way.  

They expect over 500 industry executives to attend, which includes a mix of business and IT decision makers, analysts, investors, marketers, big brands/retailers, press, and others.

If you're in the San Francisco/Bay Area, you can still register here and save 50%.