2013 Speaker List

It’s not all roses and sunshine in the cloud. There’s cloudwashing. Vendors don’t always deliver what the customer thought they were promised. Deployment fail. People get fired.

But hearing enterprise IT leaders share their unvarnished experiences with cloud deployments is rare. This session offers insights from this track’s two enterprise IT executive keynote speakers, who will share with the audience their experiences with moving their organizations toward transformation through cloud technologies, including questions every IT leader should ask his or her vendors before signing the contract. Moderated by Randy Bias, cloud iconoclast and Co-Founder & CTO of Cloudscaling, this roundtable session will dig below the surface for keys into how to guide your organization to the transformational benefits of cloud, including project design, what to look for in a vendor team, and what terms to insist on – or walk.

This session will feature two keynote addresses from Thomas Barton of Novartis and Neal Sample of American Express. Both will discuss how their organizations moved much of their enterprises workloads to the cloud. Participants will learn how these enterprises made the business case for organizational transformation to cloud, what assumptions it made in building the strategies for migration, and where the organizations are seeing early successes -- and warning signs. After they keynotes, members of the audience will be invited to engage with the speakers and facilitator Scott Bils, benchmarking their own enterprise’s experiences in cloud transformation against those of the speakers. Participants will leave armed with best practices and specific action items for transforming their organizations through cloud computing.

What would you dare to dream if you knew your cloud could not fail? That sentiment has driven some enterprises to push the envelope and embrace business models that require cloud and demand organizational transformation to succeed. In this session, track chair Scott Bils will lead a discussion with two enterprise executives who have done just that. Participants will hear how these leaders helped their organizations first understand and then embrace the agility, flexibility and dramatic time-to-market compression that cloud enables. Building sustainable competitive advantage through a transformation in business model assumptions is the goal of cloud, and this session will give participants new insights on how to help their organizations get there.