To kick off the event is the buyers wish list panel. Representative from Eli Lilly, Getty Images and British Telecom are on the panel to tell the crowd how they are currently using/investigating cloud computing and what they would like to see in the marketplace. Ultimately the panel kind of lacked a "wish list" but provided some good insights into the state of cloud adoption in large enterprises.
David Powers from Eli Lilly was probably the most active on the panel as far as participation and offering up some information. They are currently experimenting with several services from internal applications to crunching some research data, as well as utilizing technology from Eucalyptus who is one of the startups pitching here today.
The company has around 5,000 machines in their internal data center operations. David mentioned besides little one of projects his company is really looking at cloud computing as they look into replacing large blocks of machines. When they look at replacing 200 machines that are responsible for completing a certain task, they might only replace 25% of them and move the other needed capacity to the cloud, specifically AWS.
David actually mentioned that they approached Amazon in "a very direct manner" and asked them if they could purchase/license AWS in a box, Amazon of course said no, but that is a great enterprise endorsement for the service.
The main issues that seemed to spring up for all of the panelists were compliance issues and things such as where the code resides and code escrow. BT has some data laws to abide to in the UK and EU while also being under watch for business practices for a company of their size.
As you can imagine a company such as Eli Lilly has very sensitive data and regulations to be mindful of with their various research and clinical trials.
A big topic that sprang up was of course the recent news and release of the McKinsey report in which their findings "showed" that larger companies should reconsider cloud computing efforts since it might actually be more expensive. Several people in the blogosphere have rebuffed the McKinsey claims mostly stating that their report didn’t focus on incremental cloud adoption.
The sentiment here was pretty much that the report was very insightful and in-depth but they are not really paying too much attention to it and moving forward as is.
