parallels

After a break, our Open Conversations panels are back. We are going to host this year’s first Open Conversation at the Parallels Summit in Las Vegas on February 5th 2013.

The idea of the open cloud has different meanings. There are open infrastructure groups that are working toward federating clouds at the infrastructure level. These are groups such as OpenStack and Cloudstack, two of the most well-known efforts to help companies build their own clouds.

And then there are the hosting providers who serve the small business. Small businesses are not as much interested in building out their own clouds. But more so they want to use tools that they can use in a SaaS environment with as little hassle as possible.

On this coming Tuesday at 1:30 PM PST Alex Williams (TechCrunch) will co-host a Google Hangout with Krishnan Subramanian, founder of Rishidot Research at the Parallels Summit in Las Vegas to discuss why open standards is needed to serve small businesses to purchase services through a cloud marketplaces.

Some of the questions we expect to discuss:

Why are cloud marketplaces an issue particular to small businesses? Why not open-source the effort? What would make this better than the Amazon marketplace? Are there any other federated cloud marketplaces available?

Our discussion will also cover the differences between open cloud efforts and why there are so many open-source cloud efforts underway.

The hosts will be joined by executives from Parallels Software, Savvis Direct, McAfee and 1&1, a hosting service.

Here is the Google+ link to the event: https://plus.google.com/events/cnh63qpkv8j6nd2masp42g8pqkc

The hangout can be viewed live at Rishidot Research Youtube Channel. Please join us next week.

Check out Alex William’s post on TechCrunch about this panel discussion.