The NexGen Cloud Conference and Expo will be held at the San Diego Marriott Hotel and Convention Center, December 4-5, 2014.
“All roads lead to the cloud” is the event’s theme reflected in its many topics and seminar tracks. Discussion among the thought leaders attending and speaking at the event will be about cloud sales, cloud marketing and building a path to offering cloud services to business customers.
The event will open on Dec. 4 with a keynote from celebrated futurist, entrepreneur and director of engineering at Google, Ray Kurzweil.
Other keynotes during the two-day event will be delivered by Alex Freedland, chairman of Mirantis, a developer of an enterprise-grade OpenStack distribution that's forging the future of the cloud; and Tiffani Bova, a vice president at Gartner and distinguished analyst who specializes in IT sales strategies and channel innovation.
While other cloud conferences center around a specific technology or company, the NexGen Cloud Conference and Expo is clearly focused on the business of the cloud. Of course there will be many brand-name vendors and leading cloud service providers participating in the event, but according to the conference organizers at The Channel Company, the NexGen Cloud Conference and Expo is decidedly vendor-neutral.
This is an important conference, especially for the solution providers and partners who are responsible for helping to cloud-enable businesses – from the smallest mom and pop to the largest enterprise company. These are the Architects of the Cloud who will benefit from the event.
“There's nothing else out there where a partner or solution provider can come and say, 'I've got to figure out this cloud thing.' That's where there's a gap in the market that this event fills,” says Robert DeMarzo, SVP of Strategic Content at The Channel Company.
During the two-day event, attendees can learn from partners and integrators who will share real-world insights on best practices and developing business models attuned to the new IT landscape:
- Rich Roseman, former CIO of 21st Century Fox, is presenting a case study called the “Customer Perspective: Moving a $71 Billion Media Company to the Cloud.”
- Allen Falcon, CEO of Cumulus Global, who built the company into a thriving cloud practice through partnering with Google, will present a talk called “Building Your Cloud Portfolio” to help businesses choose cloud services that best serve their markets. Falcon will discuss the professional services needed to succeed and how to create or shift an organization toward cloud services.
- David Geevaratne, president of Washington D.C.-based solution provider New Signature, will talk about profiting from the Microsoft Cloud Platform.
- Sam Coy, president of Netrepid, will present the “Solution Provider Playbook For Competing Against AWS, Google & Azure.”
- Alex Brown, CEO of 10th Magnitude, a Microsoft Azure-aligned solution provider based in Chicago, will give a talk about “Marketing Strategies For The New Cloud Economy.”
Conference host The Channel Company has also joined forces with The ASCII Group, CompTIA and THINKstrategies to extend the scope of the event. Each of these prestigious technology industry organizations will add content in order to expand the size of the cloud community that the event touches.
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