News Roundup: HostingCon 2011

HostingCon 2011 is underway in San Diego, and this year's event is reportedly the largest yet. There's plenty of tweets and photos on the conference Twitter stream. Much of the media coverage has been provided by The WHIR. Here's  a review of some of the news highlights thus far:

Day 1 Keynote: Simon Wardley - The opening keynote at HostingCon 2011 was delivered by Simon Wardley, a researcher at CSC’s Leading Edge Forum, who sought to provide a real understanding of how cloud computing could impact the hosted services market, in a presentation called "Situation Normal, Everything Must Change." Wardley describes an "innovation paradox" in which methods we need to survive today are opposite to those needed to survive tomorrow. "The techniques required for efficiency are diametrically opposed to those needed for innovation," Simon said via Twitter. "As organisations are a mass of activities - some innovations, some commodity - there is no one size fits all method of management."

Day 2 Keynote: Antonio Piraino - Tier 1 Research's Piraino says phase 3.0 of hosting has to do with a lot of new layers being placed on top of the hosting resources, which creates a new layer of expectations, including some around performance and security. It’s a lot like what “cloud 2.0” is at the same time. Piraino says cloud computing was originally a playground for developers, and it’s only in the last two or three years that we’ve seen businesses migrating their processes onto the cloud.

The CTO's Dilemma of Build vs. Buy - The large upfront costs, staffing, agility and legal issues of data centers make it a massive undertaking for a hosting company. SoftLayer's Duke Skarda argues that it makes far more sense for smaller companies to outsource their data center services to another company instead of building their own facility.

Public Policy and the Hosting Industry - Government and law makers don’t necessarily seek to have an adversarial relationship with the hosting business. It really just doesn’t always have access to the hosting business’s point of view, according to participants in the “Public Policy and the Hosting Industry” panel, moderated and organized by Christian Dawson, COO of ServInt.

Boston Selected for HostingCon 2012 - iNET Interactive has announced today that HostingCon 2012 will be held in Boston, Massachusetts, from July 16-18 at the John B. Hynes Veterans Memorial Convention Center located in the heart of the beautiful and historic Back Bay. HostingCon attracts web hosts, cloud services, data centers, software-as-a-service (SaaS), ISVs and other Internet service providers from across the world. In 2011, HostingCon attendees represented more than 35 countries.

For more coverage, see the HostingCon 2011 channel at The WHIR.