21 May 2010
HTK Managing Director, Marlon Bowser, yesterday spoke at a major Cloud Computing event.
From the left: Marlon Bowser (Managing Director, HTK) with Philip Hargrave (CEO and Network Director, Digital Communications Knowledge Transfer Network), Robin Meehan (CTO, Smart421), Ian Osborne (Director of the Digital Systems, Knowledge Transfer Network) and Mahesha Pandit (Programme Manager, Scalable Computing Programme of Digital Systems KTN).
"Cloud computing - what is it and what can it do for my business?" took place at Adastral Park, best known as BT's research centre and home of 21CN, and brought together a range of experts for an afternoon of highly topical presentations and business networking opportunities.
The event was organised by the IP-City Network in collaboration with Digital Communications & Digital Systems Knowledge Transfer Networks, and was focused on local and regional organisations. The aim was to demystify all the hype and explain the business advantages of private and public Clouds, including Microsoft's Windows Azure, IBM's CloudBurst or third party Cloud services with Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Rackspace, and others - including the HTK Horizon Software-as-a-Service platform.
It was the pilot for a series of national events that will provide an opportunity to hear experts describe exactly what is meant by 'Cloud Computing', to hear from businesses already using cloud services and gaining benefits, to quiz an expert panel to help gain a better understanding and to meet with other business people hoping to take advantage of the new services on offer.
Frank Stone, organiser for IP-City Network said "You will also hear from two local companies, Smart421 and HTK, about how they are already exploiting these applications and developing new services, which other companies can benefit from directly. After this event, companies will be able to make progress in their own organisation, understand the advantages and drawbacks of using Cloud computing and who to get more help from locally and take action."
Neil Miles, managing director of Smart421, said "Companies in the Eastern counties are watching carefully to understand how the emergence of Cloud computing can bring competitive advantage to them."
IP-City Network focuses on the ICT needs of industry and is the catalyst for bringing like-minded people together, via inspiring and informative step change innovation events, workshops, enterprise activities and Special Interest Groups (SIGs). For more information, please visit www.ip-city.com
The Digital Communications Knowledge Transfer Network (DCKTN) has been established by an industry-led group of leading players, with funding from the Technology Strategy Board. It seeks to bring competitive advantage to the UK by promoting collaboration and knowledge sharing between the users and providers of Digital Communications, and helping to drive innovation in the sector. For more information, please visit www.dcktn.org.uk
