The first set of keynotes at the first ever Cloud Connect conference took place this morning, two fast-paced sessions with thirteen presenters having ten minutes each. Here’s a summary of ten takeaway messages from the the event (including the interesting stats on the cloud adoption shown right):

1) Cloud computing is the grey matter of our distributed nervous system.

Alistair Croll (Bitcurrent) opened with a look at “clouds and crowds”. He explained that cloud computing is just the next step in a timescale of human evolution that began with farming and irrigation and brought us the industrial revolution and electricity in every home. Now that we are sharing more and more and living online, cloud computing is the enabler for a distributed human consciousness.

2) Cloud computing accelerates the supra-national evolution of the Internet.

Dan Elron (Accenture) observed that since cloud computing is seen as an evolution of the Internet, governments are more savvy about it than previous disruptive technologies and are trying harder to regulate it. The greater movement of information and contraction of resources is breaking down national boundaries, but the perception of cloud computing as US-centric and a distrust in global collaboration (c.f. climate change) is a challenge. Dan argues we need to fight this by managing government perception and working towards a cloud bill of rights.

3) Any time there’s discontinuity in technology [like clouds] there is an abundance of opportunity.

Vijay Bhagavath (Deutsche Bank) continued the idea of cloud computing as a disruptive technology, that will create opportunities on Wall Street as elsewhere. He compared the shift from in house infrastructure to virtualization and hosted computing to the shift from traditional telephony to VOIP or the shift from legacy gateways to Ethernet.

4) Smaller companies are embracing the cloud faster, but enterprises too are shifting to cloud computing.

MR Rangaswami (Sand Hill Group) stated that small companies have a 2:1 advantage with clouds today, but that Fortune 500 companies will shift from 5% to 20% externally hosted systems over the next five years. He highlighted three key questions that still need to be addressed:

(i) Is a private cloud a cloud?
(ii) Is a SaaS app a cloud app?
(iii) Is virtualization a cloud initiative?

He also listed the top ten cloud vendors as :

1. Amazon
2. Google
3. Microsoft
4. Salesforce
5. HP
6. IBM
7. Cisco
8. Rackspace
9. VMWare
10. GoDaddy

5) The Platform as a Service layer will be focus of differentiation and innovation.

Matt Thompson (Microsoft) presented an overview of Microsoft’s cloud offerings, and presented the Microsoft model that you will develop the same code regardless of whether you deploy on premise or cloud hosted. The default sales position will now be “tell me why you don’t want this hosted” – a big shift for Microsoft. Matt also detailed Microsoft’s plans for global data centers, summarized by the motto “We don’t want to ship lots of bits across large bodies of water.” Microsoft is looking at the cloud as an interopability layer and Azure will support PHP, Tomcat, Ruby, Java, Eclipse and Python. They are also promoting “data as a service” (for example oil companies sharing historic data for use by smaller companies).

6) Cloud computing adoption can be measured; it’s a one-horse race.

Guy Rosen (Jack of All Clouds) talked about how the allies had calculated the number of German tanks almost perfectly (predicted=256, actual=255) by analyzing serial numbers. He performed similar analysis on three of the biggest clouds and managed to calculate the number of instances launched per day – producing quite a surprising graph, shown at the top of this article: 83,152 Amazon EC2 instances, 488 Rackspace, and 181 GoGrid. Also he calculated the number of instances ever started on the cloud (as observed via Rightscale instrumentation) to be 23,192,900 on Amazon, 165,97 Rackspace, and 75,391 GoGrid.

Update: As Guy points out in the comments below, he did not describe it as a one horse race, those are my words. There are many other factors which the stats do not reflect. Check out Guy’s blog for a fuller picture.

7) There is a cloud provider almost 20 times bigger than Google, Amazon or Rackspace; it’s called Conficker.

Rodney L Joffe (Neustar) gave stats to show that botnets give computing power far greater than the biggest cloud providers – for example Conficker has 6,400,000 systems, 18,000,000+ CPUs, 28 terabits of bandwidth, and is hosted in 230 countries. He pointed out the many similarities: available for rent, choice of geography, choice of networks, choice of speciality (DDoS, Spam, Data exfiltration, etc). What’s more they’ve been around since 1998. The more serious point was that anyone in the cloud should learn from the pros and study botnets. Assume you will be a target, and make sure your cloud vendor doesn’t mistake you for a so-called “black cloud” (botnet).

8) Don’t assume the cloud is not suitable for sensitive data

Jas Dhillon (evidence.com and TASER Virtual Systems) described the project that he is running for Taser (yes, that Taser) to create the so-called “CopCloud” – allowing law enforcement officers to wear recording devices and securely upload their first hand experiences to a secure evidence repository, to be shared between law enforcement agencies, called evidence.com. An important part of the process is that the data is never touched by human hands between capture and upload. So far trials have shown performance, officer efficiency and convictions all increase with the system.

9) IT and cloud computing is now driven by the consumers

Adam Gross (Dropbox) put forward the idea that “your company has already deployed its next IT strategy”. We have moved from top-down IT (for example DARPA let to the Internet, Oracle came out of a CIA project) to a world where new innovations come first to the consumer space (for example, Gmail, iPhones and Dropbox all served personal users first and then found their place in business. Adam adapted the famous William Gibson quote to this, with “Adam’s corollary”:

“The future of your IT architecture is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed thoughout your organization”

10) The massive convergence of TV and online video is problem which only cloud computing can solve

Darren Feher (Conviva) showed that online video adoption is growing by 45% per month, and while now focussed around events like the Olympics, the ultimate convergence of TV at home and online video will to lead to 40M peak concurrent users consuming 120 terabits per second (just in the US). What’s more, online video has unique challenges – high definition, zero latency, flash crowds (e.g. Michael Jackson’s death caused a 19% growth in Internet traffic), always on, audience analytics, and an ever-increasing amount of video to store. In other words, old video delivery methods just won’t work, and cloud computing must deliver a 50-100 times increase in capability, to cope with the oncoming tidal wave of online video.