CloudBeat 2013: PayPal embraces open cloud most aggressively

I’m delighted to announce the first three speakers at our CloudBeat 2013 event in San Francisco on Sept 9-10.

This is our third annual CloudBeat, an event set on debating the trends in the cloud economy over the next twelve months.

The most disruptive trend is what we’re calling the move to an “open cloud.”

Until this year, everything in the enterprise has remained surprisingly siloed. Even cloud application leader Salesforce.com has pushed a proprietary database. But now there’s an increasing movement toward open APIs, driven by companies that need cloud applications to talk with each other, and on-premise apps to talk with cloud apps. Closed, proprietary businesses that don’t allow easy integration may still garner most of the revenue. But like the sleeping frog in the frying pan, their time may be running out.

That’s why we’re excited to announce that PayPal Senior Director of Platform Engineering Saran Mandair, who will be talking about how his company has moved away from proprietary cloud, to embrace the open source OpenStack cloud infrastructure on an “unprecedented scale” among large companies.

Second, we’ll have Netflix’s director of cloud solutions, Ariel Tseitlin, talk about how that media streaming company continues to scale its offering. Netflix is the poster child for Amazon’s cloud service. It has shown loyalty to Amazon, and so unlike other companies hasn’t moved to a multi-cloud infrastructure. But it continues to build its own tools to augment Amazon’s service, so that Netflix stays up even if some of Amazon goes down. At CloudBeat we’ll talk about what Netflix is doing, and partners like CloudBees it is working with to augment its infrastructure.

Next, we’ll feature Jeff McMillan, CEO of Dark Matter Labs, which has built a way to secure computing inside Amazon’s cloud, a highly relevant product given the recent publicity around the NSA’s spying activities. We can’t say too much about the announcement yet, but it’s very timely, and will fit squarely in our theme of the “open cloud” because it can operate across clouds.

At CloudBeat, we’ll cut through the cloud hype by gathering real customers who are adopting the cloud in interesting ways. That way, attendees will learn from the path-breakers who are transforming their businesses with the aid of cutting-edge cloud products.

You can learn more about the event’s themes here.

Join 500 executives — with a mix of business and IT decision makers, analysts, investors, marketers, brands/retailers, and press — for a rare look at what’s really working, who’s buying what, and where the industry is going as the cloud grows up.

Buy your ticket today to save 25%!

Check out the bios below, and stay tuned as we’ll be announcing more speakers over the next few days and weeks!

Saran Mandair, Sr. Director Infrastructure Engineering, PayPal
Saran is responsible for cloud automation, monitoring and systems engineering in Site operations. His current focus is to enable product agility, developer productivity and in providing self-service to manipulate parts of the infrastructure. Saran has been involved in various mission critical Infrastructure roles across PayPal, eBay and Sun Microsystems. Prior to PayPal, Saran Mandair was responsible for eBay’s core site infrastructure consisting of storage, systems engineering, data platforms and infrastructure automation.

Ariel Tseitlin, Director of Cloud Solutions, Netflix
Ariel helps Netflix be successful in the cloud, including cloud tooling, monitoring, performance and scalability, and cloud operations and reliability engineering. Prior to Netflix, Ariel was VP of Technology and Products at Sungevity and before that was the Founder & CEO of CTOWorks.

Jeff MacMillan, CEO, Dark Matter Labs
In 2009, Jeff MacMillan founded Dark Matter Labs, a highly innovate data encryption company, with the purpose of introducing much-needed innovation to a market that was behind the curve. After several years of innovation and development, Dark Matter Labs has emerged with an industry-leading line of encryption appliances that help businesses in all major industries achieve true security and compliance. Jeff’s core focus for Dark Matter Labs was to build a highly flexible product that will readily evolve according to customer demands.

Thanks to the following industry leaders for supporting CloudBeat 2013: Archpoint Partners as Silver Sponsor; and Norwest Venture Partners as Event Sponsor.