What we’re thankful for: The amazing lineup at CloudBeat 2012

We know. You’re counting the minutes until Turkey Day. We are too, but here’s a quick reminder that our annual cloud computing event — CloudBeat 2012 — is next Wednesday and Thursday!

This will be the most valuable cloud event this year, and the ROI you’ll get from attending is huge.

Above: It’s Turkey time, but get your fill of the Cloud, too

Here’s how CloudBeat is unique: Other cloud events focus mainly on legacy technologies and incremental change, and tend to let the cloud “vendors” do the talking. Now, that’s understandable, because the big legacy cloud vendors, with their big pockets, have until now dictated the conversation.

Our CloudBeat event, by contrast, focuses on the most disruptive technologies out there, regardless of who peddles them. So while we do talk about what the big players — Oracle, SAP, VMWare — are doing to help CIOs manage and adopt the cloud, we actually focus just as much attention on the new wave of technologies that promise more radical breakthroughs in performance and efficiency. These range from the innovations around OpenStack to the game-changing things happening right now around NoSQL and big data. And we’re not letting vendors hijack the show. We’re showcasing customers, and their real stories.

Give us two days, and we’ll give you:

New insights from 65 industry influencers

Participants include:

• Stephen Herrod, CTO, VMware
• Sanjay Poonen, President, SAP
• Amit Singh, Vice President, Google Enterprise
• Sujay Jaswa, VP of Business Development, Dropbox
• James Cuff, Chief Tech Architect, Harvard University
• Peter Coffee, VP of Platform Research, Salesforce
• Lew Tucker, VP & CTO, Cloud Computing, Cisco
• Sam Schillace, VP of Engineering, Box
• Rafal Los, Senior Security Strategist, HP
• Alastair Mitchell, Founder & CEO, Huddle
• Dr. Amr Awadallah, CTO, Cloudera
• Oren Teich, COO, Heroku
• See them all here

Ten never-before-seen customer case studies

Enterprise IT leaders from Harvard University, PepsiCo, Dignity Health, Kaplan, and the Church of Latter Day Saints (to name a few) will discuss their cloud adoption strategies and the successes, failures, and takeaways surrounding them.

Through their discussions with vendors and other experts, you’ll get a rare look at what really works, who’s buying what, and where the industry is going.

Pitches from disruptive new cloud companies

The Innovation Showdown is a lively track at CloudBeat where seven new companies (chosen from over 200 applicants) are invited to pitch live in front of the audience and an expert panel of judges to see whose product/service is leveraging the cloud in the revolutionary way. Check out the finalists here.

Unsurpassed networking opportunities

The deal-making that happens in the hallways at CloudBeat is tremendous. Forge relationships with over 500 industry executives, with a mix of business and IT decision makers, analysts, investors, marketers, big brands/retailers, press, and more.

Enjoy your holiday, and we hope to see you next week. Register here! Tickets are limited.

Special thanks to the industry leaders who are supporting CloudBeat 2012: Ping Identity as Gold Sponsor; New Relic, dotCloud, Huddle, and Oxygen Cloud as Silver Sponsors; and CollabNet, Aria, Apprenda, Stackato, Nasdaq OMX, Scality, AgilOne, CloudOn, Egnyte, Norwest Venture Partners, Silicon Valley Bank, RingCentral, Scale Venture Partners, Message Bus, TIBCO, and Symform as Event Sponsors.

[Image Credit: Sevens Heaven]