Ben Kepes

It seems like everyone’s talking about the cloud, but not everyone is using it.

A few weeks ago I took part in a really interesting roundtable discussion on focus.com. The roundtable was entitled “Enterprise Cloud Adoption – Defining (and Easing) the Barriers” and it bought together some of my favorite folks from around the Cloud space. On the roundtable we had;

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Recently a couple of announcements caught my eye that really speak to our contention that Cloud Computing democratizes IT. As we said in a previous CloudU report, Cloud Computing is facilitating a seismic shift in terms of business development. Formerly, entrepreneurs who wished to start a business had to invest significant capital into hardware and software licenses. Even the simplest of businesses required expensive software licenses, a server or two and the associated administration cost of keeping it all running. The availability of Cloud Computing solutions has led to a massive shift in the availability of computing power.

Having spent 2010 traveling the world talking Cloud Computing, I’ve long been of the opinion that 2011 is going to be the year that we remember when Cloud Computing reached its own tipping point. Rackspace shares my vision and sees the value in a broad educational program for 2011 – I’m excited about the program of papers and webinars we’re building for the year.

Ben is the founder and managing director of Diversity Limited, a consultancy specializing in Cloud Computing/SaaS, Collaboration, Business strategy and user-centric design.