Despite being crammed on the station at Ealing Broadway with what seemed like a million tennis fans on my way to the Cloud Computing World Forum this morning, it was actually quite good.

Don't get me wrong, there are lots of service providers there that seem to just be adding the word "cloud" to their deployed products in a vain hope to get people excited about some rubbishy software application or some telephone system that lets you route calls to mobiles. But, in general there were lots of decent service providers pitching what I consider "cloud" based services, some of which were actually new and interesting.

Interestingly (for me at least) us connected service providers are still not taking the opportunity to market ourselves at these events. Maybe there's no need to promote connectivity at these events as its a given that if you move services to the cloud you're going to need connectivity. I will be speaking with our directors because Backbone Connect have a clear direction over the coming months to help promote the importance of connectivity for cloud services, both the provider and the users.

The reality too is that the savings moving certain IT services to the cloud  can bring a business can often easily justify a 100Mb even a Gig circuit these days, prices are always falling (see our offer page for more info: http://www.backboneconnect.co.uk/promotion2.html) and putting in a big link to the internet or a providers data centre is really cost effective now.

Possibly the most interesting thing at the whole show was my conversation with the sales guy from Dell. I didn't realise how hard they are working on their cloud offerings. Their integration tool, Boomi, looks really awesome and they will have a vDaaS offering coming out at the end of the year. No doubt it will cost about 10p per user per month and I expect it is going to be revolutionary in the market. I'm an HP man at heart and I would by a HP server over a Dell any day but they really seem to have some good idea's for their services and will be interesting to see how they get on.

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