Carr blogged on Friday, noting that video from the event has been made available on YouTube, and I’ve been steadily working through the material ever since.

Krish followed up on CloudAve with his take, flagging Carr’s presentation as of particular interest. I liked Carr’s presentation too (although prefer our podcast, as I think he went deeper there), and found much to value in most of the other talks as well.

My particular highlights, I think, were three sessions later in the day;

Paul Cheesbrough (CIO at Telegraph Media Group), Francois Blanc (CIO at Valeo), Todd Pierce (SVP & CIO at Genentech) and Andy Beale (CIO at Guardian Media Group) participated in a panel session (embedded below) to discuss their real-world experiences of rolling Google Apps out across large organisations. The key take-aways? Benefit won’t be recognised across the board until six months in, and Executive Assistants need to be kept on-side as their day-to-day work inside people’s calendars is disrupted… and they’re both ‘loud’ and ‘influential.’

Google’s Dave Girouard covered similar issues from the company’s perspective, and is clearly someone to add to my list of podcast targets.

My final highlight was Geoffrey Moore (he of Core, Context, and Chasms), applying some of his broader business ideas to the Cloud. I’d certainly like to explore some of his arguments a little further another day…

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Deepak pointed to an Amazon page, which briefly reported that;

“Developers and businesses can now run their Amazon EC2 instances in the EU to help achieve lower latency, operate closer to other resources like Amazon S3 in the EU, and meet EU data storage requirements when required. The new European Region for Amazon EC2 contains two Availability Zones enabling you to easily and cost effectively run fault-tolerant applications with the same scalability, reliability and cost efficiency achieved with Amazon EC2 in the US.”

Amazon CTO Werner Vogels and Evangelist Jeff Barr were close behind, using Twitter to share the same news, and pointing to longer blog posts on Werner’s blog and the Amazon Web Services Blog. A nice example of Twitter at work.

As for the news they were reporting; it’s good to see local availability for EC2 resources join the existing European sites for S3 storage.

Werner’s post outlines a three-part rationale for the move, broadly characterised as;

• lower latency (faster) access to the servers for customers in Europe,
• cheaper use of data stored in the European parts of S3,
• compliance with European regulatory requirements regarding storage of personal (and other) data outside Europe.

All are useful, and different customers will certainly emphasise each differently. I wonder which was the most commonly cited? ‘Compliance’ was a major stumbling block to using EC2 with certain data in the past, but I wonder if customers for whom that was an issue have traditionally been that important in the grand scheme of things at Amazon?

So; speed, price, or privacy?