Google AtmosphereGoogle held a small event in London late last month, at which senior executives from a wide range of organisations gathered to discuss the impact of the Cloud. Presenters included luminaries such as Marc Benioff, Werner Vogels, Geoffrey Moore and Nick Carr, as well as CIOs at the coalface in adopting various Cloud (mainly SaaS) solutions.

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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