It’s been a pretty GigaOM-focussed week. To begin the week, my GigaOM Pro report on Europe’s Helix Nebula cloud project was published. Then Tuesday and Wednesday were dominated by activities in and around GigaOM’s first conference on this side of the Atlantic; Structure Europe, held in Amsterdam.

I moderated two sessions on the main stage on Tuesday, and worked with Kris Tuttle to guide conversation during a breakout workshop on Wednesday.

The report, Helix Nebula and the Future of Europe’s Cloud, takes a look at the interesting combination of demand-side consumers of cloud (ESA, CERN and EMBL) with supply-side providers of infrastructure (CloudSigma and a host of others), in a project that seeks to raise and address the issues associated with procuring and consuming cloud services at scale from an ecosystem of providers. The report also explores some of the ways in which this collaboration serves as a useful blueprint for Europe’s wider cloud ambitions, as laid out in last month’s European Cloud Strategy document.

My first conference session was a conversation with Ignacio Llorente of the Open Nebula project. Less well known, perhaps, than other open source clouds such as OpenStack, CloudStack, and Eucalyptus, Open Nebula is nevertheless building a steady following here in its native Europe, and further afield. Mathew Ingram wrote up our conversation, and the video is linked here (sorry – I couldn’t get the LiveStream video to embed here on the page you’re reading… Not sure if it’s them or me…)

My second session was a conversation about green clouds, with Tate Cantrell of Verne Global and Eirikur Hrafnsson of Iceland’s GreenQloud. Katie Fehrenbacher wrote up the session, and the video is linked here.

The breakout session on Wednesday took a look at the shape of the BI and big data market here in Europe. It was recorded, but only for internal GigaOM use. There should be a write-up shortly, but the room was full and the audience did a great job of engaging with Kris and I, and with one another.

GigaOM even impinged on bits of Thursday and Friday, with preparation calls and slide fiddling for next week’s webinar moderation job. Now, back to working for other clients for a while!

Image by David Heasley, shared by Flickr user ‘ColumbusCameraOp.’