At the recent VMWorld 2010 in San Francisco, Calif., cloud computing innovators from Armada, Cloud.com, RightScale, Apigee and enStratus hosted the first Executive Advisory Council on Cloud computing. As the attendees explored and debated the key issues that are defining the future of cloud computing, the panelists concluding that early adopters are now deploying 60 to 70 percent of their business applications in the cloud.

Although only an estimated 2 percent of enterprise applications are running in the cloud today, early adopters, such as Netflix, have 60 to 70 percent of their applications running in the cloud, the panelists agreed. The cloud model enables businesses to take a fresh look at the value of maintaining legacy applications or refactoring them for the Cloud. If you are developing a new application, architecting it for the cloud from the start is the way to go, said the panelists.

“Armada helps leading enterprises make informed decisions and leverage the value of the cloud in the most effective manner possible,” said Jeff Tavangar, president of the Armada Group. “The cloud computing innovators at our Executive Advisory Council validated what we are seeing from our customers – they are moving aggressively to refactor their critical business applications to harness the cloud’s tremendous efficiencies.” 

Behind the scenes, panelists and attendees from CA (News - Alert), Cisco, Salesforce.com, Microsoft, Oracle, Netflix, VMware, Joyent, OpSource, Nvidia, SOASTA, Cloudkick and others agreed that assessing an application’s needs for dynamic scalability, requirements for specialized optimization and suitability for a cloud or dedicated environment helps determine whether the cloud is the right solution. Moderated by Dave Nielsen of Cloud Camp, Executive Advisory Council panelists in the rapid-fire “UnPanel” format addressed questions, such as:

• How do you optimize an application in the cloud?
• What are the most competitive cloud computing offerings?
• What can help us simplify growing complexities in the cloud?
• What happens when the cloud breaks?
• How do cloud providers deal with audits of cloud computing requested by clients?
• In terms of initial adoption, will customers go with a public or private cloud first?
• What is a real ROI of Cloud computing?

To find out more, be sure to check out The Cloud Communications Summit collocated with ITEXPO West 2010. The Cloud Communications Summit will address a growing need of businesses to integrate and leverage cloud based communications applications, process enhancement techniques, and network based communications interfaces and architectures. This series of educational sessions at ITEXPO (News - Alert) will explore how communications as a service drastically lowers capital expenditures, reduces project risks and increases service agility and value. Don’t wait. Register now.