At the Gartner DC conference in Las Vegas, Cisco SVP and General Manager Data Center Group  David Yen delivered a key note speech yesterday highlighting the importance of a convergence infrastructure (starting with UCS)  for the deployment of cloud. (I will have very soon the opportunity to share more about David Yen's presentation -Stay tuned)

As Cisco Jim McHugh, VP Unified Computing Systems Marketing,  stated recently  "Without doubt, one of the great appeals of cloud computing is its near limitless potential. The industry has painted a world of clouds that are elastic and adaptable, ready to respond to just about any business need in the future. Although each organization's path to building clouds is (and should be) unique, not all paths will deliver on the full potential of the cloud."

And Forrester James Staten, Vice-President , Principal Analyst, Forrester research , Inc.,  one of our webcast panelists on December 6, wrote :
"Since cloud became a household word, vendors and enterprises alike have jumped to declare victory on cloud with services and infrastructure implementations that really don't deliver cloud value but have the same foundation: something we call "cloudwashing." This is a dangerous gambit as you claim legitimacy but don't activate the same economics, deliver the autonomy that cloud services offer to your internal users, and aren't standardized or automated enough to deliver
transformative agility. In other words, you claim cloud but are achieving only incrementally better value^"

So here are 5 questions that you may want to address on your journey to the cloud

What is the role of open infrastructure programmability in achieving the full potential of the cloud ?
How the right foundation can help your cloud for true elasticity and scalability ?
What are the architectural decisions that can affect future speed of service delivery ?
Why clouds require extensive automation down to the physical layer?
What are the infrastructure capabilities that support resource distribution with complete transparency and simplicity?

On December 6 at 9:00 am PST, Cisco Jim Mchugh  and Forrester James Staten as well as
Jeff  Hanson, IT Engineering Lead, Fico Corporation
Rick Schlander , IT Engineering Lead, Fico Corporation
Tom Force, MPS technology Delivery Officer, Xerox Corporation
and Satinder Sethi, VP Data Center Solutions, Cisco
will debate  these questions during an unique webcast . (registration here)

I recently share the remarkable story of Xerox (blog)  Here is a video invitation from Jim Mchugh and James Staten

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xk0JpLAzmZU

I hope to see you on Thursday amongst the participants !

Who to follow on Twitter ? James Staten (@Staten7) , Jim McHugh  ,@drombaut and @ciscodc.