"We had a very successful presence at the Cloud Expo in New York. Significant opportunities now being progressed with an extremely positive response from the market to say the least!"

This comment from an exhibitor was not uncommon as the event, the world's largest Cloud Computing ever produced, finished its three-day run. The next editions will be held in Prague June 21-22 and Santa Clara November 1-3.

David Linthicum, the well-known technologist and writer, wrote about the New York event, "What's most interesting about this conference is the size. Although vendor -focused, it's the largest cloud computing conference I've ever seen. The attendees are mostly people who 'need to know what the cloud is,' and are in search of vendors and consultants to help them move systems to cloud computing platforms, either public or private."

David said he found three main reasons that IT executives attended Cloud Expo: budgets are being cut, "(cloud) seems like the emerging way to do computing," and companies are moving their products to the cloud.

Another angle of view was taken by Ellen Rubin, who headline her report by stating that "Virtualization Steals the Spotlight."

Ellen wrote, "At first glance, cloud computing can appear to be “virtualization taken to its logical conclusion. After all, if the main benefit of virtualization is to consolidate data center resources and increase the speed of provisioning, then cloud is the ultimate pay-off: don’t own the resources at all and cut provisioning down to a few minutes with instant self-service gratification."s

"But upon further thought, and as was highly visible at Cloud Expo this week in NYC, cloud seems to be giving virtualization a return to the spotlight...remember that most enterprises have adopted virtualization in some way, but are only about 20-percent virtualized so far. So there’s plenty of room left to penetrate, and there’s still lots of opportunity for optimization and better management."

Cloud Expo was visible in pictures, too. In addition to the many attendees who provided Tweetpix of their week, CRN ran a special report that featured highlights of Cloud Expo--Oracle's massive presence, Abiquo's public debut, and the large crowds.

It was definitely a week to remember in the history of enterprise IT and enterprise IT events.