London, 27 June 2014 – EMEA’s leading Cloud event, Cloud World Forum, thrust Cloud into the spotlight once again last week with thousands of visitors, over 300 speakers and the industry’s top providers converging on the Olympia National in London and driving the most comprehensive agenda in the Cloud market.
This year the event was co-located with Big Data World Congress and Enterprise Apps World. Big Data World Congress saw Watson supercomputer demos, courtesy of IBM, insights into the use of Big Data in weather and climate forecasting from the Met Office, data analytics in the gaming industry, care of Mediatonic and a case study on data infrastructure at Spotify, delivered by Wouter de Bie, Team Lead Data Infrastructure, Spotify.
The evolving role of the CIO came into focus on Day One of the Cloud World Forum conference, with a panel discussion titled ‘Redefining the role of the CIO in the era of the Cloud’, which examined the increasingly hot topic of how Cloud is effecting the role and responsibilities of CIOs as companies fight to stay ahead of their competitors and maintain the pace of innovation.
The event boasted an impressive line-up of the industry’s technology giants including: Intel, Oracle, HP, Dell, Google and Microsoft and it also featured an exclusive C-level keynote Future Cloud Theatre, with CIOs and CTOs from leading end-users, such as: Coca Cola, UEFA, BBC, BMW, Marks & Spencer, UBS, CERN and Lufthansa.
Onyeka Nchege, CIO at Coca Cola Bottling Co. Consolidated, gave a keynote presentation called, ‘Open Happiness in the Cloud: Taking a 100 year old traditional brick & mortar organization to the Cloud’ - discussing culture and the impact of high expectations, leveraging the workforce and managing the technology rush. Nchege also discussed how the company has started to move its non mission-critical systems to a private Cloud with plans to move everything off-premise within five years.
This year’s Cloud World Series Awards winners were also crowned as part of the event. Judged by world class experts in Cloud Computing, the winners were announced in six categories encompassing: Best Cloud Service, Best Cloud Application, Best Cloud Platform, Best Cloud Security Solution, Best Cloud Data Centre & Storage Solution and Best Big Data Analytics Solution. The full list of winners can be found here:
www.cloudworldseries.wordpress.com/2014/06/18/silver-lining-for-cloud-world-forum-winners/.
Ewa Campbell, Head of Marketing, Cloud World Series, said: “2014 was a real success for the Cloud World Forum. We had a strong and diverse conference agenda and there was a fantastic buzz on the show floor throughout the event. We’ve received some really positive feedback since, from visitors, speakers and participating companies and are already looking forward to making 2015’s event even better than this one.”
Following the success of this year’s event, Informa Telecoms & Media can confirm that Cloud World Forum will take place at the Olympia Grand in London for 2015. The dates for next year are 24-25 June 2015. For further information, visit
http://cloudwf.com/. Alternatively, keep up to date with the event on Twitter using @CloudWSeries or #CloudWF, to gain exclusive previews ahead of 2015’s conference and exhibition.
