Many thanks to everyone who took part in the Architect Forum on the 25th, and I mean everyone – I haven’t witnessed such a vocal audience in some time – really great mind share all round.

Here’s all the links to slides that were used and I hope to have videos edited before too long!

 

Articulating the value of Cloud Computing
Neil Ward-Dutton, Research Director, MWD Advisors

Before we can talk about value and selling the idea to the business, we have to be clear what we’re talking about! What is Cloud? From here we can start to understand the business case and scenarios and look at the entry points for enterprise investment.
View more presentations from MWD Advisors.
Cloud Computing – What’s the Point?
Dave Coplin, Service Line Architect, Microsoft Ltd

Cloud Computing is being positioned as the future of the IT Industry, yet we collectively seem to be unsure on what it actually is and, more importantly, how to get from here to there. This session will attempt to reconnect us all with the longer term reasons on why the cloud is not just important but fundamental to the kind of transformation we are looking technology to provide the way we live, work and play.
View more presentations from ukdpe.
Architectural considerations for BPOS
Andrew Jones, Practice Director, CSC

The Microsoft Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS) is a set of hosted messaging and collaboration solutions that currently include Microsoft Exchange Online, Microsoft SharePoint Online, Microsoft Office Live Meeting, and Microsoft Office Communications Online. This is the first wave of business focused finished (or SaaS) services from Microsoft extending the traditional on-premise model. On the surface the model appears simple but what are the considerations one must make in moving to a hosted model? What do you do about identity integration? How can you extend and customise the service? How do you provision the service and migrate? Is this a one way trip? How do you share services that are on-premise with those that are hosted? These are just some of the questions you need to ask as you peel off the label and start to look inside. In this session we will look at the key architectural considerations for moving to a BPOS solution, but also reflect on the fact that these can be converted to a general form and applied in any scenario where one is looking at a choice between software and service.
View more presentations from ukdpe.
Windows Azure Overview
Dave Gristwood, Architect, Microsoft Ltd

There is a load of fuzz around Cloud, but in reality the actual implementations of cloud platforms are quite simple to describe and define. Azure is no different and this session attempts to provide a clear overview of Azure within 20 mins!
Patterns for Cloud Computing
Simon Guest, Senior Director of Technical Strategy in the Developer and Platform Evangelism (DPE) group, Microsoft Corp

Everything that you read these days seems to suggest that you should be moving to the cloud. But where do you start? Which applications and services should you be moving? How do you build the bridge between on-premises and the cloud? And more importantly, what should you be looking out for along the way? Based on real-world scenarios, this session explores a set of pattern for applications that best take advantage of the cloud, together with working examples on the Windows Azure platform. This session provides the tools and knowledge to determine whether cloud computing is right for you, and where to start.
View more documents from Simon Guest.