News
Cloud World Forum Highlights Expanding Cloud Usage within European Businesses
July 2015 by Marc Jacob
This year’s Cloud World Forum (co-located with Enterprise Apps World), thrust Cloud into the spotlight, proving that Cloud is driving forward agile businesses, enabling the next wave of data services and personalisation required by organisations, as well as supporting innovation in the Internet of Things. Attracting thousands of visitors, the conference and exhibition highlighted how 80% of UK businesses now use Cloud technologies and are ready to leverage them to advance their digital services.
Now in its seventh year, Cloud World Forum is carving new trends and relationships as the Cloud and IT industry’s top content-led event, boasting the most comprehensive agenda. This year’s content-led program drew delegates to nine packed theatres and a closed Executive Summit, to hear from industry pioneers and VIP enterprise speakers discuss the IoT, DevOps, containerisation, software defined technologies, communications and collaboration, the employee experience, mobility, app development and entrepreneurialism in the start-up industry. Key speakers included, Robert J.LeBlanc, Senior VP Cloud, IBM; Anthony Headlam, CTO, Jaguar Land Rover; John Finch, CIO, Bank of England; and Fin Goulding, CIO, Paddy Power.
Martin King, Co-founder of inspireNshare.com, who was Head of IT Services at Ealing Hammersmith & West London College for 13 years, spoke at the event and commented that this year: “Cloud World Forum felt like it had been designed for experience - rather than just a load of exhibition stands and some seminars bolted on. Cloud World Forum gets better every year - this year was very, very good - so many of these conferences are rushed and crowded affairs. The executive theatre was a treat. Such a slick event from speaker liaison through to attendance - I am impressed.”
Numerous exciting new features were added to 2015’s programme, including the Cloud Tech Hub, a dedicated content theatre and exhibition zone on the show floor for the thriving Tech City start-up and SME community. Working in conjunction with leading Tech City influencers, this brought together the most innovative technology players, investors, mentors and accelerator programme leaders to share crucial insight into developing and executing successful launch strategies. This provided the perfect platform for a DevOps community meet-up led by David Gildeh, Founder and CEO of new start-up Dataloop.IO.
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 Platform Innovation of the Year; Best Cloud Application; Most Innovative SME/Start up Vendor; Best IoT Platform; Best Cloud SME Project by a Vendor; and Best Enterprise Mobility Solution. The full list of winners can be found here: http://cloudworldseriesawards.com/.
Following the success of this year’s event, Informa Telecoms & Media can confirm that Cloud World Forum will take place at Olympia again in 2016. The dates for next year are the 21 and 22 June. 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 2016’s conference and exhibition.
