Tier 1 Research’s third annual Hosting Transformation Summit kicked off on Tuesday at The Venetian Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas, Nevada with a full-day of panels and sessions surrounding everything from the next-generation of managed hosting, to tips on how to make data centers more cost and energy efficient and the rapid growth of content delivery networks and their role in the hosting industry.
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One of the discussions that stayed on everyone’s minds throughout the day was Dan Golding’s keynote, “Hosting Transformation-2008 and Beyond” where he talked about the next-generation of managed hosting and how hosting providers could market their services to attract the enterprise market.
Golding offered five key suggestions for managed service providers to embrace, which included concepts like becoming more available and reliable, as well as implementing standards and certifications to help drive the growth of the industry. The discussion also brought up the importance of enabling content like video and how CDNs could help with that, as well as the idea that Web hosts should begin offering their managed services in a highly on-demand manner so that people could simply click on the Web hosts’ sites and “do the impulse try rather than the impulse buy.”
Next was “The Ultimate Customer Panel,” where Jim Cook, CIO of Jockey and Dan Demeter, CIO of Korn/Ferry International offered insight into what enterprise IT decision makers thought with regards to how Web hosts were marketing their services and how they could be more effective with connecting with the enterprise market.
Evolving techniques and technologies within the data center was another theme that came up a couple of times today with the panel, “What’s New and What’s Cool: Retrofitting Your Data center,” where panelists from HITEC Power Solutions, IDC Architects and APC-MGE discussed what hosts could co to retrofit their data centers to handle both additional load and also become more energy efficient. Later in the afternoon Phil London from APC-MGE continued the discussion with the idea that higher power densities would continue to increase and hosts had to learn to adapt to this, which is where APC could help out with its capacity management solution.
Of course the topic of utility and grid computing and its emerging technologies, strategies and opportunities came up in a panel as well, which was preceded by Tier 1′s Dan Ephraim and 3Tera’s Berry X Lynn taking a moment to eulogize former CEO Vladimir Miloushev and his contribution as a thinker and innovator to the hosting industry.
Attendees also had the opportunity to learn more about the merger and acquisition opportunities in the hosting industry through DH Capital’s presentation as well as Microsoft’s thoughts on managed hosting and its belief that services are key, not technology and that hosts need the platform, the services and ultimately need to deliver experiences to end users to keep up with the changes the company sees in the hosting industry. Attendees also heard examples of how managed hosting providers could push into the enterprise market and how hosting providers and content delivery networks would inevitably have to work more together with the growing demand of efficiently and effectively delivering rich-media content to end-users.
An interesting factor we noticed throughout the day was the fact that Amazon’s S3 solution was dissected in at least three of the sessions but it was unfortunate that the company itself wasn’t present at the event, not necessarily to defend itself, but to simply offer some more information and insight behind its solution as it sounded like a large portion of the presenters and the attendees found interest in Amazon’s technology and offerings and could benefit to hear more straight from the horse’s mouth.
The summit continues Wednesday and wraps up with a panel on marketing best practices for Internet infrastructure and software companies.
