The second day of presentations opened with Tier1 managed hosting analyst Antonio Piraino's keynote on virtualization and cloud computing, where he explained the technologies and products that will be paramount in hosting's future. Piraino's best bets for hosting services include Platform as a Service, utility storage, and virtualization from desktop to data center environments

He ranked Amazon EC2, Savvis Utility Compute, IBM Blue Cloud, Sun Network.com and AT&T's Synaptic Hosting platform as the top utility cloud computing platforms. He also named his top five cloud storage platforms: Amazon S3/SimpleDB, Nirvanix SDN, Layered Technologies, Rackspace CloudFS and Savvis Utility Storage.

While companies like Savvis (savvis.net) and Amazon (amazon.com) recieved high marks, he said companies wishing to make the cut in the future need to offer cloud services to small and medium-sized businesses, enterprises, ISVs, and as Software as a Service. They must quickly adopt new virtualization products that will better handle migrations and business automation.

Providers should also offer a suite of services helpful to businesses including security, analytics, billing, storage and application troubleshooting. Alternatively, a service provider could focus on a niche specialty.

While technology was also addressed in such presentations "Software as a Service and Platform as a Service" by Tier1's Jason Verge and Wesley Kennedy, there was much discussion on how these technologies are being adopted in the real world.

TATA Communications (tatacommunications.com) hosting and data center services director of product management Vinay Nagpal presented "Hosting in a Global Marketplace: Strategies to Integrate Global and Emerging Markets." TATA Communications is India's largest privately held company and has its history as building the country's first steel mills and car plants electricity. With the almost 100 subsidiaries in industries as diverse as tea and steel, TATA's hosting services are becoming a major world-wide player with facilities worldwide.

Nagpal explained how global reach and emerging markets penetration will be the next opportunity for growth. India and China not only are growing quickly, they are becoming innovation drivers themselves, with TATA not being the only example. Addressing global needs, supply chains, partnerships and workforces, he said, are all challenges for companies wanting to take their services global.

As the conference closed, moderator Dan Ephraim, Tier1 VP of Business Development, thanked all attendees for coming and contributing to the ever-changing discussions surrounding the hosting industry. Ephraim facilitated much of the communication between attendees and speakers, allowing post-discussion question periods to go over the time allowed, which made the conference more interactive and informative.