Had the opportunity to attend a seminar on cloud computing in New York last week put on by Amazon, MySQL, Sun Micro, and a local Santa Barbara company called Rightscale.

While much of the seminar is what you would have expected - heavy marketing and cheerleading on the products and services put on by each company, there were some jewels as well. Probably the most interesting discussion was from the enterprise attendees who were either in the implementation/provisioning process, or in due-diligence phase of preparing a cloud processing proposal for their companies.

Security, surprisingly was not the hottest topic (OK, I am humbled, and admit I was wrong on this point). The hottest topic was the cost of migrating applications from the existing IT infrastructure to a cloud infrastructure, and the fact many companies are still using some very old legacy applications that will require major re-writes prior to bringing those applications into a cloud infrastructure.

The enterprise attendees were a good mixture of financial companies (traders, investment houses, and banking), as well as some attendees from smaller manufacturing and import/export companies. All definitely had cloud on their minds, and even those who did not have short term plans admitted they needed to bring themselves up to speed quickly, as corporate management has begun asking cost/benefit questions related to running internal data centers -vs- outsourcing to a third-party data data center or cloud.

Rightscale did a very credible job of explaining this is not a simple task, and that even the most savvy companies can use professional assistance in building both their business case, as well as migration and vendor selection strategies. We'll put Rightscale on the SoCal tech watch list next to 3tera. (www.rightscale.com)

This week brings more cloudy planning, venturing to San Diego to attend the San Diego Software Industry Council (SDSIC) weekly meeting - with this week's topic on the state and future of cloud computing.