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Late last week, SDForum in San Jose, CA, hosted a standing-room only conference on Cloud Computing.   The speakers were a good mix of industry analysts, end-users and vendors with a very lively audience that asked some great questions. There were several key take-aways from where I sat...most notably that Cloud Computing is part of the natural evolution of computing environments and trends that began with SaaS. Yes, Cloud can be disruptive but that won’t come from pure adoption. The disruption will come from significant advances in the underlying infrastructure, heterogeneous management systems, capacity/workload management and the emergence of open standards. James Staten of Forrester Research forecasted that the hype bubble around Cloud Computing will dissipate toward the end of 2009/beginning of 2010. Why? Because there are few real examples of profitable solutions solving real world business problems. The bulk of the conversation at the conference was on the "cool stuff," that Cloud might support in the future, such as gaming and mobile computing. And that leads to the second take away - it’s all about the infrastructure.  The absence of discussion around what is the right IT environment, data center architecture, DR and HA requirements, policies and management tools to ensure that Cloud service providers can meet SLAs was noticeable.  Without the right virtualization and I/O management capabilities to simplify administration, server provisioning and application deployment to ensure availability, scalability, and disaster recovery, Cloud can not realize its potential. We've truly come full circle - and it looks like technology innovation is going to get its rightful spotlight again! And that leads to my third take away...the need for standards.  Users of Amazon’s Cloud can’t move their applications to Google’s cloud and vice versa.  That’s a problem and the audience called it ‘vendor lock-in’ and you know what? They’re right.   The wider vendor community needs to come together and start to agree on some basics. Let me know your thoughts on Cloud and the challenges we have to make it real, and then make it work.