The terms ‘it’s the economy’ and ‘the recession’ are on all of our minds. The current economic climate is affecting our ability to raise capital, merge with or acquire other firms, close deals with enterprise clients, build new datacenters and expand properly. This Keynote will focus on three crucial areas. First, we will take a look at real data, from both public and private companies, that offers a snapshot of how the sector is doing – the good and the bad. Then we'll describe some winning strategies for surviving and even thriving in a time of economic contraction. Finally, we'll turn our focus on the future – what do we need to do right now in order to maximize the coming recovery? This discussion will run the full gamut from people to equipment to facilities to products.

The Hosting Industry is under increasing pressure to deliver improved security and availability at a lower cost. Datacenters must facilitate scalability and flexibility of their IT infrastructure whilst minimising capital expenditure, energy costs and operating expenditure. Peter Hannaford will present solutions which could allow the Hosting Industry to optimise existing assets; to match supply with demand with a scalable flexible power and cooling infrastructure when new build is required; to introduce management systems to monitor and measure energy efficiency and offer tenant power billing.

T1R has rounded up some of the most prominent equity and financial organizations to discuss what they're looking for from enterprise colocation and managed hosting providers. This group will share its concerns and highlights regarding where it sees the most potential for the industry. These experts will pinpoint what it should cost to set up new cloud infrastructure services and how we can do it better. Key topics for discussion will include the services mix, the importance (or not) of eco-efficiency, billing issues, customer service and industry perceptions.

T1R recently spent time surveying the hosting industry and the enterprise world, to understand the drivers and inhibitors common to the industry. This talk will focus on the key applications driving the hosting industry toward new services, and specifically the winners and losers in the cloud infrastructure services space. Who are the players, how did they get there, and who are the vendors paying the most attention to enabling new ‘monetizable’ services to the hosting industry? Watch out for the pitfalls of aiming your products in the wrong direction, though.

Cloud storage is the fastest-growing segment of the cloud computing market. Tier1 has gathered leading companies from both the cloud storage enablement and cloud storage services sides of the market to discuss the pros and cons of traditional SAN- and NAS-based storage versus modern cloud storage. How do hosting operators wishing to offer cloud storage services deploy these technologies side-by-side? What have use cases shown in terms of the pitfalls and opportunities for new monetization and partnerships?

Join leading practitioners that have created business models fostering on-demand Web apps, and see what will drive the next wave of cloud users. What models work best for attracting ISVs and SaaS customers? How do you manage application sprawl, and all your SaaS vendors? Are there special requirements for monitoring performance and ensuring security and uptime? Is there still place for SOA in this SaaS world? What is the next evolution of business clouds? The panel will comment on the continuum of increasing efficiency, partnerships and private cloud enablement, and will look into the top applications that each panelist is looking to host on cloud infrastructure and platforms.

As the concept of outsourced business infrastructure and applications grows, so does the need for on-demand, online applications. Tier1 has picked a mix of firms that have successfully implemented some of the most popular applications in the hosting industry. This panel will address some of the industry's most pressing questions. Why the growth in these services? Are these still the most demanded applications from enterprises and SMBs alike? How are they being implemented as components of – and in supplement to – cloud services? What are the next big killer apps that will drive hosted business? Are you picking the right app suite? Are we in danger of heading down the ASP route?

T1R has identified four broad categories that represent new growth areas in the cloud infrastructure services space: management, automation, security and storage. Join some of the top fully managed hosting providers in Europe as they collide over which of these areas they believe to be most critical in moving into the cloud space. Is there a difference in the way in which enterprises, SMBs, government agencies and developers are approached? What kind of IaaS and PaaS provider services are needed? Are clouds hosting 2.0, or colocation 2.0? What is it that the industry is asking for? What is the next evolution of the cloud?

For datacenter operators, beyond the question of ‘build versus buy’ is the need to understand where to expand your business lines. Credit is becoming harder to access, and capital needs to be responsibly used to make the most of market opportunities. Do datacenter operators look to new storage, CDN or managed hosting services, or is the separation and specialization of datacenter services a better way to succeed in a tightened economy?

This session is an opportunity for the audience to pepper the analysts with questions, comments and ideas that will lead to thought provoking responses and topical conversation that benefit the hosting community.