Abstract
You no longer need to manage a data center, or license and maintain complex software, to use (or even develop) strategic business applications.  Generic but critical IT concerns, like high availability and disaster recovery, can be someone else's problem -- while you focus 100% of your energy on understanding user needs and delivering better business processes. These are the demonstrable benefits of Cloud Computing, a dramatic improvement in enterprise application development and delivery.  The speaker will explore alternative and complementary models of Cloud Computing architecture and will profile several companies who have put them to work to build better applications, faster, at a fraction of the cost.

Biodata
Peter Coffee, Director of Platform Research at salesforce.com, works with enterprise and entrepreneurial developers and IT managers to build a community based on the company's Force.com Platform as a Service..  He was formerly the Technology Editor at eWEEK, an international multimedia center of expertise in enterprise infrastructure technology and practice.  He has more than 25 years' experience in advancing and evaluating information technologies and practices as a software developer, IT manager, consultant, educator, and internationally published author and industry analyst.

Based near Los Angeles, Coffee has written product reviews, technical analyses and opinion columns concerning disruptive forces in IT tools and practices; he has appeared on CBS, NBC, CNN, Fox, and PBS newscasts addressing Internet security, the Microsoft antitrust case, wireless telecom policies, and other eBusiness issues. He chaired the four-day Web Security Summit conference in Boston during the summer of 2000; he has been a keynote speaker, session leader or moderator at technical conferences throughout the U.S. and in England, Australia, Canada, Mexico, China and Brazil.

His two books to date are the Ziff Davis Press tutorial "How to Program Java" in 1996 and "Peter Coffee Teaches PCs," published in 1998 by Que. His specific areas of coverage have included development tools and business intelligence products.

Before becoming a full-time writer and analyst in 1989, Coffee held technical and management positions at Exxon and The Aerospace Corporation dealing with chemical facility project control, Arctic offshore development, strategic defense analysis, end-user computing planning and support, and artificial intelligence applications research. He was subsequently a prominent industry analyst throughout the life cycles of technologies including x86 and RISC microprocessors; Windows, OS/2, and Mac OS; object technologies, including Smalltalk, C++, and Java; and security technologies including strong encryption.

Coffee holds an engineering degree from MIT and an MBA from Pepperdine University, and has taught in the department of computer science at UCLA and at Pepperdine's Graziadio School of Business and Management and the Chapman College School of Business.  His other activities include choral and instrumental music, Boy Scout backpack expeditions and merit badge counseling, youth soccer refereeing, and community food bank coordination.

"Accelerating Enterprise Grid Adoption"
Speaker: Tan Tong Hai (President & Chief Executive Officer, Singapore Computer Systems)
 
Session Chair: Prof Lawrence Wong (National University of Singapore)

Abstract
Grid computing is largely adopted by the academic and research communities today. This presentation provides an overview of current grid adoption landscape in the Enterprise space. It also covers key developments, challenges and roles that key stakeholders can play in accelerating grid computing adoption for Enterprises. These stakeholders include commercial grid services providers, governments, industry bodies and grid communities such as the Singapore Grid Forum, among others.

Biodata
Mr Tan Tong Hai was appointed President and Chief Executive Officer (CEO) in August 2005. Under his leadership, SCS regained profitability within a year of his joining.

Before joining SCS, Mr Tan was President and CEO of the former NASDAQ-listed Pacific Internet (PacNet), where he turned the company around from a loss position within a year of joining and subsequently delivered 14 consecutive quarters of profit. Before PacNet, Mr Tan was CEO of StarHub Internet.

A graduate (with honours) in electrical engineering from the National University of Singapore, Mr Tan began his career at IBM and worked there for 11 years. He developed an intimate knowledge of the systems integration business, and held many management positions, including that of General Manager of International Application Solutions Pte Ltd, a wholly owned subsidiary of IBM, focusing on business applications for small and medium enterprises.

An active business leader, Mr Tan is currently President of the Singapore Grid Forum, a member of Nanyang Polytechnic’s School of Information Technology Advisory Committee and a member of the Singapore Chinese Chamber of Commerce & Industry IT advisory panel. He was previously Council Member of Singapore Manufacturers’ Federation, Singapore Computer Society, Singapore Infocomm Technology Federation, and also a member of the Chinese editorial advisory committee of Singapore Press Holdings .

"Massive Scale-Out and The Emergence of Cloud Computing"
Speaker: Alanna Dwyer (Business Director, Unified Cluster Portfolio, HP)
 
Session Chair: Jason Tan (Hewlett-Packard Singapore)

Abstract
The IT industry is in the early stages of a major shift to new business and deployment models that are generally being referred to as "cloud computing". Instead of buying or leasing IT, enterprises and individuals can access a wide range of services deployed over the internet.   Services include everything from business services to applications,  to compute cycles, to bulk storage, to shared databases and more.  Business models vary, from contracted sets of services with SLAs, to Software as a Service (SaaS), to totally ad-hoc use of services on a pay-as-you-go basis.  HP has a broad set of programs to address this shift in the industry, including a portfolio scale-out systems, software, infrastructure and services.  This talk will provide an overview of the shift that is happening in the industry and will describe some of HP's activities to deliver scale-out solutions to power cloud computing.

Biodata
Alanna Dwyer manages HP's Unified Cluster Portfolio for the Scalable Computing and Infrastructure (SCI) Organization at HP. SCI is a new organization within HP, providing leadership for the next generation of scale-out infrastructure for HPC, Web 2.0 and Cloud computing. The Unified Cluster Portfolio is a modular package of tested and pre-configured hardware, software and services for scalable computation, data management and visualization.

Alanna has been working in the area of high performance clusters and open source for over a decade, and works closely with developers and partners to deliver technologies critical for grid and cloud computing. Alanna's experience includes positions in product management and strategic planning for emerging technologies in the IT and pharmaceutical industries. Prior to that, she served as principal analyst for an international consultancy, with assignments in Europe, Latin America and the U.S. Alanna has an MBA from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, and a BA in Mathematics and Economics from Boston College

"Japanese Grid Initiatives and Future Directions"
Speaker: Dr Hiro Kishimoto (Senior Research Fellow, Fujitsu Laboratories)
 
Session Chair: Amy Foo (Fujitsu Singapore)

Abstract
The presentation will cover three major Grid initiatives in Japan. They are the National e-Science Grid "NAREGI" project, Open Grid Services Architecture, and Grid Computing for Financial Services

Biodata
Dr. Hiro Kishimoto is currently Senior Research Fellow at Fujitsu Laboratories and Visiting Professor at the National Institute of Informatics. He has led several software projects that developed distributed systems and has been an architect of the Business Grid Computing project. Hiro received the IEEE Gordon Bell Award in 1994 and the InfiniBand Contribution Award in 2000. He was presented the first GGF Leadership Award at the GGF-14 Meeting in Chicago. He received BE and ME degrees in Communication Engineering and PhD in Computer Science from Tohoku University, Sendai, Japan in 1981, 1983, and 2000, respectively.