The Cloud Computing World Forum, scheduled to take place on October 22, will outline why Cloud Computing and Software-as-a-Service are ideal solutions for the small business sector, during its one day conference in London.

The event will take place the 22nd of October at 76 Portland Place and feature among others, a presentation from Mike Spink, Research Director for Gartner, who will discuss why the Cloud is perfect for SMBs.

Mr. Spink explained, ”The promise of Cloud Computing creates a tremendous opportunity for SMB’s to revisit their IT strategy and critical planning assumptions. As the market evolves and matures, Cloud Computing will become a viable and cost-effective alternative to on-premises IT for an increasing percentage of requirements.”

Mark Johnstone, MD of organizers Point Zero Media noted, ”It’s our intention with this event to make business aware of the possibilities of Cloud Computing and SaaS. This technology is available to everyone and could be of huge benefit to the SMB. We hope the event will provide insight to some of these businesses whilst also giving them the opportunity to network and meet with likeminded professionals and peers.”

Key speakers at the event will include:

- Evangelos Kotsovinos, VP of Hosting, Morgan Stanley
- Dr Pamal Sharma, CIO – UK and Ireland, General Motors
- Kostas Tsatsaris, CTO and Director, Strategy and Architecture, HM Revenue and Customs
- Keith Misson, Business Director, Group IT, Aviva
- Andy McLoughlin, Co-founder and Strategy Director, Huddle
- Simon Abrahams, EMEA Head of Product Marketing, Rackspace
- Euan Semple, Freelance Consultant/Former Director of Knowledge Management, BBC
- Laurent Lachal, Senior Analyst, Ovum
- Robin Daniels, Sr Manager, Product Marketing, Salesforce.com
- Tim Mather, Author, Cloud Computing and Privacy
- David Terrar, CEO, D2C
- Mike Spink, Senior Analyst, Gartner

The event will also feature an intimate exhibition and networking area available to all attendees and provide great networking opportunities with industry leaders, presenting opportunities to meet and do business with likeminded individuals who have an interest in cloud computing.

To register, please visit: www.cloudwf.com or call +44 (0) 845 519 1230. For further information on the event, please contact Mark Johnstone at +44 (0) 845 519 1230 or email mark@pointzeromedia.com.

The Cloud Computing World Forum began as a way for professionals to learn and discuss the future development and integration of cloud services and will feature key decision makers from all of the cloud service providers. The conference will address the current state of the cloud computing market, the business value of the cloud, deployment strategies and integration techniques, and security and privacy issues, as well as look into what the future holds from cloud service providers.

New reseller and dedicated web hosting packages for Canadian and U.S. clients have been launched by web hosting service provider, Hosting Nation.

Sean Enns, Director of Marketing and Communications at Hosting Nation explained, ”We already offer a lot of extra resources in our shared hosting plans. The reseller and dedicated environments are natural extensions of products and services we already provide.”

Users receive WHM and cPanel, as well as the Fantastico DeLuxe and Installatron software installers. Hosting Nation has also added custom resources, such as simple installations of development frameworks like jQuery and Blueprint CSS and the R1Soft Continuous Data Protection. The basic reseller plan from Hosting Nation includes 25 GB of disk space and 250 GB of bandwidth for only $19.95 per month. View all reseller hosting plans from Hosting Nation

Dedicated severs are either dual or quad core Xeon servers with a minimum of 2 GB of Ram and 2000 GB of disk space. Dedicated servers from Hosting Nation start at $259 per month. View all dedicated server plans from Hosting Nation

Hosting Nation is a privately owned web hosting and web service provider headquartered in beautiful Parksville, British Columbia. Hosting Nation is committed to providing their citizens with best in class web hosting technology, software and support by drawing on over 50 combined years of experience in server management, web design, programming, project management and internet marketing.

A recent licensing agreement between Microsoft Corp. and SmarterTools Inc. extends Microsoft’s patented Exchange ActiveSync technology to more than 15 million end users through the latest version of the SmarterMail mail server.

The agreement provides a patent license to SmarterTools for this industry-leading technology and allows Microsoft to expand its reach to include SmarterTools’ robust customer base, which encompasses hosting/service providers, enterprises, and small to medium sized businesses.

David Kaefer, general manager of intellectual property licensing at Microsoft offered, ”We are pleased to work with SmarterTools to provide Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync to SmarterMail users. This technology is being sought out by our partners and competitors alike because it enhances their value proposition to their customers, and we believe that to be a testament to the innovation taking place at Microsoft.”

Microsoft has been licensing the Exchange ActiveSync protocol for mobile devices since 2003, and SmarterTools joins a growing number of companies licensing the Exchange ActiveSync patents for implementation on a server.

Tim Uzzanti, CEO of SmarterTools noted, ”With the growing number of mobile manufacturers adding Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync compatibility to their devices, the technology is the standard for mobile synchronization and communication. Mobile devices are becoming the primary device for communication and the ability to accept a calendar event, read email immediately, and track tasks from a mobile device while syncing with the server is a necessity. The addition of Exchange ActiveSync to the SmarterMail mail server is part of our continuing commitment to provide individuals and businesses the tools necessary to compete in today’s marketplace.”

Under the terms of the patent licensing agreement, SmarterMail 6.x users have the ability to synchronize emails, calendars, contacts, and notes between mobile devices in real time using Exchange ActiveSync’s Direct Push technology. SmarterTools has packaged the SmarterMail 6.x Exchange ActiveSync add-on differently than other providers, resulting in a yearly subscription priced well below competitive solutions.

In addition, SmarterTools allows customers to add Exchange ActiveSync to only the mailboxes that need the technology, making adoption of the add-on easy and affordable for small to medium sized businesses (SMBs) and the ISP/hosting industry. Scalable and easy to manage, SmarterMail 6.x features a rich, Webmail interface; reporting; events/notifications; throttling; message archiving; intrusion detection/prevention; advanced synchronization with Microsoft Outlook; over-the-air support for BlackBerry, iPhone, and Windows Mobile devices; and optional add-ons for Exchange ActiveSync and Commtouch Antispam. Enhanced antispam, antivirus, and security features provide superior protection out-of-the-box. SmarterMail is available at the SmarterTools Web site and through authorized resellers.

Founded in 2003, SmarterTools Inc. is an information technology-management software company based in Phoenix, Arizona. SmarterTools builds a Windows mail server, customer service software, and a Web log analytics reporting tool that simplify and automate the day-to-day IT operations of businesses and hosting environments.

Dedicated hosting provider, LeaseWeb, has made significant upgrades for its Support Department over the past six months in response to signs that the customer support experience could be improved.

Rolph Haspers, Operations Director of LeaseWeb remarked, ”Various developments caused our Support Department to become somewhat overburdened at the end of 2008.In Q4 2008, LeaseWeb experienced a tremendous growth spurt that had repercussions on the Support Department. This department was facing extra difficulties due to the unfortunate lack of engineers at that time, and the fact that it had too many lower qualified engineers. Also, we are traditionally a highly technology-oriented company, which is not always conducive to customer-friendliness and which became more apparent during this stressful period.”

The most recent semi-annual customer survey held among more than 1,300 customers showed that the measures are having a positive effect. The upgrade of LeaseWeb’s Support Department included the hiring of 20 more highly qualified engineers and the improvement of the terms of employment. In addition, all support engineers completed a series of communications training courses to improve their ability to operate in a more customer-friendly manner. These measures have resulted in an impressive 20% increase in the number of fully satisfied customers over the past six months.

More than six months ago, immediately after the disappointing support results from the previous customer survey, both short-term and long-term measures were implemented in order to provide the customers with renewed confidence in a positive support experience. Haspers: The survey results confirmed our gut feeling and we immediately took action. Our short-term measures included the temporary hiring of additional Support staff, partly from the UK. These highly experienced employees were able to relieve some of the pressure and provide effective support to less experienced staff.

For the longer term, LeaseWeb immediately started looking for more highly qualified engineers in an effort to expand its Support Department with additional permanent staff. Haspers: This expansion process is still continuing, although the current staffing of the department already has significantly improved the ability to handle peak loads. This positive effect is clearly reflected in the most recent semi-annual customer survey. In addition, six months ago, we immediately decided to relieve the burden on the Support Department in a structural manner through additional investments in automation, among other areas, and by unlinking the provisioning process, i.e. the process of making servers and other hardware available. That should also help to lighten the work load of the department and improve the quality of support.

Many of LeaseWeb’s customers are Internet professionals or specialists such as system integrators, Web developers and application developers who resell LeaseWeb’s hosting services and integrate them into a total solution. As a result of this particular customer focus, customers have a relatively extensive knowledge of hosting. Support nonetheless remains vital. Haspers: Hosting has become a commodity for these companies. They have some knowledge of hosting, but they want to have the ability to fully concentrate on the services they provide in addition to LeaseWeb’s basic hosting products. In that sense, support remains vital for them.

Are there any other needs when it comes to support? Haspers: The customer survey confirms that we are on the right track and that our quality improvement operation has been successful, but we want to optimize our support to an even further extent. Our focus for the coming six months is to further improve the response and resolution times for issues. In addition, we are continuously working on expanding our engineers’ knowledge, e.g. through additional certification processes, in order to take the customers technical support experience to yet a higher level.

LeaseWeb is an international provider of hosting solutions that is primarily geared towards the professional market. The company is among the top-20 hosting providers worldwide and its services include server virtualization, dedicated servers, collocation, streaming, webhosting, and domain name registration. LeaseWeb is the proprietor of a first-class network that offers a bandwidth of more than 750 Gbps, spanning four data centers in the Amsterdam region via major telecom carriers. LeaseWeb is also present via Internet exchanges in Amsterdam, Londen, Frankfurt, New York, Brussel, Kopenhagen, Parijs, Budapest, Boekarest, Warschau, Praag, Bratislava, Milaan, Wenen, Stockholm, Oslo, Zuumlrich and Madrid. This way, LeaseWeb enables companies around the world to create and continue their online presence in a simple and affordable manner. Since its founding in 1997, hosting provider LeaseWeb has expanded its network to include more than 22,000 servers. LeaseWeb’s clients include Royal Joh. Ensched OGD, 123Video, Jaap.nl, Relatieplanet, MijnAlbum, Starbucks, Hyves, PricewaterhouseCoopers, Twenga, Direct Wonen, Heineken, Wikipedia, and Rijksmuseum Amsterdam.

Microsoft Gold Certified Partner and a provider of Windows-based hosting and managed IT services, MaximumASP, will soon release a new shared windows hosting platform.

According to the company, MaxESP will be the first highly available completely PCI compliant (web + data) Microsoft ASP.NET shared web hosting platform. The MaxESP core focus is to cater to all aspects of the application life cycle. Customers can quickly upgrade the standard plan and make their application load balanced and more robust with 1 mouse click. Introductory accounts will be available in October free of charge for 30 days and just $49 a month after the trial period.

Besides the usual features of a hosting solution like email, SQL databases, SAN-supported storage, free backups, etc., the MaxESP elastic shared platform adds an SSL VPN service free of charge, PCI compliance at a shared price point, and on-demand application-aware load balancing and simultaneous application instances without forcing customers to rewrite their code.

As a leading Windows-based hosting provider, MaximumASP keeps up with the latest developments in Microsoft technologies while continually seeking customer feedback.

Matt Griffin, product manager at MaxESP explained, ”Windows Server 2008 R2, Internet Information Services (IIS) 7.5, and Application Request Routing, which is an IIS extension, offers tremendous benefits to both our company and our customers in our new shared hosting platform.”

MaxESP is a highly scalable, cost-effective hosting solution that makes it easier for customers to manage their applications. In a shared-hosting architecture, multiple customers use the same physical server. These environments have traditionally been difficult to manage as they grow to include thousands of customers and applications, the MaxESP solution makes it easier for MaximumASP to support a rapidly expanding customer base.

With both its current offerings and MaxESP, MaximumASP simplified the administration of shared hosting for its IT staff. Dominic Foster, CTO of MaximumASP added, ”With Application Request Routing on top of Windows Server 2008 R2, we’ve created a rock-solid platform that’s scalable to any level and takes care of all the headaches normally associated with shared hosting.”

John Zanni, general manager of the Worldwide Software plus Services Industry in the Microsoft Communications Sector at Microsoft Corp. offered, ”With Application Request Routing from Microsoft, hosting providers can offer elastic scalability, optimized resource utilization and reduced management costs to their customers in a simple process. MaximumASP, as our Hosting Solutions Partner of the Year, continues to innovate and demonstrate in-depth knowledge of Microsoft technologies with its MaxESP platform.”

Additionally, MaximumASP takes advantage of the ability of ARR to manage multiple server farms and to manage and monitor all configuration settings through easy-to-use tools including IIS Remote Management.

Mr. Griffin added, ”ARR sits on top of a common, or shared, configuration system provided by IIS, which makes it very easy for us to develop custom modules or apply custom provisioning that plugs into the rest of our IT pipeline. We can use this to support billing, track customers, scale up or down, or add capacity for on-demand products that we want to roll out.”

MaximumASP can quickly provision highly available and scalable server farms and expand customers’ self-service options. Multiple layers of load balancing, enterprise SAN storage and redundant server farms will support high-performance requirements. The result will be better service for hosting customers and savings of up to U.S. $166,000 a year for MaximumASP in labor and hardware costs.

Mr. Foster continued, ”We are very excited about MaxESP as well as the IIS 7.5 architecture and anxious for more customer feedback on how it simplifies management of hosted sites and Web applications. MaximumASP continues to lead the hosting industry by giving our customers a competitive edge and enabling them to be first-to-market with new solutions.”

Created in IIS 7.5 and Windows Server 2008 R2 MaxESP has many exciting new features:

• Easily create and control your applications in IIS 7.5 using IIS Remote Management
• Highly available shared hosting with application aware load balancing
• Need more power? No problem. Add instances of your application to seamlessly scale capacity
• Decrease the number of nodes when not operating at peak times – or allocate to other website(s)
• Customizable scalability right at your fingertips

MaximumASP, based in Louisville, Kentucky, was founded in 2000 as an outsourcing firm for Windows-based hosting services. MaximumASP was named by Microsoft as its 2009 Hosting Solutions Partner of the Year. The company currently hosts more than 50,000 domains for customers in over 120 countries. With a strong focus on hosting solutions that combine advanced monitoring and management tools, MaximumASP has become a top choice for Microsoft developers seeking a robust hosting platform for mission-critical web applications.

Microsoft Gold Certified Partner and a provider of Windows-based hosting and managed IT services, MaximumASP, will soon release a new shared windows hosting platform.

According to the company, MaxESP will be the first highly available completely PCI compliant (web + data) Microsoft ASP.NET shared web hosting platform. The MaxESP core focus is to cater to all aspects of the application life cycle. Customers can quickly upgrade the standard plan and make their application load balanced and more robust with 1 mouse click. Introductory accounts will be available in October free of charge for 30 days and just $49 a month after the trial period.

Besides the usual features of a hosting solution like email, SQL databases, SAN-supported storage, free backups, etc., the MaxESP elastic shared platform adds an SSL VPN service free of charge, PCI compliance at a shared price point, and on-demand application-aware load balancing and simultaneous application instances without forcing customers to rewrite their code.

As a leading Windows-based hosting provider, MaximumASP keeps up with the latest developments in Microsoft technologies while continually seeking customer feedback.

Matt Griffin, product manager at MaxESP explained, ”Windows Server 2008 R2, Internet Information Services (IIS) 7.5, and Application Request Routing, which is an IIS extension, offers tremendous benefits to both our company and our customers in our new shared hosting platform.”

MaxESP is a highly scalable, cost-effective hosting solution that makes it easier for customers to manage their applications. In a shared-hosting architecture, multiple customers use the same physical server. These environments have traditionally been difficult to manage as they grow to include thousands of customers and applications, the MaxESP solution makes it easier for MaximumASP to support a rapidly expanding customer base.

With both its current offerings and MaxESP, MaximumASP simplified the administration of shared hosting for its IT staff. Dominic Foster, CTO of MaximumASP added, ”With Application Request Routing on top of Windows Server 2008 R2, we’ve created a rock-solid platform that’s scalable to any level and takes care of all the headaches normally associated with shared hosting.”

John Zanni, general manager of the Worldwide Software plus Services Industry in the Microsoft Communications Sector at Microsoft Corp. offered, ”With Application Request Routing from Microsoft, hosting providers can offer elastic scalability, optimized resource utilization and reduced management costs to their customers in a simple process. MaximumASP, as our Hosting Solutions Partner of the Year, continues to innovate and demonstrate in-depth knowledge of Microsoft technologies with its MaxESP platform.”

Additionally, MaximumASP takes advantage of the ability of ARR to manage multiple server farms and to manage and monitor all configuration settings through easy-to-use tools including IIS Remote Management.

Mr. Griffin added, ”ARR sits on top of a common, or shared, configuration system provided by IIS, which makes it very easy for us to develop custom modules or apply custom provisioning that plugs into the rest of our IT pipeline. We can use this to support billing, track customers, scale up or down, or add capacity for on-demand products that we want to roll out.”

MaximumASP can quickly provision highly available and scalable server farms and expand customers’ self-service options. Multiple layers of load balancing, enterprise SAN storage and redundant server farms will support high-performance requirements. The result will be better service for hosting customers and savings of up to U.S. $166,000 a year for MaximumASP in labor and hardware costs.

Mr. Foster continued, ”We are very excited about MaxESP as well as the IIS 7.5 architecture and anxious for more customer feedback on how it simplifies management of hosted sites and Web applications. MaximumASP continues to lead the hosting industry by giving our customers a competitive edge and enabling them to be first-to-market with new solutions.”

Created in IIS 7.5 and Windows Server 2008 R2 MaxESP has many exciting new features:

• Easily create and control your applications in IIS 7.5 using IIS Remote Management
• Highly available shared hosting with application aware load balancing
• Need more power? No problem. Add instances of your application to seamlessly scale capacity
• Decrease the number of nodes when not operating at peak times – or allocate to other website(s)
• Customizable scalability right at your fingertips

MaximumASP, based in Louisville, Kentucky, was founded in 2000 as an outsourcing firm for Windows-based hosting services. MaximumASP was named by Microsoft as its 2009 Hosting Solutions Partner of the Year. The company currently hosts more than 50,000 domains for customers in over 120 countries. With a strong focus on hosting solutions that combine advanced monitoring and management tools, MaximumASP has become a top choice for Microsoft developers seeking a robust hosting platform for mission-critical web applications.

Web hosting industry tutorial firm, DemoWolf, has initiated an overhaul of its pricing structure. Tutorials of all kind are being offered at substantially reduced rates, discounted at up to 80 percent from former costs.

DemoWolf has gone through its entire inventory of tutorials and lowered regular and sale prices on all of its offerings. Not only have they continued its ”50% off” sale pricing, but they have lowered all of their regular prices.

The company has also updated its Savings Bundles to reflect all the new tutorials released in the last several months. In the last year, DemoWolf has doubled the number of tutorials available in its inventory, from 1,900 in August 2008, to over 3,600 as of now. New savings bundles are available at: http://www.demowolf.com/bundle-and-save.php. Voice tutorials are available at 75% discounts at http://www.demowolf.com/bundle-and-save.php.

The main changes include:
- New tab system for Standard vs Voice tutorials – the list only includes either voice or non-voice tutorials, rather than both. Tab back and forth between them to see what is needed.

- New sub-tab system for languages – Now only the English tutorials are displayed initially, with all other languages available by clicking the appropriate language tabs, for easy navigation between English, French, Spanish, Dutch, Greek, Brazilian, Russian, Czech or Bahasia tutorials.
- New ”Watch Now” buttons for every series, tied into a Nested-Floatbox system of viewing tutorials.
- Quick indicators letting you know if a tutorial series is also available in a Voice version, or in other languages.
- Regular and Sale pricing is more clearly labeled, as are the ”Buy Now” buttons.
- New sub-categories of tutorials to make tutorial series easier to locate.

Following is a list of the new tutorials released just in the last 2 months. All tutorials can be viewed from the new Hosting Tutorials page:

WHM 11 Setup series (29 demos)
WHM 11 Services series (33 demos)
WHM 11 Accounts series (35 demos)
WHM 11 Management series (24 demos)
Joomla New Setup VOICE series (20 demos)
Joomla New Admin VOICE series (17 demos)
Joomla New CMS VOICE series (17 demos)
Joomla New Extensions VOICE series (18 demos)
Joomla New End-user VOICE series (12 demos)
cPanel 11 x3 end-user FRENCH series (31 demos)
Horde FRENCH series (11 demos)
SquirrelMail FRENCH series (10 demos)
RoundCube FRENCH series (10 demos)
Fantastico FRENCH series (47 demos)
Drupal FRENCH series (14 demos)
Gallery FRENCH series (11 demos)
WHMCS 4 End-user series (10 demos)
WHMCS 4 Setup series (22 demos)
WHMCS 4 Management series (14 demos)

DemoWolf produces tutorials for the web hosting industry. The tutorials included for CPanel, feature 5 different skins, Direct Admin, Email, FTP, H-Sphere, Helm, phpMyAdmin, Plesk 8 for Linux, Plesk for Windows, SeverCP, SmarterMail, Virtuozzo, WebHost Manager,and several DNS domain name tutorials.and several DNS and domain name tutorial series. DemoWolf also has several tutorial series with voice and audio narration, including different voices and accents to choose from. DemoWolf is an Internet services company based in Halifax, NS, Canada. Specializing in providing ”professional quality” branded tutorials for the web hosting industry, DemoWolf also provides custom tutorials for many other online applications.

The Green Geeks firm has purchased green power and will join the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Green Power Partnership.

Green Geeks, LLC is purchasing more than 48,000 kilowatt-hours (kWh) of green power annually, which is enough green power to meet 300 percent of the organizations purchased electricity use. Green Geeks, LLC is buying renewable energy certificates (RECs) from Bonneville Environmental Foundation, a leading national supplier of green power products.

Trey Gardner, CEO of Green Geeks explained, ”This is a huge honor and we are proud to be recognized by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. We’ve always been diligent and we’ve worked hard to make Green Geeks the most eco friendly company we could be. When the EPA contacted us we were pleased to find out that companies like ours could get the support of the EPA through their Green Power Partner Program. We look forward to working with the EPA and their Program to further the cause for more companies to go green.”

Green power is electricity that is generated from environmentally preferable renewable resources, such as wind, solar, geothermal, biogas, biomass and low-impact hydro. These resources generate electricity with a net zero increase in carbon dioxide emissions, while offering a superior environmental profile compared to traditional power generation sources. Green power purchases also support the development of new renewable energy generation sources nationwide.

Kathleen Hogan, Director of the Climate Protection Partnerships Division at EPA noted, ”EPA is pleased to welcome Green Geeks to the Green Power Partnership. We applaud their commitment to using green power to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.”

According to the U.S. EPA, Green Geek’s green power purchase of more than 48,000 (kWh) is equivalent to avoiding the carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions of more than 6 passenger vehicles per year, or is the equivalent amount of electricity needed to power more than 5 average American homes annually.

Green Geeks LLC provides shared, reseller and dedicated server web hosting as well as domain name registration and domain management. Green Geeks has offices in Toronto, Chicago and Los Angeles and they service customers in over 40 countries World Wide. Since the start of operations Green Geeks has been an eco-friendly web host with 300% green energy purchases.

Founded in 1998 and based in Portland, Ore., Bonneville Environmental Foundation (BEF) is an entrepreneurial nonprofit that engages market forces and ingenuity to help people address our most pressing energy and water issues. Through sales of carbon offsets, BEF supports renewable energy development and education and long-term watershed restoration. Bonneville Environmental Foundation recently established a subsidiary, BEF Renewable Incorporated, to initiate innovative renewable energy projects and partner with tax-exempt entities, such as schools, cities, tribal governments and other nonprofits, to help them develop renewable energy projects.

The Green Power Partnership is a voluntary program that encourages organizations to buy green power as a way to reduce the environmental impacts associated with purchased electricity use. The Partnership currently has more than 1,100 Partner organizations voluntarily purchasing billions of kilowatt-hours of green power annually. Partners include a wide variety of leading organizations such as Fortune 500 companies, small and medium sized businesses, local, state, and federal governments, and colleges and universities.

Web hosting sponsors have been confirmed for commercial Hadoop company, Cloudera, for the inaugural Hadoop World conference, which will take place Friday, October 2 at the Roosevelt Hotel in New York City.

The 12 confirmed sponsors for Hadoop World: NYC 2009 are Facebook, Rackspace, Yahoo!, Intel, IBM, Amazon.com, Supermicro, Softlayer, and eHarmony. Confirmed media sponsors include GigaOm, High Scalability, ReadWriteWeb and The Register.

Christophe Bisciglia, founder of Cloudera remarked, ”To have such a large number of industry leaders sponsor a first-time event speaks volumes about the importance of Hadoop and its future. As traditional enterprises around the world are turning to Hadoop to solve data-intensive computing challenges, Hadoop World will provide compelling use cases along with the introduction and instruction needed for enterprise users to get started.”

At Hadoop World, more than 30 of the world’s most experienced Apache Hadoop practitioners — including project creator Doug Cutting — will gather to discuss Hadoop-related best practices and use cases.

Eric Baldeschwieler, Vice President, Hadoop Software Development, Yahoo! explained, ”Yahoo! is the largest supporter and contributor to the Hadoop project, and we run the largest Hadoop installations in the world to support complex data analysis and mining, display advertising, our content platforms, personalization, filtering email spam, research, and more. We are excited about the growth we’re seeing in the Hadoop ecosystem, including more uses of Hadoop for mission critical activity across the industry. At Hadoop World, we look forward to discussing the exciting prospects and challenges for continuing to make Hadoop faster, more scalable, more reliable and more secure.”

Rod Smith, vp of Emerging Technologies, IBM Software Group noted, ”We see that applications based on Hadoop have the potential to revolutionize business analytics in the same way PC spreadsheets did in the 80s. Using Hadoop to tap the power of ‘Big Data’ sets the stage for a new class of Web applications– enabling more business professionals across industries to gain insight from today’s massive amount of information.”

John Engates, CTO at Rackspace noted, ”At Rackspace, we generate terabytes upon terabytes of log files and event level data operating our cloud services. Hadoop has proven to be a scalable and reliable system for storing and processing our ever increasing volumes of data, and we’re excited to share details with the community at Hadoop World: NYC 2009.”

Nathan Day, CTO, Softlayer noted, ”We see a lot of our customers taking advantage of Softlayer’s bare metal cloud offering to achieve better performance for Hadoop. It’s exciting to see how many companies are turning to Hadoop and we’re pleased to be a part of this growing community.”

Cloudera, the commercial Hadoop company, delivers the scalable platform for a new generation of data-intensive applications. Founded by leading experts on big data from Facebook, Google, Oracle and Yahoo, Cloudera helps traditional enterprises tap into the power of Hadoop. Headquartered in Silicon Valley, Cloudera has financial backing from Accel Partners, Greylock Partners and angel investors who include Diane Greene (former CEO of VMware), Marten Mickos (former CEO of MySQL), and Jeff Weiner (CEO of LinkedIn).