CloudFest is beginning with the opening speech, and it will last full three days to cover every bit of cloud. We are covering the whole event with the latest news and speeches as well as the live stream itself.
The timestamps are based on the GMT timezone and the latest updates come to the top.
Day 3
16:20: CloudFest 2022 is ending with the closing speech. Thank you for following the event with us.
16:00: Josepha Haden Chomphosy, WordPress executive director at Automattic is not at the main stage, digitally. She is speaking about the tomorrow of WordPress. She states the WordPress ecosystem is so big, it would make 39th of the economy in the world as a country. Josepha is now telling about the state of the transition to the block editor, Gutenberg, as an ecosystem. She is inviting more people to contribute to WordPress as well.
15:10: Danny McPherson, executive vice president & chief security officer of Verisign, Tim Callan, chief compliance officer of Sectigo, and Robert Neumann, head of cyber protection operation center at Acronis are at the stage for a roundtable discussion. Robert and Danny are participating digitally. They will be discussing the new strategies for a more digital world. The speakers think that the COVID pandemic has accelerated IT by years at once, but also brought more threats. Robert thinks AI-based solutions are never enough to be trusted alone yet. He also stated that education is the key to digital security.
14:45: Jeff Hardy, chief communication strategist of Art of the Message is now giving his speech; instead of introducing other speakers. He is talking about hosting and cloud threat assessment. Customers’ weak passwords and their tendency to leave their devices unlocked are still the most important security threats.
14:35: Andy Simpson, senior director, strategy & analytics at Verisign is digitally connected to stage one, explaining building for evolving digital world.
14:10: At the second stage, Erik Leo, MSP account manager at n-able is giving his speech about the security and effectiveness of image backup; starting with the evolution of backup solutions.
14:05: Russ Jeffery, product strategy and ecosystem at Duda will talk about the website speeds of SMBs and its relation with gaining more customers in hosting service providers’ perspective. He states that loading time affects e-commerce SMBs’ sales directly. A 0.1-second decrease in loading time can increase the conversion rate by 10%. He is giving tips for increasing the speed of the websites; one of them is improving font loading optimization, and another one is prioritizing content.
13:40: Adam Sandor, solution architect of the cloud security start-up Styra is on the stage. He is giving his speech about authorization the cloud-native way. They provide unified authorization built on open policy agents for Kubernetes, microservices, public cloud, and custom APIs.
13:30: Lunch break is over. The event is about to continue.
12:10: Lunch break. We will be back at 13:30.
11:45: Alan Wilsmouth, CEO and founder of 2CRSi, and Philip Kurus, senior sales executive at Boston Server are about to give their speech about green solutions for modern cloud environments. He states that the measures taken for green IT also cuts the costs of energy. The company has some solutions that use the heat from data centers to use it for hot water. Philip is explaining their joint project with 2CRSi. He states that their project uses much less energy than the company’s competitors’ solutions.
11:35: Martin Schröter, senior cloud security sales specialist of Check Point Software Technologies is at the main stage to talk about the transformation of the cloud. He started his speech by explaining unified security solutions for the cloud. He explained transforming into the cloud for businesses.
11:20: Pascal Bitterly, head of marketing Flexible Engine Cloud at Orange Business Services has arrived at the stage. He has begun his speech for cloud migration by stating that all kids are dreaming of becoming the new Mark Zuckerberg now. He introduces the capabilities of his company’s cloud solution. He is now telling the reasons for trusting Orange.
10:55: Dr. Avesta Hojjati, head of R&D at DigiCert is now on the stage to talk about digital trust and certificates. He points out that the digital certificates were lasting longer in the past, but way shorter today. He states that developments should be designed with security in mind; not as later-to-secure. He ends his speech by reminding the importance of security while companies are embracing remote working.
10:30: Dr. André Fachat, CTO complex solution architecture of IBM, and Sonja Pierer business consumption director of Intel Germany are on the main stage to discuss digitalization of the healthcare systems.
10:05: Prof. Yuval Noah Harari is now on the main stage, digitally. He is explaining how technology can help humans flourish. He is pointing out that ancient advancements, even writing, have also caused negative effects on human life. He says writing was discovered to collect taxes, not empowering people. Yuval is also stating that social media platforms are using greed, fear, and hate with their automatic suggestions related to users’ interests. Overall, he is explaining that the main purpose of the new technologies should be checked if they are seeing the users as basic consumers, or they are empowering humanity by providing them tools; like YouTube provided.
09:50: Holger Müller, CTO of Cisco, and Janek Maiwald, CTO of DGC will give their speech about the use of AI to boost IT vulnerability and threat management. Janek states that there are a lot of attack scenarios. He is showing the technical diagrams of Cisco’s AI-based security solutions. Janek points out that machines are way better than humans to detect the smallest problems in security.
09:30: Stefan Mink, head of TechOps Hosting at IONOS SE, and Sebastian Noelting, CEO of RNT Rausch are on the stage. They will be discussing the sustainability of the data centers.
09:25: At the second stage, Claudia Frese, CEO of STRATO AG, Paulo Storti, CEO of Zextras, Pascal Bitterly, head of marketing flexible engine cloud of Orange Business Services, and Jordan Yerman, senior copywriter of CloudFest are gathered to talk about helping older SMBs to digitize. Claudia phrases that older people have issues with trusting digitalizing solutions.
09:05: David Mason, director of channel success at Sitelock, and Tim Callan, chief compliance officer of Sectigo are on the stage to discuss educating customers about security threats for their websites. On average, every website is attacked 172 times a day; which is a huge number. But the owners don’t even notice them because of the security measures. Bot traffic towards websites is 5x of the genuine human traffic.
08:50: Introduction speech for the last day begins. The next CloudFest is announced; it will kick off on 21st March 2023 and it will last three days.
08:30: The last day of CloudFest is about to begin.
Day 2
16:45: The second day of the CloudFest event is now ended. See you tomorrow!
15:50: Rober Jacobi, Director of WordPress at Cloudways, Chris Lubkert, co-founder of Extendify, Jonathan Wold, partnerships of Post Status, and Jean-Baptiste Marchand-Arvier, CEO of WP Media is at the second stage to talk about the true value of the WordPress ecosystem.
15:45: Chiara Grossi, CMO of WIIT, Elisabeth Kurek, VP of cloud marketing at IONOS, Jan-Jaap, Jager, CRO of Acronis, and Max Reckers, performance technology consultant of Ajax and Dutch National Team are on the stage to discuss marketing in sports for IT brands and service providers.
15:30: Igor Seletskiy, CEO and Founder of CloudLinux is at the second stage to talk about making WordPress hosting faster, smarter, and more secure. He is introducing zero-day protection capabilities of Imunify360 security solutions. He tells that PHP X-Ray detects where the WordPress site is slow, and it is automated. He also provided some information regarding the upcoming CloudLinux OS and Imunify360 features focusing on WordPress sites, such as SmartAdvice, AccelerateWP plugin, ShortCode caching, and more. They are at the beta stage right now and will be released this year.
15:15: Gourang Sinha, director of Titan is taking the main stage to speak about the future of e-mail with hosting and domain industry. He says hosted e-mail is not a great solution from the hosting company’s perspective because of its costs. He also states that Microsoft and Google’s solutions are not suitable for most of the customers because they aim for thousands of users. Titan is providing customized e-mail solutions for its customers. Their solution is zero-configuration like Google’s and Microsoft’s solutions as well.
14:50: Andreas Gauger, CEO of Open-Xchange will talk about the possibility of double-digit organic growth in the hosting industry. He thinks turning back to open-source solutions as components might be the way for it. He is now introducing OX’s Cloud Management Center.
14:50: Mike Israel, IT asset lifecycle consultant of Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Roger Benson, commercial senior director of AMD EMEA, Simon Besteman, manager director of Dutch Cloud Community, and Yann-Guirec Manac’h, head of hardware R&D at Scaleway are at stage two to discuss clean energy and cloud sustainability.
14:35: Zsolt Egri, CEO of BitNinja Security is now at the secondary stage, to tell about the company’s security solutions for servers. He is explaining the modules of BitNinja solutions and providing information about possible ways of monetization as well. He is now talking about BitNinja SiteProtection for targeted attacks.
14:30: Going on with HDD storage solutions, Rainer Kaese, senior manager of business development storage products at Toshiba Electronics Europe is on the stage to give his speech about cloud data storage with HDDs as well. He also states that the majority of the data is still being stored on the HDDs.
14:05: Colin Presly, senior engineering director of Seagate has arrived at the main stage. He will talk about the evolution of storage solutions. He states that cloud data centers are still choosing HDDs for their 90% of storage over SSDs; this data is consistent for the last 5 years. As of 20 GB drives, the old tech is not sufficient to further improve it. HAMR is the next thing in the HDD storage industry and Seagate is making efforts to transition to it. They are also putting two actuator motors that work separately for reading/writing headers for enhanced performance, calling it MACH.2.
13:45: Hans Seeuws, external relations manager of EURid, Keith Drazek, vice president, public policy & government relations at Verisign, and Thomas Rickert, director names & numbers at ECO is now at the second stage for a panel subjecting hosting & cloud providers and DNS abuse.
13:45: Alexander Jenewein, hyperscale sales leader at Lenovo EMEA is now on the stage, will focus on the green supply chain efforts of his company. They are trying to make product packaging as efficient as possible, including enterprise racks. Low-temperature soldering is one of the efforts Lenovo is putting in. The company has a recycling facility as well.
13:30: The lunch break is over. The event will soon continue.
12:08: 1.5-hour lunch break begins. We will be back at 13:30.
11:45: Dr. Wolfgang Oels, COO of Ecosia is now on the stage for his speech, subjecting regenerative and green cloud infrastructures. He summarizes the steps with building own renewable energy and becoming 200% renewable and climate positive; directing the extra energy to other local areas and organizations.
11:30: Jochem De Greef, managed service provider and account executive of Zerto, and Bas Welman, solution architect of Hewlett Packard Enterprise are on the stage for a fireside gathering, subjecting the fastest RPO and RTO for DRaaS providers at the main stage. They are discussing the disaster recovery capabilities of Zerto and HPE.
11:20: Alexander Best, regional technologist Central Europe at DataCore Software, Karl Rabe, MD and founder of WoodenDataCenter, Madhu Rangarajan, VP of products at Ampere, and Max Schulze, founder at Sustainable Digital Infrastructure Alliance have gathered at the second stage to discuss zero waste data centers.
11:10: At the second stage, Ralph Völter, VP sales EMEA of Instaclustr is giving his speech about accelerating development with Zero Operations, by using a managed open-source data platform.
11:05: Gleen Johansson is still on the stage; now Sim Upadhyayula, general manager, solutions at Supermicro is joining him while Soeren Von Varchmin, chairman of the advisory board at CloudFest moderates the mini panel. The subject is green data centers in the Nordics.
10:55: Glenn Johansson, CEO of GleSYS is now giving his speech about the fight against climate change, giving examples from the company culture of GleSYS. They are re-using the heat from data centers, instead of releasing it into the environment.
10:30: Maria Vaquero, innovation manager of Cloud & Heat Technologies and Sonja Pierer, business consumption director of Intel Germany are on the stage now. They will talk about making cloud infrastructures more sustainable. Cloud & Heat Technologies provide cooling solutions for data centers. They can deliver liquid cooling solutions as well, which has way better heat distribution capability than air cooling.
10:15: Alexander Best, regional technologist Central Europe at DataCore Software is on the stage to explain the relation between software-defined storage and sustainability. DataCore provides the software with low licensing fees; hardware is completely changeable.
10:00: Thorsten Schafer, sales director of EMEA at Scale Computing, and Norbert Lindermeirer, senior business development manager of BOSTON have arrived at the stage to discuss automated infrastructures. They began with the current problems in data management. They are introducing the B.I.C (Boston Igloo Cluster) with HC3 engine.
09:35: Roger Benson, commercial senior director of AMD EMEA is on the stage to give his speech about the sustainability goals of AMD. The company sets a bar for its supply chain regarding sustainability. AMD wants to go one step further in energy efficiency for its products, compared to the ongoing trend.
09:10: 09:10: Frederik Haak, senior manager, and SSD marketing at KIOXIA is now at the stage. Currently, the company can provide 2 TB storage in a single TLC chip. By 2023, the NAND flash consumption will surpass 1 zettabyte. He is now explaining KIOXIA’s cloud-focused SSDs. The new products can reach 15 GB/s speed utilizing the PCIe Gen5 interface. They can endure 2.5 million hours.
08:50: Jeff Wittich, chief product officer of Ampere is now on the stage to speak about data center space and the cloud-native processors. He states that current x86 CPUs are no longer efficient for cloud applications. Ampere’s cloud-native processors can bring 2.4x more cores to the same footprint of x86 CPUs. Their CPUs are consistent with their frequency, have one-thread-per-core, have huge caches, and are efficient. This year the company will release 5nm based, Ampere custom-core CPUs as well.
08:43: The live stream has started with the welcome speech.
08:30: The second day of the event should have started by now, but the live stream is currently unavailable. Let’s see how it goes on.
Day 1
16:45: The first day of the event ends. See you tomorrow!
16:10: The first day of the Cloudfest event is ending with a fireside chat with Klaus Kolitz, CTO at Sixt SE. The subject of the fireside chat is cloud infrastructure around the mobility services, such as Sixt itself. The company is aiming to transition into autonomous vehicles in the future and cloud infrastructure will be the key for it.
15:40: Igor Seletskiy, CEO and founder of CloudLinux comes to the stage to explain how to generate more revenue from customers while making them happier too. 90% of them use WordPress. He states that the security in WordPress is very important since if there is any malware or pop-ups on your website, Google does not list you in the search results at all. Also, WordPress is the most hacked CMS cause of its popularity. Due to rising security threats, customers are willing to pay extra for enhanced security; as much as 75% of their hosting costs. Imunify SecureSite is the ultimate security solution for WordPress hosting with database infection prevention.
Igor also introduced the AccelerateWP caching plugin for WordPress, which is free but has a Premium edition to take your WordPress optimization to the top. The Premium version enables customizing the caching method for target customers since object caching might not be suitable for some of the websites. AccelerateWP can analyze the website to provide the most optimal caching method available. The plugin is in the beta stage right now and it will be available in later 2022.
15:20: Andreas Baresel, CEO of Datagroup, and Frederik Schmidt, cloud expert of Datagroup are on the stage to give their speeches about cloud expedition. They are showing the actual extreme conditions of Michael Martin’s (photographer, geographer, and author) expeditions in Antarctica and using them as a metaphor to solve the challenges in the cloud.
15:00: George Melissargos, executive director, FAE, and Solutions Enablement at Supermicro is now on the stage to speak about Industry 4.0 and edge to cloud capabilities. He is explaining the philosophy behind designing edge computing appliances with some examples of real cases in the automated welding industry.
14:20: Andreas Pankow, CEO of DGC Switzerland, Dino Huber, CEO of DGC Germany, and Suzanne Grieger-Langer, founder of Profile Suzanne has arrived to stage to discuss physical and mental cyberthreat forecasts for cloud providers. Suzanne is performing a demonstration by utilizing a crime story.
14:15: At the second stage, a new panel focusing on advanced artificial intelligence and high-performance computing has begun. The panel is moderated by Christian Dawson, executive director at i2Coalition. The speakers are Diarmuid Daltun, co-founder of DeepSquare, Dr. Avesta Hojjati, Head of R&D at DigiCert, Paul Morgan, Director HPC cloud & consumption of Hewlett-Packard Enterprise, Rainer Strater, head of Global Perform Hosting at IONOS, and Sundar Gopalan, senior director of product marketing at Ampere.
14:00: The main stage continues with the speech of Jan Löffler, CTO of Plesk. He states that more and more websites are using WordPress; reaching 43% of all websites over the Internet. 60% of the websites are developed by the agencies. He is pointing at the importance of reseller hosting solutions; relating the high percentage of the agencies in development. 360 Monitoring, cPanel SEO, and Sitejet are the new integrations to the Plesk website management system. WebPros is now a trusted partner. The company will provide additional features this year.
13:50: Earle F. Philhower, senior manager of KIOXIA America has taken the NameStudio API stage to explain software-defined storage solutions. The cloud-optimized hardware of the storage will be driven by open-source software which defines how the hardware behaves in different conditions.
13:30: Kay Bandemer, head of acceleration at Trend Micro has begun his speech on the NameStudio API Main Forum. He is explaining shifting to container security solutions for the organizations. The solution Trend Micro offers is named Cloud One.
13:30: The break is over. The event will continue now.
12:00: Lunch break time. We will be back at 13:30.
11:40: Jann Wendt, CEO of north.io, and Rainer Strater, Head of Global Platform Hosting at IONOS take the main stage. They explain the collaborative Marispace-X project which aims to collect and process the data coming from oceans and their ecosystems. While Wendt speaks about the requirements in the data collection, Strater details the solutions IONOS provides to solve those problems.
11:30: At the second stage named NameStudio API Main Forum, a panel begins subjecting exploring new markets. Dror Shaked, SVP BizDev of wix.com, Fredrik Björklund, CEO and co-founder at Miss Group, Jeremy Warren, CEO of Monarx, and Patric Pulvermüller, CEO of Acronis are the panelists with the moderation of Christian Jaeger, CEO of CloudFest.
11:20: Thierry Souche, CTO of OVHcloud is now at the main stage. He is delivering his speech which is titled “Cloud With Benefits” and is about the sovereign cloud solutions that imply with the local regulations. He informs the guests about the products and features in the OVHcloud’s pipeline.
11:05: Dr. Burt Kaliski Jr, senior vice president, and chief technology officer of Verisign gives his speech about the security of the Internet routing system by connecting remotely to the event.
10:40: Hartmut Schultze, business architect of Hewlett Packard Enterprise is now on the stage. He is explaining the usage of the Swarm Learning method for gathering data in the medical sector. The company provides a decentralized AI solution to match the GDPR rules. They are using this technology on the Edge currently and aim to make it cloud-native at the end.
10:15: Patrick Pulvermüller, CEO of Acronis, and Candid Wüest, vice president of cyber protection research at Acronis are taking the stage now. Pulvermüller is telling about the partnerships in the cloud and hosting industry. Wüest is talking about the security threats in the industry; stating that the “bad guys” are getting smarter every day. He is focusing more on ransomware attacks and how Acronis is successfully stopping them.
09:45: Till Eisenberg, CIMON project manager at Airbus Defence and Space is explaining the connection capabilities and cloud services of the International Space Station. He is also showing the CIMON AI hardware and software, which looks very similar to Wheatley from the video game, Portal.
09:25: Jacob Bom Madsen, lead product manager of Universal Robots has explained the increasing importance of robots.
09:15: Merritt Moore, quantum physicist and professional ballet dancer at Physics on Pointe has took the stage for her “Dancing with Robots” speech with an actual dance with robots.
08:50: Sonja Pierer, business consumption director at Intel Germany came to the stage. Sonja explains Intel’s vision for “Going Beyond the Platform”. While optimization and collaboration are the keywords for this title, Sonja tells more about the security features of Intel products.
08:30: The opening speech has begun with the speech of Soeren Von Varchmin, chairman of the advisory board at CloudFest.