Keynote 1: Key trends in enterprise uptake of cloud computing

Summary form only given, as follows. The IT industry has seen a significant shift in spending towards cloud-based services, with concepts such as IaaS and PaaS becoming nearly ubiquitous. In the process, the software management stacks for running clouds have become increasingly automated and virtualized. The next step in this evolution is what we are referring to as Software Defined Environment (SDE), in which infrastructure elements such as storage and networking become further virtualized and leverage advances in switching technology, ethernet convergence, etc. Projects such as OpenStack Quantum are helping to abstract and virtualize these infrastructure elements so that individual workloads can be more intelligently assigned the resources they need -- an important improvement given the intensity of workloads such as Big Data that must be supported by clouds. In this talk we will talk about the trend in Cloud Computing towards SDE-based infrastructure in the industry and areas where contributions from the research community will be needed. We will also discuss how IBM and its Research division are looking to leverage these capabilities in offerings coming to market in the next 12-18 months.