Interop Vegas is turning into cloud week. I put together a quick schedule of the event, spanning four days in Las Vegas.

The week includes:

• The Enterprise Cloud Summit, a 2-day paid workshop on how enterprises can use cloud computing.
• The Interop General Conference, which includes a Cloud Computing and a SaaS track–the latter being run by Jeff Kaplan and Scott and Chris at Tripletree.
• A CloudCamp event that Interop and Bitcurrent are sponsoring which will bring in Dave Nielsen and some of the other CloudCamp creators.
• An Unconference event open to all attendees, which has become an Interop tradition.

If you want to attend Interop, we’ve got a $100 discount code for the general conference. Expo passes, which will get you into CloudCamp and Unconference too, are free.

It’s time to head to New York for the start of the fall conference season. This year, Interop and Web2Expo are side-by-side at the Javitz Center, and we’re holding the Interop Unconference event on Thursday night. Then there’s High Performance on Wall Street happening on Monday the 22nd.

At Interop this year, we’re helping to run the Software-as-a-Service track (in conjunction with Jeff Kaplan of Thinkstrategies) and the Cloud Computing track (helped by Peter Laird, who I first met when I saw his excellent Taxonomy of the Cloud, which he’s been hard at work revising for Interop.) I’m also doing a free session on cloud foundations at the show. The lineup of speakers and panelists is remarkable, and will hopefully lead to some great conversations. We also have folks from Google, Amazon, Joyent, 10Gen and Bungee on a Web2Expo panel.

Here’s a recap of the sessions and participants:
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At Structure08 last week, Bitcurrent and GigaOm introduced Briefings. These 20- to 30-page reports look at a particular industry or technology in detail, combining what we learn while reporting on the space with research and internal discussion.

The first briefing focuses on cloud computing, which was the topic of much of Structure08. It’s available from the Briefings website at an affordable $250 through Paypal. If you’re trying to come up to speed on cloud computing quickly — whether as an investor, an entrepreneur, or an IT professional — we hope this format of background, landscape, and industry direction will fit the bill.

We’ve got many of these planned — my next one will be on Application Delivery Networks, and we’re also doing one on mobility and telepresence.

Cloud computing is the hottest Internet insider buzzword since the technologies to which it owes its existence: Virtualization and Grid Computing.

In May’s Interop Unconference, we explored their intersection in an informal jam session with enthusiastic audience participation starring Jinesh Varia (Amazon), Kirill Sheynkman (Elastra), Rueven Cohen (Enomaly), Jacob Farmer (Cambridge Computer), and Louis DiMeglio (ScienceLogic).

It’s taken some time to fully digest the results.

To many of us, the cloud is that amorphous blob of semicircular squiggles the IT crowd has been using on whiteboards to represent the internet since the mid-nineties. Clouds mean we don’t care what’s in them.

Once upon a time, that cloud in the middle of the whiteboard used to just represent the network — how to get from here to there. All the interesting stuff happened outside its borders. More recently, however, we’ve started moving the rest of the shapes on the whiteboard into the cloud. Applications and infrastructure are now drawn within the borders of that formerly ill-defined and anarchic etherspace.

If you listen to some overzealous cloudnuts, you’ll will hear that pretty much everything is rushing headlong into the Internet’s troposphere. But the truth is much more complex, and rational opinions seem to favor a hybrid future of rich clients, hardware, and software. We’ll have a hugely diverse mix of private and public cloud-based services providing both a back-end and a matrix for device interaction.

Aside: I’ll leave defining cloud computing ad nauseam to other bloggers. For our purpose it is the trend of outsourcing what you would normally run in your datacenter to an indefinitely flexible computing platform which is billed to you as a utility. Traditional hosters don’t count (for me) as cloud providers, but newer managed service hosters might, depending on the level of automation and scalability they employ.

So what did the Interop crowd conclude?

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I know I’m a little late with this, considering the fact that Unconference was last Tuesday. And I already got the lecture on relevance and blog timing from Mr. Bitcurrent himself, but my current experiments on creating the 25th and 26th hours of a day are not as successful as I’d like, so this is really the first chance I’ve had to put something down.

It appears that Unconference in general was a big success at Interop. The Web Operations track was definitely interesting and included a bunch of probing discussions around our topics.

Some highlights:

During the Maximizing Web Performance session, we had good discussions around what web performance really is, how we can accelerate it, and what some of the realities of deployment are. Kent Alstad from Strangeloop Networks brought up the web performance equation which is a good way of examining all the components that go into end user performance in a web application.

One interesting point here was how the “client compute time” has become increasingly important with new web2.0 apps that have actual client processing (javascript, etc). That’s probably a component that we didn’t really take into account a few years ago.

In the Beyond Web1.0 discussion, Brian Albers from Kaazing gave us a good overview of what new technologies like Ajax and Comet were going to mean to the network and how some of the protocol behaviors that we’ve taken for granted for the last few years (particularly with HTTP) are different when it comes to these cutting edge technologies.

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We’ve now lined up our final two experts for the Web Operations track at Unconference. Today, we welcome two new experts to the track:

• Kent Alstad, CTO of Strangeloop Networks will be our expert in the Maximizing Web Performance session.
• Ajay Arora, VP Products at Mashery will be our expert in the Public Web Services session.

I’m very happy to have Kent and Ajay in our little Web Operations family. I’m looking forward to having great discussions with both of them during the track.

I’m happy to say that we’ve lined up two new experts for the Web Operations track:

• John Overton, Director of Strategic Partnerships at Coradiant, will be our expert for the Watch It Live session.
• Brian Albers, VP of Development at Kaazing, will be our expert for the Beyond Web 1.0 session.

It’s great to have John and Brian involved with the event. I’m looking forward to working with both of them.

Interop’s Unconference event is shaping up nicely, with the moderators for the four topics now selected. Four members of Bitcurrent’s team will be helping to guide discussions on several topics, including web operations, virtualization, mobility, and security.

I’m the moderator for the Web Operations topic, which includes everything from web application deployment to delivery to security to acceleration to monitoring, and beyond!

Making sense of these technologies and how they help us deliver an application is difficult enough. However, we also have to be aware of where new technologies are headed and how concepts that we think we’re familiar with may change and alter the way we think of web applications.

In these sessions, we’ll examine some of these technologies and how they apply to today’s and tomorrow’s web applications. Our experts will provide a sampling of what’s important and relevant when we deal with web operations. Collectively, we’ll discuss, debate, scrutinize, and fawn over a large variety of technologies. Our intent is to leave the session smarter and dumber at the same time: we’ll learn about some things that we didn’t know, but also realize how much we need to learn yet. Web operations is a technology sandwich, with extra toppings – we have 2 hours to take a small bite.

Bitcurrent will be presenting a new kind of conference in Las Vegas this year. It’s called Unconference, and it’s an attempt to make the event more interactive and collaborative. We’re pretty psyched about the event, and looking forward to trying the concept out.

Since 1999, we’ve been organizing conferences for Interop: First on performance, following the publication of a book on the subject; then on web operations, data centers, and so on. This year, we’re running the SaaS and Cloud Computing track, and we’ve got a lineup of experts and panelists.

But even though that conference track has folks from Google, Amazon, Akamai, and a host of startups participating, it’s Unconference that keeps us up at night.

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