The Infrastructure-as-a-Service model of early Cloud Computing providers has focused on making the hardware layer consumable as on-demand compute and storage capacity. Stuart Charlton, Chief Software Architect for Elastra, will be giving a session on 'Cloud Computing and the Next-Generation of Enterprise Architecture' at SYS-CON's Cloud Computing Expo (November 19-21, 2008) - a pathbreaking adjunct to the 4th International Virtualization Conference & Expo being held at The Fairmont Hotel in San Jose, CA.

"This is an important first step," Charlton notes, "but for companies to harness the power of the cloud, it should enhance the alignment driven by enterprise architecture, driving down the lead times for delivering IT value to business, from concept to deployment, and through maintenance."

An architecture-aware cloud computing infrastructure, says Charlton, leads to IT services that are easily configured, deployed, dynamically-scaled, and managed in these virtualized hardware environments, while tied into business processes, data models, security services and the data center's service management, problem resolution, and compliance processes.

His session will discuss in greater detail how this new approach to infrastructure operates and how to increase both alignment and agility through it.

Charlton joins a star-studded lineup of speakers covering the hottest IT topic for years, with Amazon, IBM, Microsoft, Google, Yahoo, Intel, HP and a host of others all offering, using or developing high-end computing services typically described as “cloud computing” - through which massively scalable IT-related capabilities are provided as a service using Internet technologies.

Forrester Research analyst James Staten calls cloud computing "classic disruptive innovation - where the mainstream dismisses the product and small companies have time to create a real differentiated value." But there are so many offerings just now that what infrastructure architects are looking for above all is a set of organizing principles they can use to guide them in choosing between them all.

Such principles. and a host of associated Cloud topics, will be addressed in San Jose by:

• Dr Werner Vogels - VP & CTO, Amazon.com (Cloud Keynote)
• Reuven Cohen - Founder & Chief Technologist, Enomaly
• Mike Eaton - CEO, Cloudworks
• Jonathan Bryce - Founder at Mosso (Rackspace)
• Nati Shalom - CTO, GigaSpaces
• Don MacAskill - CEO & Chief Geek, SmugMug
• Mike Feinberg - Senior Vice President, Cloud Infrastructure Group, EMC
• Billy Marshall - Founder & CEO, rPath
• Dr Thorsten von Eicken - CTO & Founder, RightScale
• Songnian Zhou - Co-Founder & CEO, Platform Computing
• Patrick Harr, CEO - Nirvanix
• David Young - Co-Founder & CEO, Joyent
  
• Dave Durkee - CEO, ENKI
• John Janakiraman - CTO, Skytap
• Stuart Charlton - Chief Software Architect, Elastra
• Lars Leckie, Principal, Hummer Winblad Venture Partners
• Dr Rich Wolski - Professor, U.C. Santa Barbara
• Javier Soltero - Co-Founder & CEO of Hyperic
• Omer Trajman - Director of Field Engineering, Vertica Systems
• Alan Williamson, Founder at Blog-City.com, Creator of BlueDragon
  
• Rachel Chalmers - Senior Analyst, Enterprise Software, The 451 Group

The sessions are all listed here.