we also welcome our listening and viewing audience, and we invite everyone to visit us online. now, it is my pleasure to introduce our distinguished moderator who helped us all together today's panel. he is a technology veteran with operating in investing experience in technology businesses and the ceo of a premier north american publication with data center facilities, virtual private clouds, managed hosted platforms in san francisco, los angeles,

and a nationwide high- performance backbone. it is also the managing partner of excellent capital, a private equity firm investing in growth stage companies. previously, was the co-founder of centera, the leading provider of wireless base stations. prior to that, he worked at national semiconductor, where he led the development and commercialization of internet networking products. he has been -- he has a degree in management from stanford, an ms from the university of central florida, and a degree in electrical engineering from the indian institute technology, bombay. he has authored numerous publications and has over 50

u.s. patents. >> thank you for organizing this panel discussion, and thank you, everybody, for graciously being here today. it is my great honor to introduce an incredibly distinguished panel of industrial luminaries. let me start with timothy, simon, and jeanette. tim is a professor at the stanford business school where he teaches a very popular class on this service via in fact, i have taken your class, and you bring in some incredible speakers and make it very entertaining. jim also has a distinguished career in the private sector. he was the president of oracle's on demand service, which by some records was the first online on demand service. cloud computing has a lot of fathers, but tim is often called the grandfather of cloud computing because of that

endeavor. but tim is also an investor in a cloud computing companies, and author of some very exciting cloud computing books. thank you for being here. next, we have simon crosby. he is an entrepreneur, who has just launched his latest company, and he might tell us a little bit about it. before that, almost just about a month ago, he was the cto of citrix systems. he got there by selling his last company to them. that company has developed some of the key virtualization technologies, which enable the cloud. he made a big contribution. thank you for that. last but definitely not least, we have jeanette tomlinson, the

cto of our very own, dear city of santa francisco -- gina, and sen. she has had a very daunting task of taking the legacy infrastructure of the city and moving that to a professional data center. but also, setting up a virtual private cloud and making a foray into the public cloud. she offers a unique perspective as a large government user on cloud computing. she was also the cio of the san francisco municipal transport station at 40, and she was also managing clorox's data centers previously. thank you for being here. with so much brainpower and prospective in this room, i will actually ask each of our panelists to take four or five minutes and give us a landscape

of where you think of computing is today and where you see it going. am standing here with these microphones makes you feel like what rupert murdoch must have felt like this morning. i have no direct knowledge of the cloud. [laughter] let me make a small correction since my academic colleagues -- you're so sensitive to this. i am lecturer at stanford university, not a professor. that is another level of this conversation teary let me extend the conversation a little bit. one of the things that it was after i left or go, i taught for many years at stanford and talk, as i told the kids, real stuff. i started a class on cloud computing. three years ago, i started a class at the university in beijing as well on this subject because i feel it is really important. we are in my opinion in the second year of a 20-year cycle that is no different than the client server cycle that happened last time around, and i

think education is an important component of this. so i'm going to take my four or five minutes to educate you guys a little bit on what is this thing we call cloud computing. i'm going to try uses much plain english as i can, leave all the technical buzzwords aside, and try to eliminate -- illuminate for you what is happening. fundamentally, is an economic thing that is happening, and that is what has always driven technologies economics. i will get to that in a minute. i do a lot of public speaking. i was counting today because i had to do something this morning. over the past six months, i have talked to 5000 people about cloud computing. what i've tried to do with them and what i've tried to do with you is tried to explain cloud computing in a way you could explain to your facebook friends. [laughter] let me start with we all use cloud computing. we all use consumer application clout services. twitter, facebook, ebay, google,

amazon, etc., you are using consumer application clout services. just so we realize how far we have transition, i was with a stanford did about two months ago, and i'm giving her the lecture on what is cloud computing, and i start that way. i say once upon a time, consumer applications used to get installed on your pc and update and all that, as she looks at me and said, "i've heard of this thing. isn't it called a floppy disk?" [laughter] what many of you guys probably do not know is on the business application front, this has similarly happen in a very different way. nearly every business application -- when i talk about business applications, and talking about financial customer relationships systems, purchasing, hr, web analytics, all the software business is used to automate their businesses. what you may not know is in the

past 10 years, every business application software company which has gone public has been delivered as a cloud service. nobody does it in the new world the old way anymore. is all delivered as a cloud service. this ranges from -- many of you are in san francisco. you know who salesforce is. they have been a huge leader in this. even in the whole bay area. you have netsuite. as i said, nearly everyone. i will give you one example, which you all are probably familiar with, which you will think is an odd example, which is opentable. i'm guessing because san francisco is ground zero, right? on the one hand, you see an open table as a consumer application cloud service, right? you go on, reserve restaurant space, right? it is free. the other side is a business

application. they are selling to restaurants. software to help them increase the number of people. that has happened really within the past 10 years. as i said, every application. increasingly, what has happened is highly specialized applications. i will give you one example of that. dealer track. they actually do loan origination software for automotive loans. today, basically 80% of all the loans in the united states are processed through their software. we will see much more of this. we want to talk about not as public companies, tons of this. all of these guys uses the original cloud service. a lot of people have asked me why we call it a cloud. what does this come from? it is pretty simple. in the old days of client-server computing -- some of us were around them -- we would draw a

picture of a pc, a picture of a unix server, and then a picture of a little clout in between. mostly because none of us understood how networks work. for the old folks in the room, you may remember certain words. this is all communication technology developed for corporations to build their own networks. that sounds like crazy talk today, right? nobody does that anymore. everybody is using ip, mpls- based networks. that is the network cloud. the network guys realize that in order to build a network service, they had to put these things called switches and routers in a room that had high quality power, guard dogs out front, and not located on a fault line, right? since the advent of data centers.

many companies enter into the market. it is no