Through more than the last 10 years, I have gotten to know so many of you through attending HP events and the evolution that has taken place from Software Forum to HP Discover. It has been great to evolve through my career as I have gone from working within IT and networking within telecommunications to now leading a technical presales team with xMatters, an HP ISV partner. In parallel, I have gone from practitioner and chapter leader with OVFI to board member and President of Vivit Worldwide. And I am more excited than ever for this year's HP Discover event!

What particularly interests me this year are the sessions on Cloud and hosted delivery of products and services. So many thrilling innovations are coming about due to the predominate development of cloud technologies and offerings. From IT to the business to client interaction, hosted solutions are offering a rich availability of features, availability, time to market, latest technology and so on. This demands that the cloud direction no longer be a buzzword but now a critical business technology and direction that can longer be ignored.

My eye is heavily on the direction that HP will be going this year with their offerings and messaging. Any software organization knows best the positioning, features and capabilities of its own product. They are the experts in their own technology and are best positioned to create a Software or Platform As A Service offering that is a repeatable and cost effective offering. It is easy to see how entire software service organizations are disrupting the landscape as we talk; and in order for a software company to transform into a software service, it requires agility, flexibility, and most of all innovation!

The reason for my own personal interest in this matter is the same reason I am involved in user groups and working with other practitioners. The ability to learn from the experience of others is key to one's own success. Representing xMatters at the conference and learning about how our own hosted cloud infrastructures can offer quick time to deployment and an environment that is always up to date is important to me. We have embarked on an initiative internally in which we create a seamless client experience in getting clients live quickly and efficiently. In today's complex environment, with security concerns, audits, integrations, data loading and process engineering, it is a challenge to deploy efficiently in either a traditional premise based implementation or a hosted infrastructure. Our goal is to have all parts of the xMatters organization, Sales, Consulting, Assistance, Operations, etc. working together in order to partner together with the client for this seamless and efficient deployment model. With the current environment changes, it is easy to foresee many of the traditional software offerings in the marketplace dying. With such a competitive landscape, it is critical for organizations to focus innovation on the cloud solutions.