Image by thekenyeung via Flickr

Today’s Monday Interview in the FT is with one of the most refreshing characters in a crowded, noisy and somewhat monotonous cloud-computing/software market. Marc Benioff, founder, chairman and chief exec of Salesforce.com has most certainly carved out a name for himself as not only being one of the most successful pioneers of today’s pay-as-you-go business IT world, but also as a chief exec who is not afraid to give the media what it wants; contentious comment, honest opinion and perhaps most importantly, his time.

So is Marc Benioff the perfect media spokesperson? He certainly fits the bill in terms of having a great background story that is of great interest to the press; one of the youngest people to be given a vice-president title at Oracle, launches Salesforce.com, a multi-billion dollar company, from his apartment, donates a proportion of his company’s revenue to charity and what’s more he’s a keen paddle boarder and yoga fan.

But it’s perhaps the time he devotes to raising his media profile that makes him a press darling. Apparently Benioff devotes his Friday afternoons to the media – making himself available for interviews and comment with many journalists having access to his direct number. The benefit this would bring to his PR  teams would be immense. Imagine knowing that a CEO you represent is ready and waiting to engage with the press every week and has devoted time to do it. The time spent negotiating PAs, Outlook calendars and other obstacles would be drastically reduced, leaving his PR team to focus on getting column inches.

This availability, coupled with his commitment to deliver messages and comment that make people sit up and take notice, make Mr Benioff an example of a great spokesperson. While his competitors will say that he dishes out over-hyped messages and likes to stir the pot with soundbites such as “I’m sorry, for those of you who didn’t make it into the cloud…we’ve moved on!”, I can’t help think that his fellow chief-execs are a little envious of his PR approach.  Would it be such a bad thing if a couple more followed suit?

Engagement by exhibitors seemed to remain mostly flat, with just two additional exhibitors joining the conversation. That said, two exhibitors that were tweeting on the first day of the conference didn’t continue to engage on the second. This may be because they were tweeting about a presentation that they were giving on the first day to encourage people to attend it, and so on the second day didn’t see much benefit from tweeting about the event.

To me this seems like a bit of a mistake. Exhibitors that gave presentations on day one could have blogged about their presentation or posted the slides online. Equally, exhibitors that were giving presentations on day two, could have tweeted about the forthcoming presentation on day one, and talked about what would be covered, as Ivo Murris did on Wednesday when he posted a sneak peak of his presentation.

I also noticed a number of people checking in on Foursquare at the event, with Carenza’s CTO (@reidjc) bagging the title as mayor. However none of the exhibitors seemed to be encouraging people to check in at their stand. With many tech savvy people at the event, it seems a shame that companies didn’t encourage this activity and offer incentives to people that checked in at their stand. Perhaps next year, when location-based social networks may be more mainstream, we’ll see more companies looking to connect with people in this way.

In a search of news coverage about the 33 exhibitors I could only find 17 articles, which suggests that most companies didn’t make announcements at the event. This is a trend we’ve been seeing for a few years now with many firms gaining coverage around events by securing briefings or bylined articles. Here’s an overview of some of the key articles I found.

• Cloud Expo: Channel 5 IT chief says capacity planning is key to cloud success (Computing.co.uk)
• Cloud Expo: Europe is 12 months behind the US in cloud uptake (Computing.co.uk)
• Xiotech execs are betting the company on ISE (TheRegister.co.uk)
• Hillingdon Council showered with unexpected cloud benefits (ITPro.co.uk)
• House of Lords leads Commons in mobility (ITPro.co.uk)
• Don’t leave cloud monitoring to vendors, expert warns (ITPro.co.uk)
• Data Store enables apps for Londoners (ITPro.co.uk)
• Carrenza launches new cloud offerings (CBRonline.com)
• Carrenza gives cloud customers greater control (V3.co.uk)

Throughout the day more than 160 tweets were posted, with many people offering their thoughts on the presentations that they had seen, commenting on the demonstrations that they had received and what they were hoping to get out of attending the show.

But despite this just eight of the 33 exhibitors were tweeting about the event and only two of them tagged their tweets with the official #CEE11 hashtag yesterday. This meant that people who were following the stream of tweets about #CEE11 might have missed out on their tweets.

It seems to me that some of the exhibitors missed out on a great opportunity to engage with their target audiences online, many of whom were having conversations about the event on Twitter.

However a few companies were getting it very right. Matt Wood from Amazon Web Services (@mzee) shared his presentation on Slide Share and Molton Technology posted a sneak peak of the presentation that Ivo Murris will be giving today.

I also thought RackSpace had been very clever by snapping up Google Ads for searches for “Cloud Expo Europe”. Highly targeted search advertising, such as this, can be a very effective way of reaching a specific audience, without having to spend a small fortune.

Day two of Cloud Expo Europe is already underway, and I’ll be posting another blog tomorrow about the online activity surrounding the event today.

Related articles

• A day at CloudExpoEurope ’11 (secyority.com)
• Open Source Expo 2011 (alexhudson.com)

With such massive hype around cloud computing, understanding what really interests people that you want to influence is key. @RuthJones did a similar experiement at InfoSecurity and the results were something of an eye opener for the people we met with afterwards I can tell you!

We’ll be giving you a sneak peak at the top level results at the end of every day, courtsey of @mpwatson. But if you want the really juicy stuff you’ll have to meet up with us – bribery, moi?

Related articles

• Viviane Reding: The Digital Forecast Is Cloudy (online.wsj.com)

Well, it looks like the title of my previous blog, “The sky is the limit for cloud computing!” was quite prophetic, with rumours abound this morning that BSkyB is reportedly going to buy The Cloud!

And it looks set to be a pretty good investment, what with Gartner’s report on Friday citing that cloud computing will be a top technology priority for CIOs in 2011.

There really is massive excitement around all internet service-based technologies – definitely an area to watch this year!

P.s. See what I did with the picture – Sky/ Cloud… Clever, no? I’ll get my coat

Photo by Flickr user jimflix!, licensed under CC BY 2.0.

Gizmodo editor Jason Chen has been raided by Silicon Valley’s computer crime force in hot pursuit of the case of the missing iPhone prototype. According to a bulletin published by Gizmodo today, they broke down the front door to gain entry, and departed some hours later with a truck containing Chen’s computer equipment.

CIO – Most IT staff in financial services looking to change jobs

Over three-quarters (77 per cent) of IT staff working in the financial services sector are looking to change jobs within the next year, a new survey shows.

Information Age – UK cloud computing market ‘to double by 2012′

Analyst predicts that UK rate of spend on cloud computing to reach more than £1bn within next two years

UK spending on cloud computing services will double within the next two years to over £1.2 billion, one IT industry analyst has claimed.

IT PRO – Sony kills off the floppy disk
Sony is to bid a final farewell to the 3.5in floppy disk and will be ceasing manufacturing as of March 2011.

The Financial Times – Spotify hopes to challenge iTunes

Spotify, the fast-growing European music service, is making an ambitious challenge to Apple’s iTunes with an important upgrade to its technology.

Over the past few weeks we’ve been following almost 500 security voices on Twitter (ranging from vendors to journalists to bloggers). Each afternoon of the show we’ll be posting a summary of the top stories being talked about online.

We’re compiling this round-up using a range of social media tools such as Twitter Times, Twittermeme and Hootsuite.

Aside from multiple tweets on hangovers and collapsing keynote stages, here are the top stories from #Infosec today…

VMforce: VMWare and Salesforce announced plans to launch VMforce Enterprise Java Cloud, which will provide more than 6 million enterprise Java developers with an open path to cloud computing – @vmforce posted this blog from Steve Herrod.

McAfee: After last week’s flawed signature update McAfee said that it will offer compensation to home and home office users – and unveiled next generation firewall (along with @watchguardtech and @sonicwall).

Cisco expanded its content security arsenal: Cisco launched a data loss prevention and web security service as part of its Secure Borderless Network initiative (by @phil_V3).

There’s been lots of talk about the seizing of Gizmodo editor Jason Chen’s computers last Friday in California. And a number of security watchers also returned to an article from 2007, for insight in how to get ahead in information security.

YouTube is making the tens of millions of videos it hosts more accessible to the deaf and hard of hearing by putting automatic captions on them.

IT PRO – Mobile surfing now more popular than reading

Europeans spend more time accessing the internet from their mobile phones while they’re out and about than reading newspapers or magazines.

The Guardian – Plans to fight cyberwar are a ‘recipe for disaster’

Senior security experts have criticised the west’s approach to online threats, suggesting that not enough is being done to stem the growing tide of cyberattacks.

The Register – Google says desktop PC is three years from ‘irrelevance’

Google’s European sales chief says that desktop PCs will be “irrelevant” in three years. This week, as reported by Silicon Republic, Google Europe boss John Herlihy told a “baffled” conference audience that very soon the smartphone will completely eclipse the desktop. “In three years time, desktops will be irrelevant,” he said. “In Japan, most research is done today on smart phones, not PCs.”

ComputerWorldUK – BBC order pulls plug on iPhone iPlayer app

A promising and potentially useful iPhone application that would have allowed users to browse, view and even download content from the BBC has been blocked by the corporation.

ComputerWorldUK – European IT managers have cloud aversion

Barely one in five of European IT managers think that cloud computing represents a game-changing change in methodology for enterprises, roughly the same proportion that believes that cloud computing is a fad.

Total Telecom – T-Mobile UK, 3 UK in talks to sell Google’s Nexus One
T-Mobile and 3 UK have confirmed they are in discussions to sell Google’s first own-branded Android smartphone, Nexus One, in the U.K.

The Guardian: Boris Johnson to launch London ‘Datastore’ with hundreds of sets of data
Fund of up to £200,000 will help developers to create innovative use of 200 datasets in new free data initiative

Computerworld UK – Year-end glitch blocked email across world
Email sent in the first few hours of 2010 may not have reached its recipient thanks to an embarrassing “2010″ bug buried in the open source SpamAssassin anti-spam engine used by many Internet Service Providers.

Computer Weekly – 2009 sets new records for malware, says Panda Security
PandaLabs, the anti-malware laboratory of Panda Security identified record 25m new strains of malware in 2009. This is 10m more than the company has recorded in the past 20 years and includes a large number of new examples of banker Trojans, making up 66 per cent of the total

The Register – Sony to co-launch 3D TV channel?
Sony may partner with two leading video entertainment giants to launch a dedicated 3D TV channel, it has emerged, just hours after sports broadcaster ESPN confirmed plans for its own 3D telly service.

Computerworld UK – Good news on IT jobs
There has been a significant increase in the demand for IT staff, according to an extensive survey of recruitment firms.

The Financial Times – Cybersitter sues China for piracy
A small California company that was one of the first to bring an internet porn filter to market sued the government of China and several major computer companies on Tuesday, accusing them of misappropriating its censorship program for use in the controversial “Green Dam” project.