Transforming Businesses to Transform the World at the C2C Cloud Adoption Summit

"Until your event," said Alejandro Lorenz, Lead Software Architect at IT4IPM, in a follow-up interview after attending C2C's first Cloud Adoption Summit in London on November 30th, "I didn't think that we had a problem." Now, Alejandro says, after hearing from other companies at the summit about the investments they had made in their cloud migrations and their faster migrations' impact on their overall management, he realizes that his own organization's top management "must fully invest in the migration" to Google Cloud.

The Cloud Adoption Summit was the first event of its kind for C2C: a day-long event featuring a keynote address, several industry panels and interactive breakout sessions, and numerous opportunities to network over meals and drinks with the one-hundred-plus guests and two-dozen-plus speakers in attendance. Many of the sessions were hosted by C2C partners, including Deloitte, Palo Alto Networks, Aiven, Workspot, and Appsbroker, but some of Google Cloud's biggest customers, like Deutsche Bank and GEMA, also appeared to present and discuss their business and technical initiatives. Topics ranged from cybersecurity and infrastructure modernization to sustainability lessons from the last ten years of cloud adoption.

"Being at your event and hearing other companies and what they are doing helped me," Alejandro said. Many of the attendees shared similar sentiments about the content of the presentations and the breakout sessions. "It was really important for me to attend Ellwood's CISO talk. We are a small team, as they are. And we need to go for full automation, to automate everything as they did," added Tobias Hingerl ( @THingerl ), Alejandro's colleague at IT4IPM. Tobias was referring to a session called "Scaling Fast but Secure," a conversation with Daniel Jones of Elwood Technologies led by C2C partners Aiven. The kind of insight Tobias is describing - - that increasing investment in transformative cloud technologies can present new opportunities for growth, efficiency, and security - - is the kind of insight the Cloud Adoption Summit and the Google Cloud Customer Community itself exist to make possible.

For many of the guests, the keynote by John Abel, Technical Director in Google Cloud's Office of the CTO, provided not just insight but inspiration. "It was fascinating to hear John talking about Sustainability," said Damien St. John, European Sales Engineer Lead at Appsbroker. "Not only for the impact we have on the environment...it helped me understand the marketing perspectives." Jeremy Norwood, COO of Skytra Ltd., agreed. "John's numbers made me think about the impact of our business on the environment. Sustainability is a big thing for sure. I have the sense that Google is a leader and they want to continue." For Workspot Sales Engineer John Samuel ( @C2Csamuelj ), the call to action was immediate. "When I returned home, I went to my PC and changed my screen settings to dark mode," he said. "I checked the energy consumption before and after. I was amazed. His talk gave us food for thought."

"Being at your event and hearing other companies and what they are doing helped me."

Other guests found the most value in the networking opportunities the event provided, which encouraged sharing ideas and making plans to follow up. Tobias and Alejandro are looking forward to catching up with Palo Alto about how their platform can help IT4IPM, and with Appsbroker about hiring new security engineers. John says Workspot made several new connections, and he's excited to get in touch with Robert Burton ( @Rob Burton ) of Bupa about a solution for Workspot's cloud desktops. Damien is anticipating a training opportunity with Google and more than one new business opportunity, including one with Mastercard.

For Daniel Vaughan ( @daniel.vaughan ) of Mastercard, the presentations and the networking at the event provided an entirely new way of looking at cloud adoption. In the conversations Daniel observed and joined, a major theme emerged: the biggest barrier to cloud adoption is employee skills. This theme was provocative enough for Daniel that he published an article on the C2C platform exploring his experience at the Cloud Adoption Summit and what he learned about the importance of skills in the cloud adoption context. "No matter how good the technology is," he says, "without experienced people who are using it and, most importantly, can show others how to use it well, its adoption will be limited."

For the organizations who adopt it, the cloud makes storage and resources available all over the world, providing a solution to fit every need. A community like C2C does the same thing with people. At the Cloud Adoption Summit, the entire C2C community came together in one place to connect. Now those connections exist across the globe, and the people who made them can access them at any time. You and your organization can make and benefit from these connections, too. Join C2C as a member today to become a part of our global community. We'll see you at the next Cloud Adoption Summit.

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