Peter Coffee, director of Platform Research at Salesforce.com, gives a talk on the aspects of Cloud Computing related to “Software as a service”.  He starts by underlining the reasons why a company should move to the cloud, such as competitive advantage for some companies, or dramatic cost reduction for others.  Coffee goes through the different types of services offered by Amazon and Google amongst other and describes the approach of Salesforce.com to the cloud and the services they offer. He underlines the advantages of cloud computing, such as savings, improvement in sales and innovation, discusses the security issue and how it has been solved in Salesforce.com.  Peter Coffee gives examples of successful use of cloud computing, talks about what makes the cloud compelling, what it means for services and support, and ends by talking about the circumstances that have made cloud computing more and more relevant in the future.

Peter Coffee joined salesforce.com in January of 2007, after spending 18 years as an analyst and columnist at the enterprise technology journal eWEEK (including time under its former title PC Week). Based in the Los Angeles area, he currently works with corporate and commercial application developers to build a community based on Force.com: the salesforce.com Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS). Peter has 26 years' experience in guiding the adoption and management of innovative information technologies and practices as a developer, consultant, educator, and internationally published author. He has appeared on CBS, CNN, NBC, PBS, Fox, India's Network 18 and Mexico's Grupo Fórmula newscasts addressing a broad range of eBusiness issues. He chaired the four-day Web Security Summit conference in Boston during the summer of 2000; he has been a keynote speaker, moderator or workshop leader at technical conferences, business and academic events throughout the U.S. and in India, Singapore, Australia, China, Korea, Canada, Mexico, Brazil, the UK, Spain, Italy and The Netherlands. Peter was previously the first manager of PC planning at The Aerospace Corporation, where he also worked in space systems project management and in space-asset applications of artificial intelligence techniques. Before that, he was a Senior Engineer working in arctic project planning, chemical facility construction management, and alternative-fuels engineering for several divisions of Exxon Corporation. He holds an engineering degree from MIT and an MBA from Pepperdine University, where he also served as a faculty member for the core curriculum in IT management; he has held other faculty appointments in computer science (artificial intelligence) at UCLA and in business analytics at Chapman College. He is the author of two books, How To Program Java and Peter Coffee Teaches PCs.